Cause hundreds of Israelis to die by telling them to ignore the coronavirus.

Pressure psychiatrists to lie about the mental health of a fellow ultraorthodox sect member in order to keep her from being extradited to Australia on 74 counts of sexual assault against children. Protect bunches of other sect members also accused of sexual abuse:

[Yaakov] Litzman allegedly intervened improperly to aid at least 10 sex offenders from Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community.

Pass out bribes.

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Litzman has now resigned. Who will take his place?

I’m putting my money on Moshe Katsav.

The poorest town in America, where living conditions are so crowded and squalid that in 1992 seventy percent of their children got hepatitis A, thanks this country for its willingness to let it live a welfare-dependent, scofflaw existence by breaking virus-containment laws and endangering hundreds of children, as well as the people of neighboring communities.

I wonder. If local and state authorities had ever, over the course of the last fifty years, taken the endemic law-breaking of this locality with real seriousness, I wonder if it might have stopped spreading epidemic illnesses among its children. (Don’t even talk to me about measles! Or vaccinations!)

… classrooms, Texas motivational speaker Eric Hogue steps up to ban not books but women. In his capacity as mayor of a small city, Hogue has decreed that women may not lead prayers at city council meetings onaccounta the Bible done said they caint.

Now ah don’t know much bout Christian invocations afore civic meetings, ahm a big ol’ blue stater, and round these parts the idea of praying together afore a town council meeting is pretty fucking weird, and, you know, making sure the prayer always happens to be Christian is even fucking weirder. But you caint quarrel with Mayor Hogue’s Bibleology – the Good Book do indeed go on bout how stupid and pointless women are, and how they better shut up ifn they know what’s good for them.

And I for one am ready to bow down to the superiority of men like Mr. Hogue to the female race. Just look at the guy and ask yourself if you could ever (I mean, ifn you’re a woman ask yourself) hope to accomplish all that he has accomplished. Start with his picture. (Scroll down.) The man is a Clown for Christ, bringing the Good News About Women, in a chock-full of chuckles format, to young people all over America. He has even self-published a clown book – Clinky The Clown (not to be confused with the very similar-sounding, very famous, Blinky The Clown) – which you can purchase. And he’s a magician!

What woman could hope to compete, invocation-wise, with a clown-magician who takes every single word in the Bible literally? Mayor Hogue, the stage is yours.

“It just seemed like they were trying to see what they could get away with.”

Why not? When you don’t know what science is, quarantines seem silly.

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A growing number of schools and synagogues have reopened in recent days, defying city and state restrictions.

Are parents on board? Who cares?

According to a recent report in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, some Borough Park schools have ended phone instruction, forcing parents to choose between sending their children to illegal in-person classes or risk falling behind.

When you’re a theocracy, you reward the theos for their covid-amplifying ignorance/civic indifference (see many recent posts on this blog about ultra-orthodox criminal negligence in the matter of the virus in Israel). “They put everything in the hands of the ultra-Orthodox, they capitulated on everything,” laments one of Israel’s vanishingly few enlightened voices about the new government.

Yet what more capable hands than the corrupt and benighted rabbis who have impoverished and infected their own constituency?

[Recent] mass arrests [in Israel] are the latest incident in a global trend with dangerous consequences — a small but committed segment of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community from Israel to London to New York refusing to obey social distancing orders… About 50% of Israel’s coronavirus cases have been in largely ultra-Orthodox municipalities, according to a CNN analysis of Ministry of Health data through May 12. The country is about 14% ultra-Orthodox… Though some communities have been hit hard, ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel may look at the pandemic and think: “That’s what providence wanted and I accept this as it is…”

And how nice that they are accepting it also on our behalf.

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Christopher Hitchens:

With a large part of itself, [messianic religion] quite clearly wants us all to die. It wants this world to come to an end. You can tell the yearning for things to be over… The contempt for the things of this world shows through … So that the painful business of living as humans and studying civilizations and trying to acquire learning and knowledge, health and medicine, can all be scrapped and the cult of death can take over… [What] a hateful idea.

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“He” is one of many clueless coots running the haredim and everyone they come in contact with into the ground. Literally into the ground. All because Israel has allowed – encouraged – a large group of people to live in contemptuous ignorance of a world of other people.

Israel as a Jewish gathering-in. Quite the joke. At the moment it’s a Jewish cult-factory, and that country is living – dying – with the consequences.

There’s the baseline chosen – Jews like me, I guess – and there’s the SOOOOper chosen among Jews, the ultraorthodox, whose existence founds itself on two things: Denying spiritual legitimacy to all non-ultraorthodox so-called Jews, and adhering to the very, very highest of heavenly standards every second of their day and night. This religious elite strenuously attempts to please God with every breath…

So why aren’t they able to breathe? Why has covid decimated them, tearing through much of their rabbinate and many of their non-rabbinic tremblers before the Almighty?

This article, into whose theological whirlpool we will now plunge, reviews the explanations for this incredibly sad turn of events that these same people are now providing for themselves and for the world.

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Yes, let us eke go, as Stephen’s friend Lynch says; let us embark on the idiocy and the oddity of ultraorthodox theodicy.

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For why would the being we propitiate with every cell in our body blast those cells with a fatal cytokine storm? What have we done to deserve this?

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But first: lunch! UD needs to fortify herself for this faith journey.

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Hokay. Let’s start with this:

“The Torah protects us. We don’t need to do anything,” one yeshiva student [said].

Indeed the entire ultraorthodox response, for a lethal length of time, was to double down on large gatherings of daveners, this constituting the only immune response that mattered: Entreaty to the divine.

Aryeh “Longest Rap Sheet Among the Elect” Deri was one of the first u-o leaders to wonder why, despite his in-group’s exemplary behavior, the Lord was leaving profane people alone and slaughtering the sacred.

“We need to do very deep soul-searching,” the ultra-Orthodox politician said, asserting that God was “telling us something.”

Yeah but like man like what.

First explanation: God is telling us that we are great. The best.

Secular Jews [aren’t] as prone to divine retribution as the religious, whose sins are judged more harshly by God.

Ya bum! Go walk around hatless and fuck your brains out! You’re not worth killing! … Now this guy, this guy over here, him I can choke to death on a ventilator.

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Him? Did I say him? If you want to know why God punishes his most beloved, look no further than the hopelessly whorish among us.

“Horrifying discovery: Corona epidemic = lack of modesty,” [a] poster seen in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods of Jerusalem announced, using gematria, or Jewish numerology, which ascribes a numerical value to letters and words and draws significance from words or expressions with equal values.

According to the poster, both “corona epidemic” and “lack of modesty” have a numerical value of 900, indicating a conceptual link.

Using an analytical method made famous by the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, some of the Lord’s designated coronavirus sufferers blame their women for it all. We’ve tried killing them off through contempt and overwork, but if you do the math, they’re killing us.

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Or is it something higher? God’s had it up to here with Jean-Francois Lyotard and thinks killing haredim because people like UD find postmodernism interesting is a good idea.

[T]he disease could be a divine response to “moral relativism or postmodernism…“

God’s elect are called upon to sacrifice themselves so that Verso and Routledge will publish fewer books with the word meta-narrative in their titles.

Let’s see. Anything else?

So much else. God is quarantining us to bring families closer… But when you live in a hovel with ten kids, four in-laws, and a set of parents, you’re already pretty close! God hates our materialism. But we don’t have any money or any material, so his motives are pretty obscure … God is issuing a “wake-up call” for Jews who don’t want to live in Israel… by… making several regions of Israel horrifying corona hotspots…? The virus forces naughty us into much-needed meditation on our sins and … then the … rapid shutting down of all of our vital systems…?

Of course the most dearly held theory of all is that everyone’s dying, the whole world’s dying, the messiah’s finally on the chimney tops. This is the one; this is the one that’s finally going to blow this fucking place to smithereens. Geloybt gat. Bend down and kiss your ass goodbye.

Paysach Freedman, a Jerusalem-based Haredi rabbi who runs a crisis helpline, said that the reality in his community has been dire, but suggested that it should be kept in proportion. “There isn’t a feeling that there’s a plague with people dying on every street.”

Could be worse, man!

Without a coronavirus vaccine, we will never be able to live normally again. The only real exit strategy from this crisis is a vaccine that can be rolled out worldwide…

Today there’s also the paradox that some people who owe their lives to vaccines no longer want their children to be vaccinated. That could become a problem if we want to roll out a vaccine against the coronavirus, because if too many people refuse to join, we will never get the pandemic under control.

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Ignorant, belligerent anti-vax cults present a real, ongoing challenge to civilization.

We’ll boil our women to death yet.

… when you have finally, at a very advanced age, been hauled into a courtroom for decades of deeply evil activity, the thing to do to finish out your incarceration-free run is to plead dire physical debility. Judge, I’m an old man! Jail would kill me! Have mercy.

The ploy frequently works. You’re surprised? UD has blogged about people – not even very old people in some cases – whose lawyers successfully convince authorities that whoops their client was just about to curtail his atrocities himself cuz of the following twelve life-threatening diseases that have suddenly engulfed him. Here’s a note, your honor, from a real live doctor I know, attesting to every one of them, and then some.

In the case of Rabbi Eliezer Berland, flight was his initial – and remarkably picaresque (if you have a free afternoon, you might enjoy following his multi-national, violent, on-the-lam itinerary) – response to some earlier charges against him (he likes to rape people). Now he’s back in court, charged with

defrauding his sick and elderly followers out of millions of shekels with miracle cures, including the administering of [Mentos] to cancer patients…

[H]undreds of people filed a police complaint against him for selling prayers and “wonder drugs” to desperate members of his community, and for promising families of handicapped individuals that their loved ones would be able to walk and families of convicted felons that their loved ones would be freed from prison.

His lawyer’s poignant account of a man diseased and in no condition to go to prison drew the following response from the judge:

Give him a Mentos.

… coronavirus restrictions in a lawsuit against the state’s governor. This pious town, always in the news for endemic welfare theft, anti-vax militancy, failure to educate its children, and now of course failure to observe virus containment laws, has just had it. It’s just had enough of government meddling in its wonderful way of life. This is going all the way to the Supreme Court!

Lakewood: Proud to be One of New Jersey’s Coronavirus Hotspots!

Israel’s criminally negligent health minister sits down for a chat. Excerpts.

I have a kosher, ‘stupid’ phone – not a smartphone. I have no TV at home and no internet connection. I don’t think that’s a problem. On the contrary – I’m not distracted by the smartphone so I have more time to handle urgent things... I’m proud of the fact that I’m technologically disconnected.

… Q: [M]aybe you decided to leave [your position] because of the growing criticism leveled at you.

I can’t comment on all the lies in the media. Like the story about IKEA being allowed to reopen stores, which some claimed I approved because the owner is a Gerrer Hasid so he’s a Gerrer donor. It’s nonsense. I’ve had no dealing with him and he’s not a Gerrer Hasid. Besides, how would I know if he’s a Gerrer Hasid? It had nothing to do with me.

Q: So why were they allowed to open stores so early in the lockdown exit process?

The Finance Ministry pressured the Health Ministry – but not me personally. I knew nothing about it and no one asked me. No one even talked to me about it.

Q: How is it possible that the health minister knows nothing about it?

The media has to decide, once and for all, if they want me to listen to the professional advisers [in the ministry]. When I don’t – they [the media] criticize me. If I do – they also criticize me. Enough! I knew nothing about the IKEA opening yet some newspapers made it their headline. Why? To mud-sling. If I weren’t Haredi no one would care.

Q: So the criticism is because you’re Haredi?

Without a doubt. The moment I became popular – I was named one of the most popular ministers in the government – they began coming after me.

… What about the criticism that in the press conferences with Netanyahu and Health Ministry Director Moshe Bar Siman-Tov the reporters could barely hear you, that you were stuttering and quoting the Torah instead of talking about the virus?

There are anti-Semites who saw me with a shtreimel [ultraorthodox hat] and that’s what bothered them... Some reporters are anti-Semites. They can’t stand to see a Haredi minister succeed... Everywhere I go, people respect me and wish me well. It’s only the media that does the opposite.

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… [The health minister] maintains he still doesn’t know exactly how he [himself] became infected with the coronavirus.

“I assume it was at the office or in one of the meetings we held with various officials, but the reports that I violated directives for prayer services are false. I can’t really comment any further because there’s an ongoing lawsuit on the matter,” he said.

… lets his imagination run wild, and imagines an ultra-altered ultra-orthodoxy. Shouldn’t the fact of their decimating themselves via a vicious virus they – whoops! – didn’t hear about because they think the rest of the world stinks and they never listen to it… shouldn’t that lurid fact prompt some serious thought about their suicidal folkways?

[Perhaps they might reconsider their monolithic] tendency to trust elderly rabbis on questions regarding which they have no clue…

This is a time when there is no external enemy, social trend or abusive regime harassing the community. The Charedi way of life is the enemy.

… The ultra-Orthodox are used to getting odd looks and to having a negative image. But they’re not used to their customs being the enemy. Who is that enemy? The rabbi that irresponsibly dismissed the orders of state officials. The tzadik who insisted on having a minyan of 10 at the synagogue. The funny guy who belittled strange laws of distant government men in suits.

… [M]aybe when the plague is over, Charedi society will no longer be the same. Maybe the Coronavirus will be like the fall of the Charedi Berlin wall. In other words, the plague is a good reminder that the world can turn on a dime. Charedim live in the world, they are part of the world. Change is not beyond them.

But this ain’t the way they think. The enemy is the evil godless haredim, whose viral suffering is god’s punishment for their evil godless ways. God will stop punishing them when they double down.

Ultra-Orthodox people [unlike non-ultra-orthodox Jews] do know Jewish law and therefore when they transgress religious laws it is seen as an intentional act for which divine punishment is much more severe. “The ultra-Orthodox who sin do not do so unintentionally and therefore [God’s] attribute of justice harms the ultra-Orthodox much more,” reasoned [the highest-ranking ultraorthodox rabbi in Israel].

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The voice of the ultra-orthodox:

It’s scary, but it’s true:

So do what the Good Book tells you to!