The Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council, a New York nonprofit, criticized the announcement [of forthcoming stricter oversight of private school education standards for New York students]: …”Yeshivas are in good standing with education law so why create a problem?”

We’re good! As recently as 2019

a New York City investigation of 28 yeshivas found that only two of them provided “substantially equivalent” education to secular public schools.

Two out of 28! That’s good, right? That’s around 93%.

The latest look in Karachi.

See the post directly below this one for background.

One needs to parse the pro-hijab Council of Europe message to understand the problem here.

BEAUTY IS IN DIVERSITY.

AS FREEDOM IS IN HIJAB.

Let’s start with the first statement. Variety is the spice of life, I grant you. But surely not everything that meets the eye in a highly diverse environment will strike everyone as beautiful; and indeed given the notorious subjectivity of the concept “beauty,” mixed in this case with the feel-good vacuity of the sentence’s sentiment, it’s not terribly surprising that a lot of people were turned off. Karabash has a richly diverse urban setting, with unusual bright red water features, but I don’t find it beautiful. Los Angeles is highly diverse, with gated communities for billionaires down the road from rancid encampments, but I don’t find this diversity beautiful. The hijab campaign means to educate me, to make me more tolerant of people who wear hijabs; but it starts with an insult to my intelligence.

Plus, I’m not sure defending hijabs as diversity really… works anyway. I mean, they’re diverse from what non-hijab wearers wear, to be sure; but within the hijab community the whole modesty point is to make children and adults all pretty much look alike, right? Not a very diversity-positive community.

With the second statement, real trouble ensues. Beauty is to diversity as freedom is to the hijab. So… beauty inheres in diversity, just as freedom inheres in the hijab. The hijab is as obviously about freedom as diversity is about beauty. To wear a hijab is to say I am free. I am a free person, a free woman.

Now, if the campaign stated

FREEDOM OF CHOICE IS AN IMPORTANT FREEDOM.

I AM FREE TO WEAR A HIJAB.

no one would have complained. But if you are trying to say to me that you are free because you wear a hijab, that when I see a woman (or, horribly, a child) in a hijab I’m supposed to say There goes a free person. The hijab proves it. I’m going to refer you to Orwell’s 1984. You are not going to be able to make me believe that the very opposite of the truth is true.

I’m perfectly okay with all sorts of religious people marking their submission to God in any number of ways, but the whole point of this gesture, you understand, is to publicly reject “freedom” as the French, and ol’ UD, understand it. So the campaign lies, and since most people don’t find lies very persuasive, the campaign fails.

“Freedom is in hijab” crows the new Council of Europe anti-discrimination campaign — in which we are to applaud a mark of religious submission as a mark of personal freedom.

It’s not sitting well with the French.

“Reminding that women are free to wear the hijab is one thing,” Socialist Senator Laurence Rossignol said, “but saying freedom is in hijab is another. It’s promoting it. Is this the role of the Council of Europe?”

************

Gabriel Attal, [French] government spokesman, said after a cabinet meeting on Wednesday that the campaign defied common sense “because one shouldn’t confuse religious freedom with the de facto promotion of a religious symbol”. Such an “identitarian” approach was “contrary to the freedom of conscience that France supports in all European and international forums”, Attal said.

*************

Taking note of the universal fury, and perhaps reflecting upon an anti-hate campaign that has given the French right one hell of a shot in the arm, the Council has, er, issued a statement. “These tweets have been deleted and we’re going to think about a better presentation for the project. [The wording reflects] individual statements from people who took part in one of the project’s workshops, and doesn’t reflect the position of the Council of Europe or its secretary-general [Marija Pejčinović Burić].”

Oh, so the sec gen didn’t see the thing before it went out to the whole world, either! In fact, nobody knows who the hell…

***************

Next up in the Council’s anti-discrimination campaign: A young Brooke Shields smolders at the camera and purrs: Nothing gets between me and my Calvin Klein hairshirt…

***************

Another case in point.

Though some scholars argue it should not be interpreted as a slight, a prayer in which men thank God for not making them a woman is recited each morning.

******************

It’s like…

Though some scholars argue it should not be interpreted as a slight, a prayer in which white men thank God for not making them black is recited each morning…

… Jennifer Wenisch? A German-born ISIS fanatic, she was just sentenced to ten years in jail for allowing her five year old Yazidi slave girl to die of thirst while chained up in the desert heat. Can there be no photo at all of this woman? She will be out of jail in ten years – actually, she’ll probably be released in fewer than ten years … and humanity needs to be able to recognize her — to see her coming.

UD has looked in vain for a photo; all we’ve got is some person in court, hiding her face behind a large notebook.

[Wenisch] looked shocked when the verdict was announced, staring first at her hands and then at the ceiling as the judge read out the ruling.

… as I summarized this writer’s argument about the refusal of ultraorthodox schools all over the world to comply with required state education standards – that is, to teach basic computer, verbal, and mathematical literacy, much less, for instance, empirical method, or the institutions, practices, and history of the country in which their students live.

The writer offers a welcome acknowledgement, from within the haredi world (he heads a hasidic boys’ school), of the bullshit nature of the arguments haredim make about the high quality, by any standard, of their children’s education. He notes that in reality

many hours are spent singing songs, listening to stories, and repeating material that has already been learned. In high school, meanwhile, most of the day is devoted to unstructured learning. This, for many students, consists primarily of socializing while absorbing a tiny amount of material...

[M]ost ḥasidic schools offer something like 90 minutes a day of secular studies to students ages six to twelve, the quality of which varies widely, but is mostly well below average; and these pupils then go on to high schools that provide no secular studies at all. I can tell you, as someone who attended mainstream ḥasidic schools, that by the age of fifteen I had forgotten almost entirely the smatterings of English and mathematics I had learned in elementary school and had to start again from scratch.

As I say, such honesty about – well, about what we already know, but about which haredim lie – is welcome. Yet instead of proceeding to offer suggestions about how the closed, hostile world of the haredim might be induced – more sensitively and successfully – by state education representatives to open up enough to educate their children in even minimally non-haredi ways, the writer suddenly goes on a tear about evil liberal conspiracies to “dismantle” haredi life entirely.

[The question is] whether the liberal state is willing to let a countercultural social movement that bends the rules of the liberal order grow up in its midst. From the perspective of the state, and those loyal to it, there are reasonable grounds to prevent that. What is not reasonable, however, is the sort of liberal triumphalism that imagines that, under the pretext of implementing minor or neutral reforms, Ḥasidim will simply be intimidated into dismantling their own social order...

Liberal order here means everything – everything – that is totally “antithetical,” the writer rightly points out, to the haredi way of life. Totally. Personal choice, autonomy, the use of reason to make decisions which are right for oneself and not necessarily the group (haredim, for instance, notoriously vote as an almost solid bloc; in the last election, almost 83 percent of them, as instructed by their rabbis, voted for Trump, the highest percentage of any voting group). The haredim represent a totally solid rejection of everything modern liberal democracies stand for. Full stop.

**********************

Eli Spitzer even goes on to acknowledge that for haredi parents “preventing college is the point,” so bravo to their schools for doing a bang-up job of making successful entry to college impossible… ? Aren’t we getting a little… weird here? Has Spitzer heard of Yeshiva University? Of quite a number of other seriously religious universities in America? But even those schools won’t take you if you don’t know what a computer is and get 250 on your verbal and nonverbal SATs… tests you can’t even take, come to think of it, without basic computer skills…

*************************

So what do we conclude from what is clearly a radical, all-encompassing, isolation and stupidization of a growing number of young people in the United States?

A country by the way which is itself quite religious?

America is the most religious wealthy country in the world, according to a recent survey. A Pew survey found that Americans said they prayed more than any other wealthy nation surveyed. Fifty-five percent of Americans report praying at least once daily, 6 percentage points higher than the international average.

Again, in line with it being a religious outlier in the advanced world, the US has an extensive network of religious – and often very culturally conservative – universities. As its current political battles suggest, America’s conservative religious culture and legal institutions arguably dominate – they certainly hold their own – in the institutions (had a look at the Supreme Court lately?) and practices of this country. Anyone looking for a liberal triumphalism set on dismantling religious, conservative life will find herself seriously challenged in this god-fearing, abortion under virtually all circumstances outlawing, country.

Because of course the point here is that ultraorthodoxy does not represent merely (in Spitzer’s words) “a countercultural social movement that bends the rules of the liberal order.” I mean, whoa, Nellie! Ultraorthodoxy is itself an outlier in the religious life of this religious country, where massive numbers of seriously committed religious communities educate their children to a more than acceptable standard for a productive, contributing life in the modern world. We are talking here not about counterculture, but cult – a withdrawn, broadly non-compliant cult whose members often display a positive contempt for the laws of a country many of whose claims upon them they simply reject (this contempt for the civic realm is in all respects far worse in Israel). Far from the triumphant dismantler Spitzer perceives, the reality of the extremely liberal city of New York, for instance, is that the very voting bloc ultraorthodoxy represents stays the hand of one politician after another who might for a moment think of changing that sect’s appalling status quo.

Does it not seem strange to Spitzer that a city so obnoxiously liberal as to remove Jefferson’s statue from its city council building trembles before the power of its ultraorthodox community?

*******************************

In countries like Spitzer’s – England – the ultraorthodox help make possible the just as appalling educational wreckage many Muslim schools represent. Shouldn’t Muslim schools enjoy the same freedom from an evil liberal state that, for instance, wants to stop them from treating girls like dirt, assigning anti-semitic textbooks, and refusing to teach science?

“What difference does [the ban] make,” said … proud father Nicola Sparti, 24, who described his occupation as “a little bit of this, a little bit of that.” (“Flees from Carabinieri on a motorbike,” read a recent newspaper article about him.) “One day the godfather’s there and the next he’s gone. But a father is forever.”

*****************

When it comes to Catholicism, Sicily does a little bit of this, a little bit of that.

… has struck again, defacing a public photograph of a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor. The routine defacement of Jewish faces all over the country’s cities accompanies a refusal to honor a nationwide moment of silence on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Authorities attribute their inability to stop the defacement to the country’s primitive security apparatus.

Yet another American Stakhanovite punished by the federal government for working hard! UD has followed many of these on this blog over the years – doctors whose daily caseloads beggar belief, and what do they get?

A wildly popular physician whose willingness to go above and beyond for his patients was well-known locally, Orusa is now looking at decades in prison. This is a man who even finds ways to treat non-compliant patients.

Trial testimony from former employees and patients described a standing-room-only lobby area at Orusa’s clinic. Patients with insurance coverage were forced to visit the clinic four to six times a month and undergo cortisone shots to receive pain medication and Orusa threatened to withhold pain management prescriptions from those who refused the injections… Cash-paying patients generally were not required to accept injections in order to receive prescriptions. Due to the excessive number of controlled substance prescriptions, Walmart and CVS pharmacies refused to fill prescriptions written by Orusa.

It seems like piling on to point out Orusa is a man of God, “the pastor at God’s Sanctuary Church International,” but UD really wants you to get a sense of the vile reach of the federal government.  

‘Arizona Republican audit finds

even bigger lead for Biden

in 2020 election‘

*********************

Republicans are looking into the possibility of there having been a repeat visit of the Phoenix Lights, with the use of lasers able to seek out and neutralize Trump votes.

He’s ABD at way-Christian Hillsdale College, and already Baylor, America’s premier Baptist University – the best campus in America for a college student to get shot at, or, if she prefers, merely raped – has hired him to teach kids how their natural God-given rights preclude the wearing of masks during pandemics.

On the first Friday of Baylor’s fall semester, a political science professor refused to wear a mask in at least one of his in-person classes, forcing the university to move the class online…. Three of the four students [Baylor newspaper] The Lariat interviewed claimed that in his first in-person class, [Stephen] Goniprow said that he refused to wear a mask and that because he wasn’t going to, he didn’t expect his students to wear them.

Fuck the state, kids! God made you free, and if you listen closely Jesus is telling you to ditch the mask.

Just as I am, without a mask
To rid my face of this I ask
To thee whose blood can heal disease
O Lamb of God, I sneeze, I sneeze

Melbourne’s ultraorthodox perform dangerous rooftop sprints at night!

First, a diversionary ultra-team places itself in front of the team’s synagogue so police think they’re up to no good; then, while police aren’t watching, other ultras scale the synagogue roof and enter the building (breaking lock-down orders).

When police get wise to the ruse, ultras inside the building race back up to the roof and then escape the police by running along other Melbourne rooftops!

The so-called “Piety Pentathlon” incorporates

1. scaling a building
2. climbing into the building from the roof
3. climbing back up to the roof
4. racing across rooftops
5. climbing down from rooftops

Spectators are amazed.

A neighbour, who identified himself as Brent but declined to provide a surname, said he had seen several men enter the building in the same way over the past fortnight.

“I wasn’t around on Tuesday, but this has been going on for a while now, and often happens around early evening. It’s just bizarre,” he said.

…The answer is that we did. Our silence has turned us into enablers of those who are now foisting their religious beliefs on a country founded on opposition to an established church.

… About one-third of Americans, according to a recent Gallup poll, want the court to overturn Roe. And yet, as we saw last week, the right to abortion is already functionally dead in Texas, and its fate may soon be left to the whims of Republican politicians everywhere else. It’s incumbent on the rest of us to call out those who invoke God as their legislative drafting partner.

… [T]he country lurches toward theocracy...

Bitch set us up.