Its member states just put a theocratic nightmare – where women who don’t swaddle themselves end up in jail – on its women’s rights commission. Which four EU and Western democracies voted for a place with mandated hijab laws to oversee the rights of the world’s women? The list is here. UD‘s gonna go with the most woke and guess the following four:

Australia

Canada

UK

USA

She dared to become educated and leave the control of her husband and have a career. She fails to cover her face. She is easier to kill – most women lack the strength of men. And it’s a good idea to target either young or old – this one was almost fifty. Piece of cake.

And at a police station! Martyrdom guaranteed.

Quebec has for decades made it clear that, like France, it is seriously secular; and indeed the Superior Court in Montreal just upheld a law giving the “government … the right to restrict the religious symbols worn by public sector employees including teachers, police officers, lawyers and prison guards, while they [are] at work.”

“The law destroyed my career dreams,” said Noor Farhat, a lawyer who wears a head scarf and aspired to be a public prosecutor... [Farhat says she] “can’t believe what’s happening.”

Surprised she’s surprised. Since the 1960s, Quebec has been relentlessly restricting the official civic scope of religion — the Catholic religion, mainly, but other religions as well. No one following the history of Quebec can doubt its radical commitment to the separation of church and state. If your religious belief is such that you cannot take off a head scarf for the duration of your public sector workday, you should probably be in another province.

Naturally, you can try fighting this law; but you are going up against the will of the people: this law and others like it are extremely popular in Quebec. Why not respect the people of the region and let them live – in one public domain – in accordance with the secularity that is just as important to them as your piety is to you?

She left the benighted ultra-orthodox community … divorced her benighted ultra-orthodox husband… but her weird divorce agreement left the husband in charge of their son’s education!

The shonda-for-the-Jews ultraorthodox yeshiva system, wherein they gather millions of American tax dollars to refuse their students classes in math, English, and science, now gets to take Beatrice’s kid, chew him up, and spit him out as one more witless weenie.

Beatrice sees that now. She’s upset. New York State, which has an education mandate the ultra-orthodox ignore, doesn’t give a shit. She has nowhere to turn.

Her options? She can go back to divorce court and try her luck. More realistically, she needs to home school the unfortunate. If you want something done right, do it yourself.

First Hoda goes all ISIS, and now her sister Arwa is arrested trying to do the exact same thing!

After [Arwa] Muthana was arrested, she waived her Miranda rights and stated during an interview that she was willing to fight and kill Americans if it was for Allah. 

What is it with the Muthana family? At this point I think we need to have a chat with the parents, no? As Lady Bracknell said: “To lose one daughter to ISIS, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like you brought them up that way.”

Andrew Sullivan, writing about the persistence of his Catholic faith.

And – citing dire statistics for American churchgoing – Amanda Marcotte writes:

The early Aughts saw the rise of megachurches with flashily dressed ministers who appeared more interested in money and sermonizing about people’s sex lives than modeling values of charity and humility…

Trump was a thrice-married chronic adulterer who routinely exposed how ignorant he was of religion, and who reportedly — and let’s face it, obviously — made fun of religious leaders behind their backs. But religious right leaders didn’t care. They continually pumped Trump up like he was the second coming, showily praying over him and extorting their followers to have faith in a man who literally could not have better conformed to the prophecies of the Antichrist. It was comically over the top, how extensively Christian right leaders exposed themselves as motivated by power, not faith. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Gallup’s numbers show numbers of religiously affiliated Americans taking a nosedive during the Trump years, dropping from 55% of Americans belonging to a church to 47%…

And many [potential churchgoers] are going to look at hypocritical, power-hungry ministers praying over an obvious grifter like Trump and be too turned off to even consider getting involved.

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

Plus Trumpique que le Trump Matt Gaetz is also doing his bit to keep the hypocrisy banner flying.

Answer: Definitely getting there.

Nahum Barnea, a commentator for the country’s top-selling newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, wrote on Wednesday that the rise of Religious Zionism “isn’t just a blow to morale, it’s an ideological catastrophe.”

He said Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party was now “a hostage in the hands of an anti-democratic, racist, homophobic, terrorism-sponsoring group of people.”

… Peter Galbraith’s efforts to reunite Yazidi women and their children (fathered by ISIS men who enslaved Yazidi women), and then return them to their people. But because of what Mustafa Gurbuz calls the “unfortunate… tribalist logic” of the Yazidis, these children are summarily rejected by the group. Wrong blood.

Yazidi elders have refused to let the children join the small religious community, which considers them outcasts who can never be allowed into society.

The decision has left their mothers, already traumatised by years of violence and atrocities, facing a wrenching choice between keeping their children or staying with their community.

And ain’t it lovely to think of a Yazidi woman who has already endured sex slavery, unimaginable other forms of abuse, and separation from her children and culture, now having to enter permanent exile if she wishes to be with her children.

Or she could always watch Yazidi men kill her kids as retribution:

“Even if Baghdad makes an exception in the Iraqi law and legally recognises the children as Yazidis, there is a major risk that these children – especially the males – would face retribution within the Yazidi community for their fathers’ guilt,” said Gurbuz.

Both the politics and the existence of Israel have long been matters of great fascination and importance to me. But my interest, engagement, commitment has ebbed as the country’s politics have become not only more right wing but more consistently absurd over the last decade. The animating question of Israeli politics is no longer the Arab-Israeli conflict, questions of political economy or religion but overwhelmingly the question of one man: Benjamin Netanyahu. He entirely dominates what is called the ‘national camp’ and two or perhaps three of the country’s other parties are right wing parties which are founded around their principal’s personal disputes with Netanyahu. Every few months there’s another election. When Netanyahu wins he becomes Prime Minister. When Netanyahu loses he also becomes Prime Minister. Why pay attention?

And as we look away, and as secular Israelis flee, the country goes full theocratic.

A blank canvas, after all, is better; and there won’t be any obnoxious Italian bureaucracy to tussle with. The absolute quiet, and the big views of ice-floes drifting along the Arctic, will conduce to shared visions of the Cathophate to come.

Just after one burqa ban passes (Switzerland), another is announced: Sri Lanka, having suffered hideously at the hands of ISIS, attempts to deradicalize its citizens — taking on not merely the fundamentalist burqa, but also unregistered madrasas that refuse to teach the national curriculum.

Again and again on EasyJet flights, stinky ungodly women are forced to change their seats so as not to infect any pure ultraorthodox men who may, through the machinations of some diabolical force, have been seated next to them.

If the women refuse, other passengers — far from, say, acknowledging overt gender discrimination — put pressure on the women to make them move.

Of course this goes on all the time on EasyJet and non-EasyJet to-and-from Israel flights, but only occasionally does a woman resolve to turn down, for instance, the one cup of free coffee that EasyJet offers as compensation and instead contact IRAC, which sues on her behalf and makes all sorts of money for her. The discrimination is so comically obvious, and enjoys so wide an audience, that when these particular suits come forward, airlines simply pay up. The latest beneficiary is Melanie Wolfson.

Since this is such a slam-dunk, UD proposes the following source of income in these uncertain covid times: Groups of women organize themselves to “seed” selected haredim-heavy flights. Inevitably, on any given flight, a number of these women will be seated next to out-of-my-sacred-space-godless-harlot men. Every one of these women files a lawsuit (knowing what will go down, the group will include someone designated to film events on board) and thereby earns for herself and her co-conspirators compensation in the tens of thousands. Takes more time to make than a coffee, but is more satisfying, and lasts longer.

Ok, so she lied about French schoolteacher Samuel Paty having blasphemed; but her father’s murderous campaign against Paty succeeded in exciting a local terrorist to behead him at the school, in front of students.

How could her account of Paty’s actions have been so wrong?

Well, for starters, she wasn’t there. She had been suspended for truancy.

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

And now the lives of two professors in Grenoble are in danger; a campus campaign against them might well stir up that city’s beheaders.

Haredi children are kept segregated from the rest of society; over a quarter suffer from food insecurity, according to the Israel Democracy Institute. [Haredim] hold that this lifestyle is the fulfillment of God’s commandments.