A local mosque was paying a physician to perform female genital mutilation on young girls, an attorney serving as a guardian for the doctor’s children alleged in court Tuesday.

NYT.

Once he’s been removed, you’ll be much better off.

It won’t be traumatic. It’ll be good for you.

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Meanwhile, UD‘s pretty excited to see all the national and global news coverage that’s finally being brought to female genital mutilation. When American doctors with medical degrees from Johns Hopkins University are doing hundreds of them in Michigan, it’s time to make noise.

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Who knew?

It’s on the telly too.

Her punishment is severe, though: she undergoes a forced clitoridectomy. …[T]he programme makers [had] consultations with the UN over the importance of highlighting female genital mutilation…

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Creating a bit of a stir.

Good. Time to pay attention.

If you truly care, if you’re truly principled, you do something that actually attracts people’s attention. You don’t simply sit around while the leading imam at your mosque says disgusting things. With the support of the mosque. You quit.

A leader at one of Virginia’s largest mosques has resigned after the imam there made comments in support of female genital mutilation.

Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, who was director of outreach at the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, posted his resignation Friday on his website.

Abdul-Malik says he’s leaving after “many reprehensible statements” by Dar Al-Hijrah’s senior imam, Shaker Elsayed, including his recent comments on genital mutilation.

I like “reprehensible.” But I like “many” even more. When this sort of thing happens to hit the news, public statements typically suggest the speaker was having a bad day or stumbled over his words blah blah. The miscreant himself, in his bizarre (and now recanted?) apology, suggested as much.

No, no, says his colleague. The guy preaches much that is reprehensible. So reprehensible, and so supported by the mosque, that Abdul-Malik has no choice but to leave.

Due to the lack of decisive leadership and on the part of the board of directors of The Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center and after many reprehensible statements made by the senior Imam, Shaker Elsayed, including the most recent statements on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) or female circumcision and especially after his public recanting of his apology I hereby resign my position as Director of Outreach.

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Details.

“A lot of Muslims feel like they’ve been under attack and feel like they’ve made a lot of concessions since 9/11 and now they want to plant this flag on this hill,” [says one observer].

Hell of a hill.

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FGM is a practice that, by virtue of the gravity of the harms it causes, can appropriately be called evil, yet it is not done out of evil intent.

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The fundamental societal motive for FGM stems from a belief held by several cultures; cutting away a woman’s genitals leads to stable marriages. The rationale is that if the woman is incapable of experiencing sexual pleasure, she will not be tempted to seek it outside her marriage, and devote herself to satisfying her husband.

Cultural sovereignty must yield to universal human rights when some basic, objectively vital rights such as life, health, bodily integrity etc. (which most cultures do, or should, value) are violated. The argument is one in favour of universal rights, not identical practices, and hence, the diversity and uniqueness of cultures will continue, which is the essence of multiculturalism.

What’s a philosophy BA from Yeshiva, who is also the son of the university’s chancellor, up to lately?

He’s using malicious charges of anti-Semitism to further his criminal conspiracy.

[Shalom] Lamm cast himself and his project as victims of anti-Semitism even as he was in the process of conspiring to corrupt village elections. “If you’re a conspiracy theorist and you think the Jews control things and are pulling puppet strings, then this all looks like this grand conspiracy,” Lamm told the Forward in February of 2014. “It’s basic anti-Semitism. You would have to be a believer in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to think that we could actually manipulate the world this way. It’s a complete absurdity.”

That very month, Lamm was working to get around opponents in the village government by enrolling ineligible voters to vote in village elections, according to the indictment filed against him in December. He and others created fake back-dated leases to make it seem as though the new voters lived in the village, and even put toothbrushes in their purported homes to make them seem occupied.

Next move: Anti-Semites in the court system forced him to plead guilty.

Virginia offers one-stop shopping for all of your genital mutilating needs, at a mosque already famed for having housed two of the September 11 hijackers. It’s never too soon to take your ten-year-old down to the leading imam at Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, where he’ll put you in touch with people who will cure her of hyper-sexuality as easily as one-two-three. (Footage of the imam’s fgm talk is embedded in the link to Daily Mail.)

Various folks at the mosque are shocked – shocked – that talk of forcible little-girl-clitoris-slashing is going on at Dar al-Hijrah — from the leading imam, no less — and they promise they’re going to do something about it pronto. Meanwhile, what a blessing for neighbors of that mosque when they decide it’s time to do something about the nymphomaniacs in their houses – make a beeline for Dar al-Hijrah. As this Daily Beach columnist writes: ‘AND NOW, FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION COMES TO AMERICA’.

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And remember the global rallying cry of FGM:

TWO HUNDRED MILLION TEN-YEAR-OLDS CAN’T BE WRONG!

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“Imam Elsayed should be charged by Virginian prosecutors for inciting criminal conduct,” says [Senior Director of the AHA Foundation] Amanda Parker…. “Americans must wake up to the scale of this problem. The Centers for Disease Control estimate that 513,000 girls are at risk of FGM in the United States, more than 30,000 of whom live in Virginia, making it seventh in the nation in terms of numbers of women and girls at risk of or who have undergone FGM.”

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Most activists agree that ultimately, the message against FGM has to come from within the community to truly take root. “If we are to come to total eradication, it has to come from the community, it cannot come from outside, [says one activist].”

So kudos to one of America’s highest-profile mosques for not only saying and doing nothing about FGM, but for featuring a lead imam who promotes it.

With a community of around 3.5 million people, Britain has fewer Muslims than France. But while the British media regularly covers France’s blighted banlieues and the outrage sparked by the French ban on veils in public institutions, it often overlooks the excesses of unchecked, unregulated multiculturalism back home.

A 2010, BBC Panorama report found more than 40 Saudi Students’ Schools and Clubs in the UK and Ireland were using Saudi textbooks, many of them with anti-Semitism or homophobic messages. The Panorama team found books explaining the details of Sharia amputations for thieves.

Sharia courts continue to operate across the UK despite a 2016 government inquiry into the treatment of women by such courts. A number of British Muslim women’s rights groups have opposed the sharia courts, but they continue to operate behind closed doors.

This blog about universities has long followed the reduction of a few British campuses to medieval nightmares. They spawn beheaders. They sponsor guest speakers who call for the deaths of homosexuals and Jews and apostates.

Theresa May is even – reportedly – looking into a burqa ban, something an overwhelming majority of British people have supported for years.

COME A LITTLE BIT CLOSER

(Sing it with me!)

In a hidden room just the other side of the building
She was held down there givin’ me looks that made me feel guilty
So I started walking away
She was just eight years old that day
And I knew, yes I knew I should leave
When I heard someone say, yeah

Come a little bit closer
We’ll capture you quick
You’re going to prison
For that little nick
You’re all alone
And the trial will be long

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(Written in honor of the upcoming trial.)

And that’s why Baylor University is where it is today!

Yeshiva University benefactor Zygi Wilf is at it again.

An East Hampton property owner has been flagged for a penalty for injuring or removing trees on public property.

… A code enforcement officer responded [to a complaint] and directed the contractor “to cease all work on the village easement until he gets further direction and/or approval” from the village.

Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray to God my clit to take.
For it would be a sin to be
Buried with that filth on me.

Bless my surgeons, make them close
My labia to please my beaus.
Keep me ever in thy sight;
So to all I say good night.

UD‘s mother used to quote the end of these lines a lot – every prospect pleases, / And only man is vile – because she thought the sentiment was funny, and because it seemed to apply to a lot of the places she found herself (UD recalls her reciting it one summer on a crowded Ocean City Maryland beach). UD finally checked the source of the lines – the notorious From Greenland’s Icy Mountains – and now sees that for Reginald Heber “vile” simply meant heathen…

Baylor: A criminal enterprise and a noisily self-regarding Christian university.

Rather like Bernard Madoff and Orthodox Judaism.

There’s everything to be said, criminal-enterprise-wise, for a covering of piety.

Sometimes events are too bizarre for us to assimilate directly, and that is where literature comes in. “We have art,” said Nietzsche, “in order not to perish of the truth.” And in order, he might have added, not to perish of confusion in the face of certain outcomes. When one of this country’s Super Bowl heroes is a killer who scrawls a bible verse on his forehead with a red marker (not with his own blood, as first luridly reported) and then hangs himself from his jail cell window, we need a little assistance.

Flannery O’Connor’s 1965 tale, “Parker’s Back,” helps point us, in the oblique way of art, toward some of the underlying truths, I think, of the Aaron Hernandez story. No one explored the links between violence and piety better than O’Connor.

Like Hernandez, O’Connor’s main character, O.E. Parker, is a big, vain, restless, bellicose, substance-abusing, tattoo-blanketed young man with a weird relationship to religion. He lives in a very Christian environment (this is paralleled in the real world by all the coaches – Urban Meyer at the University of Florida in particular – who tried to Christianize Hernandez) , and everyone’s always trying to draw him to the revival tent; but though he’s willing to listen, and though he marries a starkly fundamentalist woman, he stays aloof. He thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, except in one instance: “It was himself he could not understand.”

Parker’s tattoos are all-terrain manifestations of obscure furies: “His dissatisfaction [was] acute, and raged in him. It was as if the panther and the lion and the serpents and the eagles and the hawks [on his skin] had penetrated his skin and lived inside him in a raging warfare.” When his mysterious rage really acts up, he inks another predator on himself, lets that do the talking, and somewhat calms down: “Whenever Parker couldn’t stand the way he felt, he would have another tattoo.” By now, he’s running out of room: “With the aid of mirrors [an] artist had tattooed on the top of his head a miniature owl.”

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Aaron Hernandez’s tattoos were more varied than his fictional doppelganger’s: Mom and Dad; symbols of the gang to which he belonged; abstract designs. But in one crucial respect O’Connor’s character and Hernandez were aesthetic twins: Both men sported large images of Jesus on their backs. Parker has his done after a particularly intense bout of typically enigmatic destructive rage. Among a panoply of Jesus images to choose from in his tattoo artist’s book, Parker is irresistibly drawn to “the haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes.”

Looking, with the use of mirrors, at the completed tattoo, he remarks on the way “The eyes in the reflected face continued to look at him — still, straight, all-demanding, enclosed in silence.” He’s thrilled with the tattoo, and can’t wait to get home to his wife, who, with her pious Christian ways, will, he’s sure, be just as thrilled (she’s appalled at his idolatry). But because he’s so excited, Parker also wants to get rip-roaring drunk, so he delays his return in order to spend some time in a bar/pool hall, where his friends insist on seeing his latest tattoo.

When they laugh at what a religious fanatic he’s become (Parker objects that he hasn’t a religious bone in his body), he “lunge[s] into the midst of them and like a whirlwind on a summer’s day there [begins] a fight that rage[s] amid overturned tables and swinging fists” until he gets thrown out.

“Parker sat for a long time on the ground in the alley behind the pool hall, examining his soul. He saw it as a spider web of facts and lies that was not at all important to him but which appeared to be necessary.”

Aaron Hernandez’s back-tattoo was far more benign than Parker’s, a kitschy meek and mild thorns-bearer who gazes up at sympathetic doves and angels.

While Parker seems to have wanted to carry the weight of a permanently judgmental Jesus on his back, Hernandez’s tattoo seems to have been more of a Jesus-has-got-my-back number. Indeed, during his murder trial, prosecutors made much of another religious tattoo of his, a smoking gun on whose muzzle GOD FORGIVES appears. The biblical verse Hernandez wrote on his forehead in death also goes to salvation.

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So what can we say of these actual and fictive macho men, unable to understand or accept their physical nature (reports are emerging that fear of his bisexuality becoming public motivated Hernandez to commit murder), equally unable to take on the reality of a soul, and so desperate in their muteness to express something that they raked their skin with messages?

“My father believed that man by nature was a mess,” writes Norman Maclean in A River Runs Through It of his preacher father, “and had fallen from an original state of grace.” Pretty much all of Flannery O’Connor’s characters are a mess, grappling with the quandary of having been born a human being in a world riddled with physical and metaphysical traps.

In the world of O’Connor, the existence of a salvific god is not at all good news, since it simply oppresses most of us with a sense of failure relative to the obligations a serious religious life demands. (Parker’s soul “was not at all important to him” but “appeared to be necessary.”) Aaron Hernandez came up in the pagan world of gangs and made a smooth transition from that reviled violence to the venerated violence of football (his family thinks most of his problems can be traced to concussions he got on the field), but, as with Parker, he absorbed the idea that although he didn’t seem to have one – or at best, he had a flimsy web of facts and lies – having a soul was as necessary as having a body.

Neither of these men, let us say, had a soul, or even wanted one. Neither had any of the stuff we associate with a soul – like a conscience. Neither could even conceptualize such a thing as a soul, even when they sat down, bloodied after a fight like Parker, and really thought about it. The best they could do was acknowledge the importance of soulfulness to other people and therefore try to mimic the condition. Please the coach, please the wife. The pathetic literalness of their backside Jesuses was the best they could do; it was an offering to a world of believers from a world of pagans — pagans miserable and belligerent at having been expelled from their idolatrous world.

… at Yeshiva University, where his hijinks have long since made him a folk hero. But he’s outdone himself with his latest comments about an invited campus speaker he didn’t like.

The Yeshiva Commentator newspaper asked Schachter why he and one of his fanboys tore down posters publicizing the event.

“I don’t have to be insulted in my own institution. I have rabbanim in New Jersey who are always attacking me, always attacking all the faculty here in the Yeshiva. So it’s bad enough that they attack us in New Jersey, in the newspapers, and so on. We have to invite them into the Yeshiva to be mevazeh all the rebbes? They give an opinion that none of us know anything, they know better than all of us – I think that’s a chutzpah. Congress wouldn’t invite a communist to speak in Congress to explain communism. We’re not interested in communism. [The speaker] represents a different shittah, a total insult to all the rebbes in Yeshiva.”

When pressed if he takes issue with a specific article or statement issued by [speaker] Rabbi Klapper, Rabbi Schachter responded to the author, “You were born yesterday. I’m a little older than you. We have known the man for many years. He doesn’t represent our hashkafah at all! I think there are more important things to write in The Commentator. I said a fantastic shiur [Talmudic study lesson] today and yesterday – why don’t they write that up? Why do they write stupid things? This is not newsworthy. The shiur that I said is newsworthy.”

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Schachter also

object[s] to the study of the Christian Bible, … sees the work of Geoffrey Chaucer as expendable and [thinks] that 50 percent of an art history course is probably ‘avodah zara and gilui arayot’ (idolatry and licentiousness).

Schachter told a gathering of Orthodox leaders that

Jewish communities should set up their own review boards to evaluate any complaints of child sexual abuse and determine whether to bother with the police. This contradicts state laws on mandatory reporting for teachers, counselors, physicians and such.

Schachter further discouraged police involvement by warning that accused abusers could wind up “in a cell together with a shvartze, in a cell with a Muslim, a black Muslim who wants to kill all the Jews.” Shvartze is a harshly derogatory racial term.

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To be read by only those with the very strongest stomachs.

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The women all grab their phylacter
When they hear the approach of H. Schachter
He tells them they’re apes
He covers up rapes
He’s a one-person shonda enactor

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Yeshiva University: A financial and moral ruin overseen by clowns.