“Misplaced cultural sensitivity,” says someone else, and ain’t it the truth. The Hurstville Boys’ Campus of Georges River College, in Sydney, has decided it’s fine for some male students to refuse to shake women’s hands, Australia itself having no code of politeness, no cultural ethos, no sense of equity that might be offended by this.

But at least those involved in the decision and decisions like it are willing to defend themselves!

Georges River College principal Joanne Jarvis did not return calls or emails… Liberal MP for Oatley, Mark Coure, was at the Hurstville Boys’ Campus awards [graduation] ceremony [where boys refused to shake hands with women] in ­December but declined to comment. State Education Minister Rob Stokes also declined to comment… Opposition education spokesman Jihad Dib, a former school principal who is a Muslim, also declined to ­comment…

And UD is oh so familiar with this variant of the there are only a couple of thousand burqas on the street so who cares move:

Lydia Shelley, a lawyer and Muslim community advocate, dismissed concerns over the school’s handshaking protocol, saying “if you seriously want to address the issue of gender inequality … you could focus on Australia’s national shame of violence against women”. By comparison, she said, the handshake issue “pales in significance”.

No but if you really really seriously want to address the issue of gender inequality you should focus on global gun violence… Let’s go cosmic, shall we? That way no one will focus on the utterly trivial, so trivial you can’t even see it with a microscope, business of officially training teenage boys to be assholes.

… alignment.

It Never Rains but it Whores

[Singalong.]

Did y’ever wake up in the morning
And grumble as you tumble out of bed?
Your strength coach arrested — solicitation.
You might lose SAC accreditation.
The school of Ken Starr and Art Briles
Is drowning in lawsuits and trials
Your regents are vile but they won’t do town halls
You’re out of compliance with Big 12 by-laws
Yes, all day long,
Everything you touch goes wrong.

Teacher told us, when this happens, never to whine or wail;
The same things happen at other schools, but on a much smaller scale!

It never rains but what it whores;
If lady luck should happen to desert you,
Some gang rape’s never gonna hurt you,
So wait and the skies will all be blue.

It never rains but what it whores;
So what if all your troubles come in bunches,
Keep sticking to your silly little coaches,
And the sun will come shining through.

Bide your time and keep on hummin’,
Don’t you frown and sit around and weep.
Wait your turn, your day is comin’,
And you’ll be there on top of the heap!

It never rains but what it whores;
You may as well get all your worries over,
From then on you’re gonna be in clover!
Smile when you should cry,
For every cloud there’ll be a rainbow,
There’ll be a sunbeam for every raindrop by and by!

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

[UD thanks many readers who have sent her Baylor updates.]

… will be dominating news from that university for awhile. As in – what’s my girl Briles doing with her lawyers today? Last week she was suing everybody at the university cuz they said hurtful things and made her feel bad; this week she’s withdrawing her suit because “a girl can only carry so much… she wants some peace in her life…”

But don’t worry! Two other ex-football people are still suing, and there’s tons more where they came from.

America’s highest-profile Baptist university is increasingly divided up between people who are suing and people who are in prison.

Her sentence is maybe a little grammatically awkward at the end, but Sally Jenkins gets the job done here, noting first of all that corruption in university football is currently massive and growing. She notes more particularly that America’s most rape-licious campus – oh-so-Baptist Baylor – should get NCAA’s death penalty, but probably won’t cuz there’s too much money at stake. “[T]he death penalty is difficult to contemplate when major college football revenue is more than $3.4 billion.”

Plus, whether it’s Whorehouse University of Louisville or Sex Slave Baylor University (spiritual sex slaves, like what did they call those Greek temple prossies, hierodoulos), who are we to interfere with freedom of religion? It’s been said often enough – and it’s utterly obvious – that pro- and pretend-not-pro- football is a religion in America. The thick description here, as Clifford Geertz would put it, is that of multiple temple cults where worship of naughty haughty Player Gods means full submission to them. Full legal, financial, academic, physical and sexual submission. THERE IS BUT ONE GOD AND HIS NAME IS RICHIE INCOGNITO. We love steroidal fucks like Richie and want them to do whatever they want with us. They beat the shit out of our students, rape them, whatever, and the president of our university pleads Give them another chance! This is our holiest of mystery sects, full of blood and sex and brain spatter, and it all plays out, of all places, on our university campuses.

Practice in the morning – throwing, blocks, and tackles –
Practice in the noontide, til the drunken eve;
Waiting for the hostess and the time of raping,
Waiting for the lawyers, toting up the rapes.

Going forth with weeping, losing field advantage,
Though the loss sustained our spirit often grieves;
When our weeping’s over, we’ll bid new recruits welcome.
We’ll regain position, toting up the rapes.

Rabbi Yosef Shloush, who chairs an organization of settlement rabbis that invited [Yona] Metzger to speak, was quoted by the Walla news site as saying Metzger was invited over two months ago and that, at the time, “he was [only] suspected [of bribery].”

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

You cannot make this shit up.

They flew him in just so he could give a little homily at a new prayer room in the UM hospital, and Israel’s chief rabbi duly poured on the donor-schmaltz (“You and your mother are doing a lot of good, and your father in heaven is so proud of you today.”). Now he’s giving homilies from his jail cell, where this career criminal (the police have been after him since 2005) has finally been imprisoned.

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

And… I gotta say! This is the most a-fucking-mazing university page I’ve ever seen! And it’s still up on Georgetown University’s site, and all they have to do is update it with the information that he’s in jail now!

I’m quoting this in full. I am not making this up.

Yona Metzger is the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, making him one of the country’s two chief rabbis along with Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar. In June 2013 he suspended himself from official duties while under investigation for money laundering. Metzger was born in Haifa, Israel in 1953 and was ordained a rabbi after serving in the Israeli Defense Forces as a chaplain. He was appointed to the Chief Rabbinate in 2003; his appointment was controversial, as he is the only chief rabbi to have been appointed without prior experience as a rabbinical judge. Metzger has also faced allegations of sexual abuse and extortion, though formal charges were never filed. Metzger has followed in the steps of his predecessor Yisrael Meir Lau by pursuing dialogue with other religions. He has met with Muslim and Hindu leaders, the Dalai Lama, and Pope Benedict XVI during the latter’s visit to Israel.

Fuckin’ A! We want this paragon in our Berkley Center for Religion Peace & World Affairs and you know what fuck you if you think just cuz he takes charitable donations meant for suffering people and stashes them in his sister’s house we should let him go. NO. Here’s his revised faculty page and did we say fuck you?

Yona Metzger is the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, making him one of the country’s two chief rabbis along with Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar. In June 2013 he suspended himself from official duties while under investigation for money laundering. Metzger was born in Haifa, Israel in 1953 and was ordained a rabbi after serving in the Israeli Defense Forces as a chaplain. He was appointed to the Chief Rabbinate in 2003; his appointment was controversial, as he is the only chief rabbi to have been appointed without prior experience as a rabbinical judge. Metzger has also faced allegations of sexual abuse and extortion, though formal charges were never filed. Metzger has followed in the steps of his predecessor Yisrael Meir Lau by pursuing dialogue with other religions. He has met with Muslim and Hindu leaders, the Dalai Lama, and Pope Benedict XVI during the latter’s visit to Israel. Metzger just entered prison for 3 1/2 years for fraud, breach of trust and tax offenses. But watch this page – he’ll get out early (holy man) and will be able to resume his affiliation with the Center. Meanwhile, you can visit with him here, as he talks about the importance of being charitable.

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

The larger spiritual context:

In practice, the office of chief rabbi has become the grand prize in a corrupt system of political spoils. Indeed, as his successor and that of his Sephardi colleague were being chosen, incumbent Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger was already under house arrest on charges of bribery and corruption…. For decades the haredim have benefited from the fact that their singular priority—funding for the network of institutions that enable their self-enclosed lifestyle—was so narrow that they could negotiate their way into almost any government coalition. The installation of Yona Metzger as Ashkenazi chief rabbi in 2003 was a perfect expression of their cynicism and contempt for the institutions of the state: He was a rabbinic nonentity with questionable ethics, but he was an entirely reliable cutout. (Earlier in his career, Metzger had agreed to be disqualified from serving as a municipal rabbi in order to forestall disciplinary charges; when he was put up for chief rabbi, he argued that he’d never been disqualified from serving the whole country, which showed chutzpah even by Israeli standards.)

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

Here’s El Supremo with his bestie Glenn Beck, bemoaning the “bad public relations” from which Israel suffers.

The guy writes an opinion piece in the school’s newspaper wondering about this – in particular, he wonders about Yeshiva’s … curious …board of trustees, recent haunt of Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin… Current haunt of the notorious Wilfs… And all-’round, COI-infested, $500 million-losing risk-taker…

You really think these big-money boys wanna talk to a pipsqueak like you? Bugsy Siegel maybe they’d talk to. Only he’s dead. You they won’t talk to.

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

Update: The Forward takes note.

Par for the course.

Nice Jesuit school too. They must be in contention with Baylor for Most Hypocritical Religious Institution in the Land.

In 2011, Baylor University football star Tevin Elliott was suspended from school for academic misconduct, but was reinstated after university president Kenneth Starr intervened on his behalf.

… Elliott soon faced more serious problems. In 2014, he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison after a trial in which four Baylor students testified that he sexually assaulted them. Three of those incidents took place after his reinstatement in August 2011.

Keeping people like Elliott in school “… was my moral view of what the president of the university does,” Starr said.

Kenneth Starr, president of America’s foremost Baptist university.

As for all those pesky gang rapes (Baylor has recently reached settlements with two of their victims), ‘“I personally have doubts that there were gang rapes,” he said.’

… with the same extensive ties to Yeshiva University.

Today’s highest-profile arrestee, Mark Nordlicht, even shares Madoff’s biography. Both had fathers who were financial crooks. Both were deeply involved with Yeshiva University, as were many of their associates. And of course both ran/allegedly ran virtually identical Ponzi schemes.

UD is certain that if the Lord had granted Nordlicht the length of time he granted Madoff, Nordlicht would, like Bernie, have been able to do fifty rather than a measly one billion dollars worth of business.

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

A brief review of the latest batch of YU-affiliated miscreants.

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

“We have to start to become embarrassed by this. There has to be a huge re-set in the Orthodox community.”

Start here: Your most public institution – Yeshiva University – is an increasingly criminalized location. Admit this and start cleaning it up. Remove Wilf’s name from the campus. Remove Rennert’s name from the campus. Strip of their degrees YU graduates who go to jail for massive financial crimes. And don’t strip quietly. Make a public statement repudiating them.

Find a president who doesn’t hide your affiliation with Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, but who owns up to it and says that you’re now ashamed of it, and ashamed of the greed that made you decide to make those men campus heroes.

Admit that it’s time your university stopped making the news for all the wrong reasons. Admit that your hypocrisy – a pious Orthodox face hiding a cynical self-serving face – has done terrible damage to the school and has somehow got to end.

Subject all of your trustees to financial review by outsiders, with an eye toward conflict of interest and fraud. Then get rid of most of your trustees.

That’s what a huge re-set looks like. At least the beginning of one.

The American university that put Bernard Madoff on its board of trustees and made him (wait for it) treasurer has never – in the life of this blog, anyway – been out of the gutter news. Sex scandals, money scandals, an entire campus named after a convicted fraudster, a Moody’s rating so low as to be beyond belief…

I could go on. All of which means that this blog has never been able to lose sight of Yeshiva.

YU’s constant corruption is doubly interesting in the context of its pious self-image. It joins company with Baylor University and Liberty University as a national epicenter of religious hypocrisy.

Actually, YU is triply interesting — because of the pathos (it shares this with the other two schools I just mentioned) of there being many good and thoughtful and authentically spiritual people on campus. You can go to the campus newspaper and read their Job-like endless plaints.

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

Okay, so one of the school’s longest-serving leaders resigned in 2013, and here’s the most positive appraisal I can find of him.

Now the guy’s son, once a member of the university’s Board of Directors, has been arrested for voting fraud and bribery. Yeshiva once again gets prominent ugly mentions in the national press.

[Sing along.]

Free from the law — oh, happy condition!
Rapists have fled, and there is remission;
Cursed by the law but saved from the fall,
Starr hath redeemed us once for all.

Now we are free — there’s no condemnation;
Baylor provides a perfect salvation:
“Come unto Me,” oh, hear its sweet call,
Come, and it saves us once for all.

… most recently censored – nay, suppressed – an article in the student newspaper critical of Donald Trump, I’m afraid you deserve all of the ridicule you’re going to get.