… with anti-hijabis ignoring the law making veiling mandatory, and pro-hijabis screaming in the streets against the anti-hijabis, while also insisting that women, as per nonexistent divine command, should be far more veiled, the parts of the government that matter seem to have had enough.

Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf said on Sunday that the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) has instructed the legislature not to enforce a contentious law mandating stricter hijab regulations.

“Although I had no intention of publicly declaring this in such explicit terms, the SNSC has formally written to the Parliament, directing us not to promulgate the hijab and chastity law for now,” Ghalibaf told lawmakers.

On the other side, the religious fanatics running Iran into the ground have decided that stealing citizens’ personal information, and setting up a Stasi-like system of everyone spying on and denouncing everyone else, is a great way of enforcing an unenforceable law.

“Does the Headquarters for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice even have legal access to people’s personal data?” asked Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, a former government spokesman and law professor, in a popular post on X.

But forget legal niceties! When God decrees hijabs and chadors for all, you gotta go there.

 [T]here were over 1,900 reported cases of students challenging the values of the [French] Republic in 2023 alone — from refusing to attend biology lessons due to perceived “immorality,” to threats against teachers who discuss secularism, gender equality, or the Holocaust. A growing number of teachers report self-censoring in the classroom for fear of retribution.

And the problem is not confined to France. In Germany, several states have reported an uptick in Islamist-linked intimidation in schools. In 2022, a Berlin teacher went into hiding after receiving death threats for showing a satirical cartoon during a civic education lesson. In Sweden, a teacher in Malmö was assaulted after discussing LGBTQ rights in class. Even the UK is not immune: Batley Grammar School in West Yorkshire found itself at the centre of a firestorm in 2021 when a teacher faced threats and had to go into hiding after showing images of the Prophet during a lesson.

These incidents are not isolated. They represent a systemic issue: the infiltration of radical Islamist ideologies into the educational environments of liberal democracies. Schools — once viewed as neutral spaces for the development of civic identity — are increasingly contested zones where the state’s authority is being tested and, at times, eroded.

Well, the rhetoric’s grand for sure, but as UD reads the letter from fifty Yeshiva University faculty protesting the school’s bestowal of its highest honor on Elise Stefanik, she’s gotta ask the signers: Do you know where you teach?

Do you recall – it wasn’t long ago – that Bernard Madoff was your BOT‘s treasurer, Ezra Merkin an equally honored campus VIP, and to this day Ira Rennert and Zygi Wilf remain high-profile, influential, beloved, donors? Do you know that by far the largest bloc in America voting for Trump was orthodox Jews? Have you noticed that, right after the courts forced Yeshiva to allow a gay club, the school found a way to shut it down?

I mean so nu it’s always nice to protest, but why don’t you try getting a job at a reputable school?

Now that he’s on trial, he’s hunched over a big bible during testimony.

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I guess it could work…

… monolingual Americans thing.

He speaks English, Spanish, Italian, French and Portuguese, and … can read German and Latin.

Israel’s super-icky national security minister is wined and dined by a once-respectable Yale intellectual salon. The Times of Israel offers background on the moral deterioration of this group.

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If a figure as eminent as a rabbi based at Yale can legitimize a viewpoint as extreme as Ben-Gvir’s, well, that adds fuel to [anti-semitic] fire. If a Jewish educator grants a hechsher (the kosher seal of approval) to a Kahanist, then he’s making the job of the Israel haters easy.

As part of their rejection of equality, the foundation of democracy, [the Israeli ultraorthodox] reject the democratic system except in the ways it serves their purposes. Their ministers, MKs, and public all openly clarify that they are obedient to their rabbis and to their interpretation of religious law, not to laws of the state. They have held huge protests against the Supreme Court, whose decisions they do not recognize — unless they serve their community. The Ultra-Orthodox parties are completely subservient to a rabbinical council, much as in Iran — but unlike Iran, lack even a semblance of democratic mechanisms. They vote for whomever they are told to vote, en masse, and according to their ethnic breakdown: Sephardim vote for Sephardi parties, Ashkenazim for Ashkenazim.

… For the Ultra-Orthodox, the state is a foreign body to be milked like a cow, which exists only to serve them, and never the reverse. The expectation they serve in the Israeli army is to them utterly ludicrous. Why should they give their time — heaven forbid, their lives — to a country which is meant to serve them, to defend borders they don’t recognize (God promised them all of greater Israel), alongside people who are beneath them? Worse still, they wouldn’t dream of serving together with women who are impure, or take orders from anyone but their religious leaders...

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Once the Ultra-Orthodox realize their way of life, which is entirely dependent on the generosity of corrupt politicians who buy their support, is untenable and unsustainable, the open and democratic society can begin to incorporate, educate, and accept them. Otherwise, there will be a crisis not only regarding the shortage of soldiers, but of supporting the abundance of children in the huge families, on welfare by choice, whose only competence is in reproduction.

Sing it, sister. But is that even a competence? I think it’s an instinct.

… (UD ain’t Catholic, but various friends and family are), has died. The very embodiment of religious hypocrisy, he was allowed by a church fully aware of his depravity to prance around for decades enacting piety and telling other people how to live.

Part of the much-larger story of Catholic church cover-up and abuse of power, his legacy will be that, in a strong field of child rapists, he was pretty much the worst.

… Catholic integralist Adrian Vermeule invokes his triune Godhead: Giuliani, Eastman, and Clark. Where, he asks, was the rule of law (which his colleagues worry about in their letter) when those great and good men were trying to make the world safe for Donald Trump?

And as to what Vermeule means by the rule of law – listen as he lays out his law-ruled ideal state:

Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.

Yup. Right outta 1984. ‘He loved Big Brother.’ This is the rule of rulers, not the rule of law.

Fuck man I got four others.

‘[Under Trump,]  they see an opportunity in their proximity to power. They’re not lonely figures, lonely prophets shouting at the margins, but they’re very close to the halls of power, and some are perhaps working within those halls of power right now, as we speak… Vermeule talks about using the bureaucracy, using the administrative state to nudge people in the right direction.’

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Wink wink nudge nudge is your administrative state a goer? Does it… you know… go? Mwoohohohohoo, ay? Hohohohohoho, ay?

“They want science to be part of the human — [their] philosophy [is] they want to say that mankind is creating the world,” [an ultraorthodox spokesman] said. “We say everything is by God.”

… [He] objects to the [NY] Education Department’s idea that it would be good, as he put it, to “open your kids to the world and teach them about everything.”

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Apparently the schools rejecting New York State education requirements are forming a new group: UUSF (United Ultraorthodox Schools Fund) with the motto A MIND IS A BEAUTIFUL THING TO WASTE.

… Greece, and one of those parties has drawn attention to itself by sending a couple of shock troops into the national museum and smashing to the floor paintings they felt were not nice to God.

To ol’ UD‘s perhaps jaded eyes, the works at issue look inoffensive – primitive pastichy picasso-y things, they smudge and mildly distort Madonna’s mug, but, you know, in a Francis Bacon world, there’s not much here to write home about.

A violent asshole storming and trashing your national museum (where were the guards?) — now that is indeed something to write home about.

“The war has sublimated the rage seething beneath the surface to the needs of national security,” writes Yair Rosenberg of an Israeli public infuriated about the continued subsidizing of a population which refuses to defend the country because it considers Israel the enemy.

George Packard’s quietly brutal takedown of Ross Douthat’s Believe defines and defends secular liberalism in an especially engaging way. His recital of the Creed (see above) is both inspiring and resolute, and he quite correctly opens the review with it, so that readers can understand right off the bat what he brings to Christian apologetics like Douthat’s. Packer makes clear that he understands, given existential panic and the tragedies of life, the emotional appeal of redemptive faith; he makes just as clear that what seem to him consoling fictions remain fictions, and thus fail to console, much less make life meaningful. We make life meaningful.

The rational, speculative approach of Believe comes to an end in its last pages, when the authoritarianism that underlies Douthat’s, and perhaps all, religion, suddenly shows its face. He adopts a darker tone as he asks what you will do if you’ve guessed wrong—if God turns out to exist and is waiting on the other side to punish you for failing to get the point of Douthat’s book.

That’s nice – for failing to get the point of Douthat’s book – and it reminds us of the amusing tendency among some believers to really let nonbelievers have it.

[Douthat] repeatedly sneers at “Official Knowledge,” the capital letters suggesting that scientific materialism is some sort of conspiracy of the legacy media and the deep state. He accuses atheists of taking the easy way out, of claiming to be serious grown-ups when their worldview is irresponsible and childish: “It is the religious perspective that asks you to bear the full weight of being human.” But even in Douthat’s own account, religion is driven by hedonistic self-interest, for it promises an escape from the suffering of this world, and it conditions the offer on a desire to avoid pain in the next. The humanist view that we have only one another in an instant of eternity—that this life, with all its heartache, is all we’re given—raises the stakes of love and imposes sacrifice beyond anything imaginable to a believer in the afterlife.

I wish Packer had mentioned something like Camus’ Lyrical Essays, full of lucid apprehensions of a world which is ours and ours alone.