In the Mea Shearim area, there are [illegal] signs advising visitors not to enter if dressed “indecently”. Despite complying with the community’s dress code, [female journalists] were still targeted with degrading accusations and insults, being called “impure (unholy)” and receiving death threats.
Noticias Cuatro TV broadcast footage that showed a group of men throwing bottles, trash, posters, and other objects at the journalists.
The question of whether or not Israel should recognize—and fund—the right of yeshiva students to pursue their Torah studies rather than join the army has been a political hot potato since at least the 1970s…
Given that tens of thousands of Haredi men do no Torah study of any actual meaning or value – they lack the motivation/intelligence/training to do little other than show up in a building occasionally and hang around open books – the writer misstates the problem. It’s sweet that he assumes that we assume that all male babies born into this population transform into Torah scholars. But since we have eyes in our heads, we do not assume this. Because we know it is not true.
[T]here are already 6,000 Haredi men serving in the army … hundreds of them are combat soldiers, and … they volunteer in such solid and consistent numbers … the IDF saw fit, in 1999, to establish an independent battalion just for Haredi soldiers, called Netzah Yehuda.
Netzah Yehuda is nothing to be proud of. The US gov has singled this unit out for sanctions, so atrocious has its conduct been in the West Bank. And who can be surprised? A subculture taught to consider pretty much everyone not an ultraorthodox Jew pretty close to subhuman can’t be trusted with serious weaponry. Unless you don’t care about the law of warfare.
And the IDF didn’t create a unit just for Haredim cuz it was wowed by their solidity and consistency: Haredim are so unassimilably weird and demanding in their general and specific orientation (no mixing with women ever!) that nothing short of total segregation will work with them.
Indeed, “fully integrating Haredim into its ranks would require a wide array of logistical challenges—providing strictly kosher food, for example, or addressing concerns rising from coed military service—it currently cannot and does not want to address.” And why is it only the IDF that has to address ways of being that allow this group of Israelis to contribute to the Israeli state’s existential crisis? How about the Haredim meeting the army halfway, and, say, suspending strict observances for the duration of their service? Suspending their inhumane attitudes toward everyone not a member of their religious group?
OOOH, say their rabbis, that would be the first step to secularization.
So?
The author goes on to argue that the war is going desperately badly — a position rather at odds with his initial argument that the Israeli court should leave an enormous population of unemployed young men alone.
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UPDATE:
At least 22 percent of ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students under the age of 26 are illegally employed, in violation of the terms of their exemption from military service, a new study has found, appearing to undercut the community’s argument that its members do not enlist due to their total immersion in Torah study.
So let’s see what the good reason is.
Haredim believe—deeply, strongly and sincerely—that religious devotion in the form of Torah-study, no less than the actions of foot soldiers or intelligence officers, is important for Israel’s security. Indeed, a vital, essential part of it... [A]t least in Haredi eyes, [fit young men who only pray] are not evading public service but contributing to it—and in a way that, they sincerely believe, is essential to the safety and security of all their fellow Jews.
Indeed, in Haredi eyes, they sincerely believe they don’t need to work instead of pray; sincerely, they believe Israeli taxpayers should subsidize their prayerful unemployment. Sincerely, in Haredi eyes, vaccination against disease is evil, so sincerely they allowed thousands of their old and very young to die of covid. Many Haredi sincerely believe that stealing funds from the Israeli state (in which they sincerely disbelieve) is okay. In Haredi eyes, during Israel’s national minute of silence on holocaust remembrance day, you should make a lot of noise to show your contempt. In Haredi eyes, violence against the “state” – which extends from constant destructive rioting/traffic disruption to attacking children dressed insufficiently modestly – is essential to the safety and security of all their fellow Jews. (Oh except that in Haredi eyes no person who is not Haredi is really a Jew. Sincerely.)
These are all good reasons. Because Haredi people think they are good reasons. Sincerely.
“[O]ur decision not to share the news [that a member of our community stabbed and drowned her babies] is deliberate and guided by the wisdom of our rabbis.”
Ultraorthodox Lakewood NJ – known until now for its astounding rates of welfare fraud and its refusal to vaccinate its people against measles, covid, etc. – arrogantly responds to media inquiries with pride in its longstanding refusal to face up to what the many pathologies of its community have wrought. Of course this is a very big news story, but by definition America’s most anti-social demographic doesn’t give a shit.
Oh, turns out filicide mom has “severe mental illness,” which, guided by the wisdom of our rabbis, we decided left us free to put her alone in her house with her defenseless offspring. (Not totally defenseless: Apparently she only stabbed the older of the two, presumably because the pitiable child offered a little resistance.)
And of course the madwoman would – will? – continue to produce more babies. More babies is what ultraorthodox women – psychotic murderers or not – do.
Any number of cliches pertain to the problem facing hijab defenders in France, who are outraged that French Olympics athletes can’t cover their heads during play.
Secularist France has nothing against people wearing the thing in all other Olympics venues, but wants those officially representing the country during games to project religious neutrality.
Supported by many human rights organizations, hijabis are making a lot of noise about overturning the ban before the event begins next month.
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Ecoute. Here’s the problem, if you ask ol’ UD.
The far right so massacred Macron’s government in the recent EU election that Macron has called snap elections. My guess is that support for hijabs, abayas, burqas, etc., among this lot is approximately zero percent. Left, center, or right, in any case, French governments have long banned various forms of veiling, and it sure looks as though growing majorities of the French people object to strongly visible religious garb. At the moment, ye olde will of the people is against you, in other words, and while you’re free to fight the good fight, it’s arguable that this isn’t the moment.
It can’t help matters that, hijab-wise, most of the attention of the world is riveted to Iran, whose vile theocracy has succeeded in linking the head covering to murderous surveillance of women. Certes, it’s unfair, certes, it’s illogical, but efforts to portray the hijab as a symbol of healthy diversity, gender equality, and individual expressive rights (which all the letters from human rights organizations gas on about) are currently up against super-repressive mullahs who have made the hijab the central actor in their globally notorious death-to-women thing.
Hijabis in France, seems to me, would do well to acknowledge what they’re up against there, and act more strategically.
Here’s where you might start. Concede that hijabs don’t seem to most people to have jackshit to do with gender equality. (Recall this unfortunate campaign.) On the contrary. Drop that quixotic quest, and confine your language to religious freedom more broadly and indeed more vaguely.
IVF is “as immoral as anything we can imagine.”
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A CBS News/YouGov poll earlier this year found that 86 percent of respondents thought IVF should be legal …
Our country is at a crossroads. What we saw today has never happened before, and I think for the majority of Americans, it raises questions about whether our legal system can be trusted. Pray for our nation, for God‘s guiding hand that this republic will be one nation under God.
FRANKLIN GRAHAM
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Please pray that God restores our right to pay off porn stars to hush them up and to create fake records to cover up the payoff.
GEORGE CONWAY
Spawn of Franco Fanboy goes down.
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Bozell’s father submitted a letter to the court in which he … questioned prosecutors’ motives for seeking a terrorism enhancement.
“I have remained silent for the past 3 1/2 years because I didn’t want to tip the apple cart of justice,” he wrote. “But given what I saw in the trial, and more importantly learning about this terrorism enhancement, I no longer can. I believe there is more at play here.”
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Indeed there is, indeed there is. It is the hand of God. Praise Him.
… Harrison Butker has initiated a petition of his own. It calls for striking the song “I Can’t Say No” from the score of Oklahoma.
Mr. Butker casually mentions that “Congress just passed a bill where stating something as basic as the biblical teaching of who killed Jesus could land you in jail,” a not-so-thinly veiled reference to a recent bill passed in the House to combat antisemitism.
The Jesuit Review concludes:
Mr. Butker quoted the lyrics of his “teammate’s girlfriend” (Taylor Swift), “familiarity breeds contempt.” But he demonstrated what contempt for the outside world breeds.
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UPDATE: THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE KICKER
UD thinks the contempt point really gets at it. Here’s another writer:
A sort of loneliness radiates from Butker’s speech; there is the sense, in his words as in Aaron Rodgers’s increasingly dire podcast riff sessions, that all of this displeasure has been bubbling away in there for quite some time without an outlet. Mostly, though, there is just disdain, not just for all the sinful things of the world but seemingly everyone and everything else in it.
… There is no room for anyone else in this worldview, no space for anyone to live or breathe. It’s striking how Butker is unable or uninterested to connect his own faith with those of the coreligionists listening to him; this whole belief system vibrates at the frequency of cable news, and so there’s nothing for him to share but a list of demands. If Butker’s speech works as a commencement address, it is only as an opportunity for new graduates to learn how they will be treated by the sour and vengeful mediocrities who are also the most powerful people in the world they are joining: as a series of shadows whose only purpose is to be harangued, so that they might learn to be less displeasing. The advice Butker offered at Benedictine College is not really trying to be a part of any kind of conversation. It’s just a kicker moving further and further out, to see what he can get away with.
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Masturbation is nothing to be ashamed of, any more than running away from a mob you yourself have excited; but if Butker and Hawley are going to present themselves as national avatars of generative masculinity, these are not their best looks.
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More deeply: If you want to find the world contemptible, babe, the world will always oblige. Piece o’ cake. Look around. But it’s kind of a mistake – one that is obvious to all of us when you make it – to confuse your misanthropy with unworldly piety.
[Gov. Maura] Healey was invited to give the keynote address on the opening day of [a recent Vatican] conference, a perhaps surprising choice by the Holy See given that she is secular, openly gay and staunchly pro-choice despite identifying as Catholic.
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UD thanks Joanna.