The parents argued that the restrictions limit their freedom to educate their children according to their beliefs and asked the court to fine the government $6,780 per child for every day that the limitations are in place …
The haredim of Belgium don’t just want to keep their children ignorant; they want to get rich off of suing the Belgian government for the state’s efforts to educate their children.
It’s a novel, ballsy approach. For every subtraction problem my child comprehends, $6,780 from the government in penalties! Did she learn that the earth revolves around the sun today? That’ll be six thousand seven hundred and eighty big ones.
We’ll see how the Antwerp district court rules on the injunction. Maybe it’ll up their asking price. Each day a haredi child learns something, ten thousand from the government.
… here, on the burqa in England. UD predicts that England will, in a few years, enact legislation – similar to France’s and to a growing number of other European countries – against the burqa.
From a progressive British blog. We will see more and more European regions vote overwhelmingly against the burqa.
Backed by Arabian petrodollars, the Salafi movement has gained significant influence in [British] mosques, schools, Muslim organisations and communities. This has led to increased pressure on girls and women to cede to regressive patriarchy – from vigilante ”Muslim Patrols” enforcing dress codes on the streets of London, to gender segregated events at our universities, and a school in Tower Hamlets forcing girls young as 11 year old to wear the face veil.
This blog has followed gender segregation at British universities and will continue to do so as long as cowardice on the part of administrators allows it to continue. This blog will not follow the ongoing story of eleven-year-olds put into burqas because it simply hasn’t got the heart. I’ve got my own forms of cowardice, and one of them involves the inability to pay sustained attention to particularly gruesome instances of child abuse.
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UD thanks her sister for the link to the article.
… supports a burqa ban. This time it’s the Swiss, in the canton of Ticino.
Opposition to the burqa has been massive over several European countries. Defenders of this full-body shroud specifically designed for little girls and women are in the embarrassing position of having to declare huge swathes of the population of Europe bigots.
Indeed confusion at the ways of democracy reigns among burqa defenders. One defender is baffled by what she calls an “unlikely alliance of rightwing politicians and feminists.”
It’s unlikelier than that. Not just feminists and rightwing politicians but anti-feminists and leftwing politicians seem united in their rejection of outrageous gender oppression in their midst.
… Peter Berkowitz messes everything up by writing this:
[G]reater participation of the ultra-Orthodox in the economic life and defense of the country can contribute to the emancipation of enlightened Israelis from their reflexive contempt for a community whose passionate religious observance provides a counterweight to those dangerous tendencies — aimless drift, restless materialism, and indiscriminate leveling — to which free and democratic societies are prone.
Fraid not. Fanaticism is not a counterweight; it is a deadweight. Hatred of the state, hatred of free thought, hatred of empiricism, hatred of anyone on your neighborhood streets who doesn’t dress like a member of your sect, ridicule of the Holocaust, and of course thoroughgoing disgusting denigration of women – these are not sacred commitments saving Israel from becoming profane. They are direct threats to equality, communal life, enlightenment, tolerance and – ask the schoolgirl spat on and called a whore by a group of haredim because she wore modern orthodox dress – to simple humanity. There is nothing reflexive about contempt for people who are truly cruel, and whose commitment to the most toxic anti-democratic values is damaging Israel terribly.
… y’all.
I guess they get “green” points too – being driven a few blocks in a stretch Hummer.
… that the British legal establishment supports a judge’s insistence that a woman accused of a crime remove her burqa in the courtroom.
Michael Turner QC, chairman of the criminal bar association, insists Judge Murphy made the correct decision. He told Radio 4: “The public are entitled to see an individual who is entering their plea.
“If you carry it forward to the trial process and a person in a full burka intends to give evidence, is it right that the jury cannot see the person giving evidence?
“Our whole courtroom is set up so that a jury can see a witness give evidence and the reaction of that witness is very important in terms of the jury’s thinking.”
A similar principle applies in the university classroom. Professors who cannot see their students cannot teach them very well, since they have lost one important way of knowing whether students are understanding them. We rely on facial expressions – among other clues – to tell us how we’re doing.
… has decided to follow events in the Israeli city of Beit Shemesh closely. After an August 4 cover story about the religious bullies there, TNR has already written an update.
Contemporary Beit Shemesh is, for UD‘s money, one of the flashiest of flash points in ye olde can liberal democracy survive? tale.
Recall Judith Shklar arguing that cruelty is the worst illiberal vice because it creates fear in everyone around it.
[By] designating cruelty as the chief vice, the summum malum, that liberalism must avoid, Shklar was calling attention to the accompanying sentiments of fear, degradation, and humiliation that would ultimately make a liberal polity impossible.
The women of Beit Shemesh move fearfully in the public sphere because of the degrading, humiliating cruelty of the fanatic haredim among them. These women live in an authoritarian, not democratic, city, because violently cruel haredim there hate democracy and commit themselves to acts of destruction against it every day.
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The New Republic writers note one hopeful development:
A piece by Sam Sokol in the Jerusalem Post suggested that the moderate wing of the Beit Shemesh Haredi community [has come to see] the [most recent haredi] rioting as a kind of tipping point, begging their more Orthodox neighbors to disavow violence once and for all. According to Sokol, in the wake of last week’s violence, “posters stating ‘Enough Bullying’ were plastered on street corners of the haredi neighborhood of Ramat Beit Shemesh by activists of the Tov Party, which, going into municipal elections, claims to represent what are being called ‘new haredim.’”
Evidently the posters decried the silence of Haredi leadership after incidents of anti-women violence in the town. The new posters announced that the extremists had “controlled the public thoroughfares and we were quiet. They insulted and embarrassed people in buses and we were quiet…. They brought a bad name to our town and desecrated God’s name, and we were quiet…. The time has come to stop the bullying and show responsibility for our city [and] to show responsibility for our community.”
Really all we can hope for when cruelty becomes systematic enough to kill democracy is that the intense disgust which the behavior generates in most people will, as it apparently has for some among the haredi population of Beit Shemesh, catalyze action.
… But perhaps the highest-profile example of the renewed fighting feminist spirit in Israel has been the stunning success this year of Women of the Wall (WOW), currently led by Anat Hoffman… The group has been conducting women’s prayer services on the first day of the Jewish month at the Western Wall for 25 years, arousing the fury of the ultra-Orthodox authorities tasked with overseeing the holy site. WOW draws worshippers from all strands of religious practice; some members dress in traditionally male ritual garments — such as a yarmulke, tallis, and phylacteries — and also sing aloud. These practices run counter to ultra-Orthodox tradition, and more than one woman has been arrested because the law supported the Haredi view that the Western Wall is in effect an ultra-Orthodox synagogue, and the failure of worshippers to respect “local custom” at the site was a criminal act.
[T]his spring, WOW scored substantial political and legal victories. The Jerusalem district court ruled in the women’s favor. And Israel’s attorney general decided in May not to appeal that ruling. As a result, for the first time, at WOW’s monthly prayer meeting in May, police actively protected the women worshipping at the wall and instead arrested Haredi protesters who threatened them. One of the real surprises of WOW’s new legitimacy is the support it has amassed from not just the previously indifferent secular public — three female Knesset members joined the group in prayer over the spring — but from an increasing number of modern-Orthodox women.
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UD, Women of the Wall rally
last March, in Washington DC.
Amel Grami, an intellectual historian at Manouba University, whose campus was besieged last year by Salafi activists opposed to women’s equality, says the Arab Spring has “triggered a male identity crisis” that has strengthened the ultraconservative positions taken by Islamist parties. In Tunisia, he has noted, fundamentalists have called for girls as young as 12 to don the hijab and niqab, veils used by observant women. An Ennahda lawmaker has called for “purification of the media and purification of intellectuals,” while another Ennahda deputy, a woman, has urged segregation of public transportation by gender. Some Islamists have spoken of legalizing female genital mutilation, a practice largely foreign to Tunisia.
So far. But as the humanities dean at Tunisia’s University of Manouba goes on to note, the Salafists remain a very serious threat. They’re after full veiling (note the photo that accompanies the linked article) and full segregation of female university students. The “University of Manouba [has become] a battleground between fundamentalist Muslims intent on turning Tunisia into an Islamic state and secular forces trying to maintain the country’s existing constitutional rights and legal system.” It’s an ugly fight, a protracted struggle for democracy against the forces of violent reaction.
A few months ago, enraged at the dean’s defense of democratic principles, a Salafist mob showed up at Manouba.
Carrying the black flag of the salafists and shouting “Allahu Akbar,” they demanded that the dean come forward for retribution.
Kazdaghli was watching from his office window when Khaoula Rachidi, a young woman majoring in French literature, climbed a wall and reached to tear down the salafist flag. She was tossed to the ground by a large, bearded man, but her bravery inspired her fellow students to swarm the parapet and run the Tunisian flag back up the pole.
“It was a woman who stirred them into action,” says Kazdaghli. “The men had been standing around, watching what was happening, but as soon as a woman threw herself into the fray, they woke up and remembered who they were.”
Kazdaghli on the niqab:
“Our métier demands communication,” he says. “Confidence is reciprocal. I have to know with whom I am speaking. Women can travel to the university and enter the gates wearing their niqabs, but in the classroom and during exams they have to show their faces.”
Even something as simple as taking attendance or confirming the identity of someone sitting for an exam requires exposure. When Kazdaghli’s office was sacked, he had no way of recognizing the two black-robed figures who were throwing his papers on the floor. Only when they yelled that they were the victims of unfair disciplinary procedures was he able to identify these two out of the university’s 27,000 students.
“I can’t have two kinds of students in class, those with whom I can communicate, and those with whom I can’t. This is an important principle, that people have equal access to knowledge.”
… from Garrett Park, Maryland.
For starters, it’s insanely humid, but we’re all slogging through it with patriotic smiles. As I write, neighbors are gathering at the end of my driveway. Topics of conversation:
1. Mac v. Non-Mac.
2. The need to start the public school day later around here (some kids have to get up at five AM).
Mr UD now starts reading the Declaration of Independence to us. The shortened version, without the list of complaints.
Ike Leggett’s blue-shirted army just marched by and got hell from one of my neighbors. On the issue just mentioned. (Leggett is Montgomery County Executive, and he’s running for reelection.)
Whoa. Here we go. Sound of sirens! Many labrador retrievers! Here comes the fire truck! Kensington Volunteers, Garrett Park being too petite (Melissa Mader, my neighbor, suggested “petite”) for its own fire department… Boy Scouts followed by Girl Scouts! Babies in colorful colors! MUSIC!!! MUSIC TRUCK. It’s green and has people with instruments on it. The people are playing patriotic marches. Bright yellow vroom vroom with little kid working it. Here’s the Mayor! I tell him I’m writing down everything he says and so he says nothing. Melissa crashes into him.
“Hold up your poster, I don’t understand,” pleads UD as a yellow balloon walks by.
“It’s about summer food. I am corn.”
(The theme of the parade is Summer Fun.)
More on enforced gender segregation at Israel’s Hebrew University. Haaretz notes the Catch-22 – if you want to educate and make employable this enormous, growing, anti-democratic minority, you need to assimilate them into twenty-first century universities. But their regressive ways, especially their bigotry toward women, make them refuse norms of equality. The editorial in Haaretz concludes:
Hebrew University, like other academic institutions, is a public space in which students from different groups study and, while doing so, meet one another. This crucial interaction is one of the hallmarks of a liberal society in which women and men are to be treated equally. The university’s leaders would do well not to sponsor – academically or otherwise – an institution whose principles contravene these basic tenets.
So you keep the bigots out; but then you sustain a system of separate schools where the anti-democratic norms of the minority continue to thrive, and the minority continues to be what many Israeli commentators describe as a major existential threat to the nation of Israel.
The only possible solution I can see involves places like Hebrew University going ahead and assimilating these groups but making it clear the university will not budge on its democratic principles. No sex segregation. Probably a few haredim will attend despite the democratic nature of the institution; and perhaps eventually, as more and more of them find ways to tolerate the presence and equal status of women in university settings, the problem will be to a significant extent solved.