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.
UD grew up being told that Israel was the only democracy in the middle east. With gender segregated buses and city streets and clinics, Israel looks less and less like a democracy to UD, equal rights of men and women being pretty basic to democracies. And now one of its major universities seems on the verge of mandating segregated courses of study:
[Hebrew University plans] to offer special B.A. programs to ultra-Orthodox students who want to study in gender segregated classrooms.
The plan hasn’t gone up for a vote onaccounta the faculty is a mite upset.
“When I hear of gender segregation on a bus or in the street, I am outraged as a citizen. I don’t want this kind of thing to take place in my academic home,” says Prof. Rehav Rubin of Hebrew University.
“It’s a shocking idea,” one lecturer wrote. “Neither gender segregation or sectorial instruction should be allowed within university walls.”
“Gender segregation at Hebrew University would lead to disaster,” a female lecturer wrote.
“The norms of gender segregation and female exclusion are expanding,” said deputy rector Prof. Orna Kupferman, who was in charge of integrating Haredim. “They are contrary to every principle the university stands for. We’re dealing with a separation that constitutes hierarchy and discrimination…Women are [seen as] inferior and that’s that.”
Yes, the norms of exclusion are expanding in Israel despite very strong efforts to contract them. When a great university begins to move toward this form of bigotry, you know Israel is losing the battle.
… always puts you in awkward positions.
In response to Fadela Amara’s recent talk at the University of Chicago (background here), a UC student (who didn’t attend) writes:
For the far-right, it is a matter of marginalizing an undesirable religious group, and for people of Amara’s ilk, it is a matter of imposing their views of freedom and liberty in a manner that undermines those very principles.
One always hears this. Despite the fact that in France, for instance, 82 percent of the electorate supported the burqa ban (the French Senate approved it 246 to 1), one is always informed that opposition to the burqa means one is a far-rightist.
The campus group that sponsored Amara’s talk responds:
[T]he burqa ban had widespread political support in France from both the left and right. It is simply incorrect to associate Amara with the French extreme right. A member of the Socialist Party for 23 years, Amara firmly considers herself a “femme de gauche.” A practicing Muslim, born of Algerian immigrant parents in a ghetto outside Clermont-Ferrand, France, Amara falls squarely in the category of those the National Front, the far-right French political party, would love to see deported.
… says what needs to be said about sex segregation and hate speech in British universities.
Boris Johnson, in The Daily Telegraph:
The universities need to be much, much tougher in their monitoring of Islamic societies. It is utterly wrong to have segregated meetings in a state-funded centre of learning. If visiting speakers start some Islamist schtick – and seek either to call for or justify violence – then the authorities need to summon the police.
… These Islamist evangelists have no allegiance to the western society they live in and whose benefits systems they abuse: far from it – their avowed intent is to create a sexist and homophobic Muslim caliphate.
This blog has watched with bafflement as one British university after another colludes with sex segregationists and people who call for the murder of homosexuals. She truly has no idea why these schools do that. Depraved indifference?
Perhaps Boris Johnson’s opinion piece will help them begin to think about the matter.
Fadela Amara, “[French] founder of the activist group Ni Putes Ni Soumises, translated as ‘Neither Whores nor Submissive,’ and later … the Secretary of State for Urban Policies,” spoke a couple of days ago about France’s anti-burqa law at the University of Chicago’s International House (UD lived in an apartment directly across the street from I House when she studied there).
Amara knows France’s fundamentalist ghettos well; she has watched them become cults of “forced marriage, polygamy, [female] circumcision, and violence against women.” Outlawing the full burqa (the law had seventy percent support among the French) has had some effect on
[t]he strategy of radical Islamists … to send in veiled women to force unveiled women to wear the burqa. And this is a real battle that has been going on for 15 years in France. And women who do not wear the veil, who were refusing to wear the veil, have been harassed and attacked, either verbally or physically — verbally by insulting them and calling them sluts, because for them these are not women who are respectable…. So we decided to stop all of this. And to act in a way to protect the women who were resisting in these neighborhoods.
Israel – where any woman who boards certain buses or walks on certain streets can be assured of being called a slut and spat on – could learn from the way France is dealing with its fundamentalist bullies.
Justice is done.
A Tunisian court has convicted two veiled students of destroying public property at the office of a university dean they accused of slapping one of them.
The court dropped the case against the dean of the faculty of humanities at Manouba University, ruling on Thursday that there was no proof of an assault.
Score one for the forces opposing liars, bullies and fanatics in that country.
Not that this means things have improved all that much. But it’s encouraging.
More statement of the obvious. One can only hope Melbourne University’s clueless vice-chancellor has been keeping up with the gender segregation controversy enough to have read this essay by Fiona Hill. Look sharp, man! Listen up.
[Hosting the sex-segregating group that Melbourne hosted] is analogous to permitting a right-wing Christian group to promote a Crusade to Syria to “rescue” it from non-Christians. Or permitting a radical Christian group to promote ethnic cleansing of Israel to make way for the Messiah.
Maybe before the vice-chancellor starts lecturing us about religious freedom he could check out some of the organizations his university hosts.