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.

We’ve already noted on this blog that since Australian universities stand for nothing, they have no trouble allowing gender segregated events on their campuses. MEN IN FRONT; WOMEN IN THE BACK. AND KEEP YOUR MOUTHS SHUT.

Fine, fine. Different strokes for different folks, says the University of Melbourne vice-chancellor, quite on the defensive after everyone, including the opposition leader and the Minister for the Status of Women, expressed shock at his university’s nonchalant collusion with what are arguably the most reactionary forces in the world today. After all, the university explained, this was an “external organisation.” Not my business, man!

So the v-c’s backtracking a bit, now that everyone’s squawking, and he’s pointing out some niceties in the discrimination law — without noting that the discrimination in this case is coming from that external organization about which his university cares not a whit. Without noting that universities not only have a right – they have a duty – to stand for the principles of democracy, and to bar (which, the v-c hastens to add, Melbourne will in fact start doing from now on) organizations founded on discrimination.

But tut-tut, says the v-c. All religious organizations deserve respect and consideration.

It’s anti-democratic, that is, to be intolerant of any group that calls itself religious, no matter what that group believes and does. And certainly no university has the right to “impose” what the v-c calls its “preferences” on anybody.

That’s why UD said in her last post about this that if you’re fed up with British universities and their intolerant respect for democratic principles, go to Australia.

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

Jennifer Oriel gets it said.

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

A professor at Melbourne who specializes in Islam sets the vice-chancellor straight.

[I]n the most sacred place on earth, the sacred mosque in Mecca, there is no separate section for men or women. Millions of Muslims visit the mosque and pray each year without the need to separate men from women.

…

Gender equality and associated values are fundamental to Australian society and those values must be respected by all, including those few Muslims who may not necessarily agree with them.

I find it very troubling that there are some who feel that they have a right to send women, whether Muslims or not, to the back of a lecture theatre as though this was the most natural place for women in such a setting.

For the men who organise public events to require women participants to go to the back of the facility is a breach of trust and a misuse of the facilities of the university.

It is also demeaning to women. I’m sure most Australian Muslims would also be deeply offended by such practices and would indeed question the connection between the practice and their understanding of Islam.

Yes, it’s grotesque that this man must clarify basic human rights and the proper use of his university to the vice-chancellor. But I’m afraid that’s where we are now. At least in Australia.

Brits are protesting gender segregated events at their universities. In response, universities which have in the past allowed it to happen are beginning to ban the groups that do it.

If efforts to maintain equality at British universities are annoying to you, be aware that Australian universities are much friendlier to the stash-the-girls-in-the-back boys.

At an April 13 lecture on Islamic Jihad in Syria, signs directed “sisters” to the back of the theatre, and “brothers” to the front.

Gender segregation was also encouraged at an information session for prospective Australian Islamic Peace Conference volunteers held by the Islamic Research and Educational Academy at the university’s Public Lecture Theatre on March 10.

The university said the events were held by external organisations and it would not intervene to prevent the practice.

Yes, in Australia, universities don’t stand for anything, so you can bring your organization and do anything you want on that nation’s campuses. As long as you’re “external.”

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

Someone managed to dig up some old gender studies professor to squawk about this.

University of Melbourne gender politics professor Sheila Jeffreys said she was shocked to learn that this “form of subordinating women” was taking place on an Australian university campus.

“There needs to be great outrage about this,” Professor Jeffreys said. “It is a Rosa Parks moment . . . Making women sit at the back in lecture theatres is sexual apartheid. This is a new practice in Australia, whereas apartheid against black Americans was an old practice. But it should be challenged strongly so that it goes no further.

“Religious ideas that so blatantly make women into second-class citizens are not worthy of respect. They should not be allowed to undermine people’s justified rejection of discrimination against women.”

Who in the hell allowed that woman to speak?

… notes Huma Yusuf in the New York Times, and indeed this blog has followed with amazement the mandatory gender segregation at a number of university-sponsored events in British universities.

In February, during the annual Pakistan Future Leaders’ Conference at Oxford, which brought together student delegates from more than 40 colleges, a Pakistani friend who is on a fellowship at the university joined a panel discussion on Pakistani politics. During the debate, he was taken aback to hear some participants champion the role of religion in state affairs and call for the revival of an Islamic caliphate. “The only revolution that can work is one brought through Shariah law,” one participant said. Another speaker dismissed the Pakistani Constitution as “human law” that is irrelevant in the face of “divine law.”

It took my friend some time, and several conversations with pro-democracy students who recognized them, to understand that his fellow speakers were [radical Islamic] Hizb-ut-Tahrir activists. “Their interventions were meticulously planned and very disconcerting,” he told me. “It’s clear that they’re very committed to their cause.”

British universities are being remarkably indolent about dealing with the problem. Or maybe they don’t think it’s a problem.

… sexual apartheid.

Fazil Say’s the name today, the name Christopher Hitchens, if he were alive, would be invoking. A brilliant pianist who performs around the world, Say’s regular run-ins with Turkey’s increasingly ideologically rigid government have now produced a suspended ten-year sentence. Crime? Writing critically about Islam.

“We are sad for the country,” says his lawyer. Say has shut down his Twitter account. Turkey’s efforts to suppress free speech are working.

… are helping themselves to British universities. As always, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

… is the price of freedom.

People were thrilled when University College London banned a group of bigots from the university. UD wasn’t thrilled. See above. Efforts are ongoing to make Britain’s universities safe for sex segregation and hate speech. There will be successes along with near misses and failures. This is a campaign; and there’s no reason to believe UK schools are going to be able to handle it.

Sanctimony is under threat around the globe. With Israel’s ultra-orthodox kicked out of the government, to take one current instance, Israel’s non-ultra-orthodox population suddenly has nowhere to go for its spankings.

In other places, matters are even worse: People are getting belligerently anti-sanctimonious.

A woman attending the now-notorious Islamic Awareness event at University College London (go here for details) stood up at the end to lecture guest speaker Lawrence Krauss on the glories of sex segregation (it had just been imposed in that very lecture hall).

Professor Krauss shot back that women so viscerally offended by unthreatening male company in a public space would do well to stay home and spare others their sanctimonious conservatism.

Is sanctimony being forced into the closet?

From whence cometh our shaming if our shamers are silenced?

University Diaries introduces a new series – Sanctimony Watch – which will keep an eye on growing threats to sanctimony around the world.

UD and Tammy were carrying too many things – purses, prayer shawls, coats – so when it came time to hold the program for the event, we leaned some of this stuff up against the Chinese Embassy’s fence.

A few minutes later, a nice man approached and explained that the fence was China, and China would prefer we not use its territory that way.

The rally’s location was politically sensitive – embassies everywhere. Sensitive embassies. Our group wasn’t very large (a hundred plus people), but we attracted scads of anxious men whispering into phones.

The Israeli embassy people were extremely friendly. “We wanted to invite you all into the embassy,” explained one of several embassy people who came to talk to us. “But we would have needed a list of names in advance for security.”

A deputy assistant whatever addressed our group. “We respect you. We respect what you are doing. We get your message loud and clear, and it is a message we will send back to Jerusalem.”

The message – in case you haven’t been following these posts – is that women should have equal rights to pray at the Western Wall.

UD ain’t much of a Jew, but when this kind and friendly group of Jews began to sing a psalm together, she was crying somewhat.

Would she have teared up if they’d been kind and friendly Anglicans singing As Pants the Hart?

Er, yes.

Anyway. It was a chilly overcast early Washington evening, and UD and Tammy put on their prayer shawls, and raised their prayer shawls, and listened to the speakers, and thought about that strange place, Israel. When, toward the end of the event, the speaker announced it was time for davening, they figured that was their signal to leave. They crossed Connecticut Avenue and had sushi and talked about God.