[Yocheved] Horowitz views the campaign in Beit Shemesh by the extremist Sicarii, who made headlines last week after grown men spat at an 8-year-old girl whom they believed was not dressed modestly enough, as yet another misinterpretation of the Torah. “The Sicarii are insane …”
A haredi woman who sat in the front of a gender-segregated bus in Israel makes the distinction between religious and insane – a distinction without which no state can function.
France isn’t quite there yet, if we are to go by the comments of a judge who, on sentencing a man to six months in prison (the man called his wife’s midwife a rapist, damaged the delivery room in a rage, and then punched the midwife when she moved aside a bit of his wife’s burqa to make her more comfortable), said:
Your religious values are not superior to the laws of the republic.
Non, non, non. Sociopathic violence is not any kind of religious. It is insane.
… under the heading democracy (along with commentary about the burqa, you can, when you click on this category, read all of UD‘s posts about the subject at hand – violent fanatics, and their threat to Israeli democracy) has jumped to the mainstream American media.
All countries contain cults of demented and dangerous people. Some countries, with one thing and another, cultivate such cults. In the case of Israel, a vague sense of these people being authentic Jews is in play. (“Because Israel was conceived as a Jewish state, the Israeli citizen has been exceptionally compliant to the demands of groups claiming to champion the continuity of that people…”) Political expediency – coalition building – is also in play. In the Israeli population, fear is no doubt a factor. The lunatic haredi core is capable of enormous violence.
Whatever the toxic brew, Israel has ignored its fanatics to the point where it has created a threat to the nation. Now everyone is paying attention.
Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women’s rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.
Neil Clark, The Guardian.
Via Andrew Sullivan.
With a millionaire paying burqa fines in Europe, and a consortium of Israeli millionaires proposing to pay for private buses in which women will be forced to enter by a back door and to sit in the back, an intriguing new market in oppression seems to be opening up.
In the burqa model, governments stand to make huge sums; the Israeli model is pure free market capitalism.
Crucial to the success of both models is the enforcement of laws against the oppression of women, as well as a continued enthusiasm for crushing women.
The future looks bright.
…. writes Katha Pollitt in an essay today about Christopher Hitchens.
And yet I’ll take Hitchens’ seriousness about women’s persecution over Pollitt’s thoughtless nonchalance any day. In an essay attacking a number of European countries for banning the burqa, Pollitt writes “religion is what people make of it.”
Uh, no. As Hitchens points out, “Mormons may not have polygamous marriage, female circumcision is a federal crime in this country, and in some states Christian Scientists face prosecution if they neglect their children by denying them medical care.” Turns out there’s a state involved here too; religion (as the haredim of Israel are beginning to notice) is not only what you make of it, but what you and the state make of it.
Had Pollitt bothered to do the most basic kinds of reading and thinking, she’d perhaps have concluded something like this:
[W]e have no assurance that Muslim women put on the burqa or don the veil as a matter of their own choice. A huge amount of evidence goes the other way. Mothers, wives, and daughters have been threatened with acid in the face, or honor-killing, or vicious beating, if they do not adopt the humiliating outer clothing that is mandated by their menfolk. This is why, in many Muslim societies, such as Tunisia and Turkey, the shrouded look is illegal in government buildings, schools, and universities.
Israel: The madness metastasizes.
… in the Jerusalem Post.
Halachic terrorists harm three groups: They harm their victims, of course. They also do injury to the haredi community [from which they come], the vast majority of whom are law-abiding, God-fearing individuals with exemplary behavior. But they also harm the Jewish People and the Jewish state in general, projecting upon us an odious image of being intolerant, incorrigible and at war with one another.
Or as Efraim Halevy recently said, referring to out-of-control haredim: “Israel’s true existential danger comes from within.”
The main targets of these determined forces of reaction are women and girls – just as women and girls are the main targets of similar forces of reaction in places like Afghanistan. Women moving freely in the public world, thinking independently, pursuing an education – these provoke the most dangerous violence.
A letter writer in the Washington Post takes issue with a Ruth Marcus column about Israel’s haredim.
No woman in Israel is “forced to board public buses from the back and stay there,” as Ruth Marcus stated. There are several bus lines, servicing overwhelmingly Haredi communities, where there is a voluntary separation of the sexes — the wish of female passengers no less than of males. If a woman chooses to flout that convention, she is protected by law.
Flout. SOS likes that flout. Synonyms for flout, we’re told, include
mock – scoff – jeer – deride – gibe – scorn – taunt
It’s interesting that this writer considers acting in accordance with your country’s laws (which forbid gender segregation in public places) to be an expression of contempt.
Nor is the flouter at all protected by the law. No one will intervene when the men on the bus spit at her and the women call her a whore. The haredim on the bus don’t do laws; they do conventions which, if disobeyed, are being flouted and will get punished.
Just as Marcus says, Israel is becoming a land of cults, not laws. It’s pretty remarkable that there are people in this country willing to justify this trend.
The Talibanization of Israel proceeds. There are signs that the government might finally be ready to react against it.
Any significant measure will catalyze violent riots.
Habermas spells out precisely why he sees Europe as a project for civilization that must not be allowed to fail, and why the “global community” is not only feasible, but also necessary to reconcile democracy with capitalism. Otherwise, as he puts it, we run the risk of a kind of permanent state of emergency — otherwise the countries will simply be driven by the markets.
… [Why does Habermas take] the topic of Europe so personally[?]. It has to do with the evil Germany of yesteryear and the good Europe of tomorrow, with the transformation of past to future, with a continent that was once torn apart by guilt — and is now torn apart by debt.
… continues (background here), with Brinkley reporting that his Rice University students applauded when he returned to the classroom.
Young’s spokesperson failed to address his employer’s provocative behavior at the hearing, but assured everyone that the whole dustup had to do with “an attempt by an author to create a stir and sell books.”
UD thinks the real problem is that Young was not adequately briefed. People like Young think all professors are ivory tower haughties (Young actually used the phrase “ivory tower” in one of his spews against Brinkley) ripe for rolling by rough-hewn men of the people. Imagine Young’s surprise on discovering that some intellectuals can ratchet their rhetoric right down to the gutter if the occasion warrants. Not all intellectuals can do this; but it’s the job of Young’s staff to identify those who can.
… from the heart of one of the world’s most reactionary cultures.
Women are being ostracized and humiliated by a variety of means. I could mention intimate ritual laws that denigrate women (but prefer only to hint at them). Astonishingly, women put up with them, ignore the humiliation, and with indefatigable self-persuasion − and with tolerance and patience stemming from generations of suppression − wipe their mouths and give thanks for the drops of rain that moisten them.
———————————–
Details.
The scandal of the Israeli ultra-Orthodox.
What did he do? Whip it out?