“It’s an expression of ethnic pride and multiculturalism.”

Professor Samuel Heilman on the haredi practice of making women sit in the back of the bus.

A recent Columbia University graduate, Chavkin has uncovered a little bit of Israel right here in the USA.

Israeli women are already fortunate enough to be kept off the main streets, in the backs of buses, out of the newspapers, and in very special orthodox cases even under burqas!

In America, we are only beginning to see these blessings extended to our women – as with the erasure of Hillary Clinton’s face from a group photograph in a New York newspaper. But Chavkin uncovered the fact that we’ve also got a bus — a public service, subject to all applicable laws — that’s just like the Israeli buses! Women to the back, and if you don’t go, get ready to be spat on and called a whore!

It has already affected it. Some people, says Rachel Azaria, consider Jerusalem already “a lost city,” ruled by segregationist ultra-orthodox. They’ve succeeded in creating sex-segregated streets for an upcoming holiday; and of course many public buses make women sit in the back, just like Rosa Parks.

To tell women that they have to sit at the back of the bus, or that they have to stand in certain lines in the supermarket, or that the supermarket will be closed to women during certain hours goes against our beliefs … we will not stand for it.

All of this segregation, mind you, is illegal. Go to the Israeli courts, and they’ll obligingly rule again and again that you can’t do any of this in a democracy. But it doesn’t matter, because the haredim ignore the laws, and the police don’t enforce them.

Israel even has a national curriculum, because you don’t want a large, unemployable population. Opting out isn’t a legal option.

Only it is. The haredim opt out.

The larger picture here.

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An update; and an excellent idea:

Perhaps Haredi goggles should be developed. With picture recognition software these goggles would identify human females in the field of vision and replace them with convex pink patches (color could be selected by the user). Think about night vision goggles that show infrared as “false color”. This would allow pious men to walk anywhere, read illustrated newspapers (without female images cut out) without being disturbed, and without disturbing females. I would assume that in cases when women can fail to be recognized by the software they should look sufficiently un-exciting. With a “cautious” setting, all human figures with bare elbows and bare heads could be covered. With “most cautious” setting, the only visible humans would be properly dressed Haredi males.

… gets a fellowship to go to France and changes her mind about the burqa:

[A]ny feminist must realize the wearing of the burqa and niqab is something only women do. It may be grounded in centuries of tradition, but it’s blatantly sexist.

Muslim guys prance around Paris in super-tight jeans and slinky shirts. Why support something that only limits activities of women? That’s hard to support. Plenty of Muslims don’t.

… in which UD has played a small part, here’s Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, on recent events:

I know many folks get a thrill from watching Righthaven implode, but I must confess that I feel no schadenfreude. Yes, it’s fun (in a bloodsport way) to watch judicial benchslaps. Yes, of course, Righthaven has been a plague on our community, so having them driven out would be welcome relief. Yes, they have contributed to a nice body of defense-favorable precedent. Yet, using the powerful tools of our judicial system, Righthaven has imposed significant financial and emotional costs on hundreds of victims. I feel sad for the victims who have had to fight back for their rights at the peril of losing their homes, and I feel sad that we as a society have accepted a litigation system that allows a scheme like Righthaven to harm for ordinary well-meaning citizens trying to do the right thing. A judicial crushing of Righthaven is inadequate restitution for these victims, so I remain sad about the overall situation.

… in the New York Times. Across the page from Brooks, Paul Krugman takes up the same theme: Without a willingness to behave in a few non-self-serving ways, citizens of capitalist economies are going to bring their affluent democratic cultures crashing down around them. Krugman notes that between 1979 and 2005

the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. … In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million.

The claim that “the rich have a right to keep their money… misses the point that all of us live in and benefit from being part of a larger society. … [The wealthy presumably] have as much of a stake as everyone else in the nation’s future…”

(Krugman alludes to this Elizabeth Warren video.)

As to whether the wealthy feel as though they’ve got much stake in the nation’s future… Well, read Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites… or The End of Equality by Mickey Kaus. It’s definitely not a slam dunk. Here’s Lasch:

To an alarming extent the privileged classes – by an expansive definition, the top 20 percent – have made themselves independent not only of crumbling industrial cities but of public services in general. They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies by enrolling in company-supported plans, and hire private security guards…. In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life. It is not just that they see no point in paying for public services they no longer use. Many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America’s destiny for better or worse. Their ties to an international culture of work and leisure – of business entertainment, information, and ‘information retrieval’ – make many of them deeply indifferent to the prospect of American national decline.

Three women respond to a benighted article in the Guardian about the burqa.

When we sat down in the front we were instantly approached by a young man who refused to look at me and my female companion but told us very forcefully that we immediately had to move to the back of the bus. We told him calmly that what we were doing was entirely legal but he refused to hear and told us that we were shayetz, abominations. Luckily we had a male companion who had joined us who told him to quiet down.

… After trying to rip down the sticker on the bus stating it’s legal for anyone to sit where they want to, the man came back towards us and with rage told our male companion that it was ridiculous for him to defend two shiksas.

This is the latest dispatch from one of Israel’s freedom riders, women who sit in the front of public buses in that country.

The response from the ultra-orthodox man in this scene is typical. Eventually one of these women will be injured, or killed.

UD proposes that Israel turn this problem over to its medical establishment. The law works slowly. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to work at all. Sedation would be an effective, short-term, safety measure. These men are a danger to themselves as well as others.

Wired surveys the night of the living dead which is Righthaven, the company which has the distinction of having sued your blogger, UD.

… and they’ve got excellent noses for it. The new Kansas State University mascot – a catwoman who appears at football games and tells you to recycle – smells not merely of propaganda but of heavy-duty moral scolding. Just the sort of thing you want at a sports outing.

Subjected to mass ridicule, EcoKat has been quietly put down by her university handlers. Long live freedom.

… in the country’s recent banning of the burqa, says Time magazine.

Not strange at all. Same thing has happened in other European countries who’ve banned it, and will, UD predicts, continue to happen. Wherever you are on the political spectrum, you’re likely to recognize the lack of basic human rights when you see it.

Yes, it’s come to this in Israel. Women from Hebrew University now ride buses through religious neighborhoods specifically to test whether a recent court decision that – get ready for it – women don’t, like blacks in America before Rosa Parks, have to sit at the back of the bus is actually being honored.

Internships are available for American college students:

Amy Milin, a recent Florida Atlantic University graduate, rode 60 buses during her three-month internship… “There were times a group of people crowded around me and said I don’t belong here and I’m ruining their religion,” she said.

These women are on the front lines of gender justice. That these battles have to be fought in Israel is a shondah.

Last summer, at just this time, my freedom to blog ended.

I lay next to my husband in bed one afternoon and said to him:

I’m going to stop. I’m going to shut the whole thing down and not write another word. This firm that has sued me – Righthaven – they could sue me again, for something else I’ve excerpted from a newspaper. Any other firm with the Righthaven business model could also sue me. Righthaven is seeking damages of hundreds of thousands of dollars from us. They’re going to take my domain name. All because I excerpted part of a newspaper article. I named and linked back to the source of that excerpt, the way millions of bloggers do every day. I got no commercial benefit from it, because my blog has no advertising. But a man just came to our door and served me with legal papers that say that if I lose this copyright infringement case they’ve filed against me we will be ruined. I don’t have any choice. I have to shut down University Diaries.

My husband looked at me and said

No you don’t. No you won’t. Do some research. Find out about Righthaven. What they’re doing sounds completely nuts. We’re talking about a total – and seemingly unfounded – threat to your freedom to express yourself. Calm down. Keep a cool head. Call a lawyer who knows something about this.

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Now that the Righthaven enterprise is collapsing – now that they’re losing all of their cases (I turned out to be one of hundreds of American bloggers carpet-bombed by Righthaven), now that their legal staff is abandoning them (The Righthaven lawyer who sued me has expressed regrets about having worked for Righthaven. If I were facing the possibility of lawsuits and sanctions because of my association with Righthaven, I’d say the same thing. Yet in our phone chats, this person was thrilled with his job. Quite the eager beaver.), now that numerous judges have said that Righthaven never had standing to sue in the first place, I can look back on this experience and see that it was a lesson, a hard lesson, for UD, in American freedom, and in the rule of law that sustains American freedom.

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It was also a lesson in trust. Having decided to settle with Righthaven rather than pay who knows how much and suffer how much protracted misery to defend myself, I could have become cynical about a legal system that can prey on people like me and chill their speech.

Instead, I’ve watched one judge after another express rage against Righthaven for what it’s done. I’ve watched public interest outfits like the Electronic Frontier Foundation take on pro bono cases for Righthaven targets and win them big. I’ve watched legal and free speech groups all over the country respond aggressively and successfully to this threat.

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Back to last summer. I talked to a lawyer – a wonderful man who told me exactly how to get Righthaven out of my life right away, which is all I wanted.

Throw money at them. They only want money. They have zero interest in going to court. Tell them you’ll give them this much (He named an amount.) and they’ll take it. Or they’ll ask for a little more…. But are you sure you don’t want to litigate? We’re eager to defend you. We’re eager to shut Righthaven down. You will without question win the case.

What would it entail?

Well, first we’d have to depose you… How much experience have you had of the law?

Okay. Send them an email. Remember to say (He told me exactly how to word it.). And if you have any questions or concerns at all as this moves forward, I want you to call me.

What do I owe you?

Nothing.

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A day later I’m at a doctor’s appointment and my cell phone rings and it’s eager beaver. We begin negotiating. I say to my doctor

I know how obnoxious it is for someone to interrupt what’s going on and talk on their cell phone. I’d never think of doing this ordinarily; but I’ve simply got to get through this conversation now.

He nodded and said he’d be back in a few minutes.

And that was it. The rest was signing and faxing and scanning, end of story.

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Of course they’d frightened me right down to the ground. Of course I was very angry. But I had the money to make Righthaven go away very fast. Many of its other targets don’t, and it’s been painful to follow their stories.

Like me, most of these people write non-commercial blogs with an interest in – as UD‘s tagline goes – changing things in American political and social life. Many are retirees, veterans, disabled people. For months now, their lives have been nightmarish, filled with fear that they will lose everything they own because they quoted a few lines from a newspaper story.

That’s pretty much over now. Although things are still ugly, and Righthaven, cornered, continues to snarl, it’s gradually being put down. Beset by people fighting back and draining the firm’s resources, and, again, currently facing sanction, Righthaven seems to have stopped filing new cases. Already filed cases are being dismissed en masse.

Yet a lot of damage has been done, and that’s damage that you don’t ever really undo, even if you compensate people.

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The upside (UD, a ridiculously obstinate optimist, always looks on the bright side) of this experience, viewed now from the distance of a year and from the knowledge of Righthaven’s likely collapse, is pretty obvious. This Fourth of July, none of it is abstract. None of it is patriotic bromides. I’ve had my run-in with unfreedom, and I’ve watched the institutions of my country take firm action against unfreedom.

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UPDATE.

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Another update.

… about whether we’re becoming decadent and late imperial and all.

What makes political decadence possible is the luxury of a secure international position, which makes it possible both to meddle in various global problems where our vital national interests are not really at stake (Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, etc.) and permits Americans to think that it’s perfectly ok to put climate change deniers, religious fanatics, former body-builders turned actors, and other unqualified individuals in high office.

That sort of thing.

[T]he Weiner episode mark[s] the culmination of several months during which other sideshows involving outrageous male behavior — John Ensign and John Edwards come to mind — dominated news coverage at a moment when our country’s future really is on the line.

That sort of thing.

UD would only ask y’all to calm down and think this through.

We not long ago elected an eminently serious, eminently qualified president, for instance.

And vice-president.

We pay our taxes. Etc.

You want decadent, look at Italy, where they elect Berlusconi and don’t pay their taxes. In a recent New Yorker post about Strauss-Kahn, Adam Gopnik reported that

[F]or lovers of France and French life, there is something deeply depressing … [in] what many in Paris see as the “Italianization” of French life—the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor…

The very fact that we react strongly to trivialization and irresponsibility in our country’s politics suggests that we know what it means to be politically respectable. Did you see what President Obama did to Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner?

Let France glance over at Italy and worry. It has plenty to worry about. We have much less.

… the European Court of Human Rights has winner written all over it.

The application states the principal applicant is the husband who “expects and instructs” his wife to wear the burqa, a full-body covering that includes a mesh over the face, as well as the niqab, a face veil that only leaves an opening for the eyes.

But he will be at risk of prosecution under French law if he crosses the Channel because he will admit that “he expects and instructs his wife to wear the niqab/burqa”.

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UPDATE:

When I see a woman in a burqa, my feelings are of revulsion. Not of the women themselves, of course, but of the culture and the men who require this of them. Not only do I want to set them free, I want to protect my own daughter from the sight of what appears to me as forced subservience.

Boston College law professor Kent Greenfield describes exactly what happened to UD ten years ago, in Virginia’s Pentagon City Mall, as she walked with her ten-year-old daughter. At the sight of three women in burqas, UD immediately, instinctively, put her hands over her daughter’s eyes.

Greenfield concludes:

It’s time to have an American conversation about the burqa. It will not be the same as a European conversation; it will take into account distinctive American ideals, some of which — like liberty and equality — inevitably conflict. We should not presuppose that the conversation will be simple or have only one possible outcome.

Yes.