Once this pandemic has run its course, Israel will begin finally to reckon – to its eternal shame – with its cynical cultivation of huge, fast-growing numbers of violent ignorant religious fanatics. It didn’t have to be this way.
Every day, I thank … my lucky stars? … that as an American Jew, I was born into an actually secular republic, where we can afford to promote religious nut cases to the highest levels of society and everyone will just laugh at them. We laugh at them because they don’t threaten us; because, as Jon Meacham and others point out in regard to the current global crisis, we really do live in Enlightenment Country here. There’s not much good ol’ UD is willing to say about our current president, but the fact that he doesn’t even pretend to give a shit about religion (UD loved watching him cringe as holy rollers put their hands all over him) does speak well for him. When the person running the coronavirus show – Anthony Fauci – tells us he’s left the Catholic church, people don’t head into the streets with pitchforks, run him through, and demand to be led only by a person of faith.
Israelis are immediately, materially, and microbially, threatened by their government-sponsored fanatics; and now, as anyone could have predicted, ultraorthodox neighborhoods are fighting among themselves – a situation of escalating anarchy for which, again, the Israeli state can take a bow.
Significant numbers of secular Israelis have been bailing on that country for some time; secular American and European Jews also have eyes in their heads. You can see, demographically, where this is going.
The situation with Israel’s corona-plagued haredim has sped so far beyond plain ironic that it’s gone supersonic ironic… After decades of hostile self-ghettoization against the modern Israeli state, that country’s scientifically ignorant and belligerently anti-social sects have infected themselves with a disease that threatens them and their non-haredi neighbors existentially. Understandably, the neighbors are constructing physical barriers against these foolish scofflaw communities whose noncompliance with safety measures has brought catastrophe.
[T]he municipality of Ramat Gan put up barricades along its border with the ultra-Orthodox Bnei Brak, which has recorded a sharp rise in COVID-19 infections in the last few days and was placed under a government lockdown.
So, respond the haredim: How dare you ghettoize us!
Just because the “silence [of haredi authorities] betrayed and imperiled their community,” that’s no reason enlightened and responsible Israelis have to climb on board a doomed ship of fools and sink with them. They don’t think their raison d’être is to submit to criminally stupid rabbis; they believe in the germ theory of disease and act accordingly. Their misfortune is to have set up shop alongside a wretched medieval outpost that their state, which should above all be about protecting its citizens, has chosen, over decades, to ignore or, worse, to encourage. Now there’s really no way out.
… is going to collide more and more dramatically with this administration. The people who run the country are getting desperate, while their scientific advisors – like Tony Fauci – stubbornly do the only thing they can do: hang tough on behalf of empirical method. Utterly random figures like trade advisers can throw all of the enthusiastic hydroxychloroquine newspaper articles they want at Fauci; Fauci will never do anything other than point out the way science works and hope this will get through to most of the people in the room.
“My heart is crushed, yet we shall try to summon the grace of God and what strength we have to honor the hope, energy and passion that Maeve and Gideon set forth into the world.”
… is its treatment of female terrorists. To read deeply, as UD does, in the literature of ISIS women is to conclude that qua gender we are incapable of understanding ideology, much less committing ourselves to ideologically motivated activity. We certainly can’t breed people excited by the sight of infidels getting beheaded. ISIS women are always innocents led astray by men exploiting their pathetic need for love; they are such damaged traumatized people that they will go with anyone who presents himself as caring even a little bit about them.
Even in obvious cases, like Canada’s hardened veteran Ayan Jama, experts are always being wheeled out to assure us that chicks itching to explode themselves and bystanders in an act of martyrdom are really drifty ethereal lost souls, gentle troubled Amanda Wingfields… We are intended to listen to their bullshit with interest and sympathy…
To be sure, certain forms of interpretive dance can also be expressions of martyrdom..
So, like, Canada wants her out, has refused to renew her passport, etc., and she’s complaining that not only has this meant the poor woman has “lost marriage proposals,” but she’s a fine upstanding etc etc and the bomb-making stuff government investigators found is just … I mean… who hasn’t experimented, especially during these tedious at-home coronavirus days, with building a bomb?
Kushner was a reportedly mediocre student whose billionaire father appears to have bought him a place at Harvard.
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The original headline on Michelle Goldberg’s piece wasJARED KUSHNER IS GOING TO GET US ALL KILLED. Now it’sPUTTING JARED KUSHNER IN CHARGE IS UTTER MADNESS. I guess the first one was a bit over the top.
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Seth Meyers:
Oh, you’re doing your own [ventilator need] projections? Did your parents just buy you a TI-84 [graphing calculator]? … You’re not qualified to do anything, let alone tell New York how many ventilators they need. You’re a nepotism case, and you only got the White House job because you married into the family, and because the security guards believed your fake ID.
That book totally, successfully, got through to me.
What does surprise me – and will never stop surprising me – are the hoarding/gouging operations, like Baruch Feldheim’s.New York Hospitals Rationing Ventilators, Retrofitting Equipment, headline the local papers, as the morgues overflow; and here’s a son of New York who can watch the horror every day from his front window and jack up prices 700% on illegally held life-saving gear. Just wow.
Trials of BCG, which UD‘s father championed in the 1970’s to treat early stage bladder cancer (‘BCG remains the gold standard treatment for patients with intermediate- and high-risk [non-muscle invasive bladder cancer.]’), are now ongoing in several countries.
[T]here’s a deeper issue which makes the Haredim particularly exposed [to coronavirus]. Their deep belief that they can’t be taught anything. There’s nothing new under the sun. That they were always here, learning Torah, and survived despite everything. So don’t tell them about COVID-19 and doctors. They have the best medicine, which science can never improve on. They call it Torah magna u’matlza – Torah protects and saves. But it’s not Torah, it’s the belief in continuity.
Continuity is the biggest ultra-Orthodox myth. Their belief that their way of life is the thousands year-old Jewish tradition, and that all Jews in all time aspired to, until foreign ideas muddled them, was to study Torah their entire lives. Of course, this is an invention.
The Haredi ideology of voluntarily closing their community off from the world is about 200 years old and came about as a reaction to enlightenment and emancipation. The practice of every man studying Torah all day, every day, only exists from the mid-1950s when the concentration of most ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel and the U.S. allowed them to live while learning, at poverty-level, but to live, in welfare societies.
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Israel’s largest hospital has now banned haredim from its emergency room.
“When I see a Haredi person, I immediately think he has coronavirus,” a senior health official [comments]. “This is the right thing to do, it is our obligation to do it this way.”
[At the last Town Council meeting, a proposal was introduced] to construct a tunnel from the bottom of the hill by Beach Drive to Stillwater Avenue in Garrett Park Estates. This would eliminate all through traffic from the existing Strathmore Avenue, thereby making it easier and safer for pedestrians to cross.
The mayor then turned the presentation over to town manager Andrea Fox, who had done some research for the mayor. The average tunnel costs in advanced countries range from $200 to $500 [million] per mile (although the Second Avenue subway line in Manhattan has been much higher at $1.5 billion). Under the TFSN program, the federal government will cover 90 percent. Thus, if the tunnel works out to $500 million, the government portion would be $450 million, and the Garrett Park portion $50 million. The town would have to impose a one-time tax (perhaps spread over several years to lower the annual burden) of approximately $170,000 per household.
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Join celebrated Garrett Park mixed media artist Horst Van Vliet at a reception and opening for his new Penn Place exhibition, Camp Jejune. Seizing the momentum of his devastating West Olney Arts Council show, Hammer and Popsicle, Van Vliet lashes out at the forces of banality in modern society with works of violent originality. “I wish to show with my art the staggering futility of our pathetic attempts to find meaning in the drudgery of human existence,” Val Vliet says. “Each of my paintings has a voice. Each of them cries out, ‘We are not people. We are plastic. It is we who belong in the recycling bin.'” Displayed works will include “Still Life with Glass Shards,” “Hair and Mud Collage No. 35″…
