And We Support Israel Because ?
The BBC reports that Shimon Peres urges Israelis to rally against extremism
Israel’s president has urged Israelis to rally against ultra-Orthodox Jewish extremism in what he called a fight for the “soul of the nation”.
Shimon Peres was speaking as hundreds gathered in the town of Beit Shemesh to protest against the way some ultra-Orthodox Jews treat women.
There have been two days of clashes in the town after a girl said she had been harassed on her way to school.
Some ultra-Orthodox in Beit Shemesh are seeking to segregate men and women.
In another article the BBC highlights some of the thinking of the ultra-Orthodox: King’s Torah splits Israel’s religious and secular Jews
Rabbis Dov Lior and Yacob Yousef had endorsed a highly controversial book, the King’s Torah – written by two lesser-known settler rabbis. It attempts to justify killing non-Jews, including those not involved in violence, under certain circumstances.
The fifth chapter, entitled “Murder of non-Jews in a time of war” has been widely quoted in the Israeli media. The summary states that “you can kill those who are not supporting or encouraging murder in order to save the lives of Jews”.
At one point it suggests that babies can justifiably be killed if it is clear they will grow up to pose a threat.
The ultra-Orthodox don’t work, don’t have to serve in the Israeli military, or contribute to society in any meaningful way. Their views of women are every bit as extreme as the Taliban, and they will take to the street and attack people with stones and spit on them. They also oppose Zionism and don’t recognize the current state of Israel as legitimate. Their political party is part of the current ruling coalition.
Do not expect to read about any of this in the American media – it isn’t going to happen, even though the current demonstrations in Beit Shemesh started after a young American school girl was spit at and cursed as she walked to elementary school.
Update: I was surprised and pleased to see I was wrong about the US media, as they have picked up the story about Beit Shemesh at McClatchy, CNN, and CBS. About time.
10 comments
I find the attitudes of these misogynistic dinosaurs as repulsive as those of the misogynistic dinosaurs in the countries that surround Israel.
Na’ama Margolese as well as Tanya Rosenblit, a woman abused on a bus by one of the Haredi (her crime being not moving to the back of a bus) are now the “poster girls” of of the secular majority.
Jams, Na’ana Margolese is being raised in the Orthodox Jewish tradition, as are all of the girls in her school, which is why it is a girls’ school. That they are attacking her and the school show how far around the bend these whackoes have traveled. The ‘ultra-Orthodox’ are not ‘out of the mainstream’, they are part of the same fetid swamp as Salafi Muslims and many of the US Evangelical Christianists.
A number of Evangelical tour groups have been attacked while visiting Jerusalem by the Haredi gangs, but it doesn’t get reported in the US, and the Israeli police don’t arrest those who are throwing the rocks.
They have a right to believe whatever they want, but they don’t have the right to force others to act in accordance with those beliefs by the use of violence. It is past time to cut them off the welfare rolls and let them pay for their own upkeep and large families.
As I said on Steve’s blog, I’m sure they would all get on like a house on fire, the ultra-evangelicals, the extreme Haredi and the salafists…Hey you would have an Axis of Misogyny!
As far as I am concerned they are called fundamentalists for a good reason (if one takes fundamentalist to be a portmanteau of fundament and mental) – lunatic arseholes!
jams, I must have missed your comment. I do indeed have a post up about Tanya Rosenblit, comparing the extremists of all three Abrahamic religions in their treatment of women, but I don’t see any comments on it yet. I wonder what happened to yours.
Or the ‘Asses of Evil’, Jams.
Missing comments is a feature of the comment system, Steve. It does it to me on occasion. Not very often here, but on other WordPress.com blogs.
You know, the Fundies are the best argument I can think of for not aspiring to ‘Heaven’. Spending eternity with these jerks is not something I can feel motivated to want. I have to conclude that it would really be ‘Hell’, but they wouldn’t get the ‘joke’.
I may have to start carrying a potato with me [a Pratchett reference to those who wonder.]
Ah Bryan but you also have to be very sorry… and then you will be geting to munch on some -king good wood!
Mark Twain had similar choice comments about Heaven. They’re not all in one place in his work, but they’re worth finding… they make it into more than a few anthologies of his work. One of my favorites is his questioning the wisdom of having all the angels sing and play harps, when not one person in a hundred on Earth has a decent singing voice or can handle a musical instrument properly. Twain said it much more entertainingly, of course.
I can fake that, Jams 😉
It is kind of frightening, Steve, an eternity of trying to tune harps, and listening to bad choirs.
I can tune a harp. Give me one reference tone and I can tune the whole thing by ear, I’ve even tuned a piano by ear before which is somewhat harder. I can switch between drop-d and regular tuning on my guitar by ear without resort to a tuner or even fretting, when I do check it’s dead on. But I know from my own relatives who are bluegrass professionals that this is a fairly rare skill, on those occasions they tune by ear without recourse to reference strings, tones, or tuners, the results are usually ear-scraping for me since I can hear that they’re out of tune (my other relatives, being tone-deaf, don’t notice). The results if they were tuning several dozen strings rather than four, five, or six strings (hey, gotta include the banjo players in there 😉 ) would be… awe-inspiring, in a sickening sort of way :twisted:.
Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company. Mark Twain had that one right, that’s for sure ;).
BTW, you are officially now anti-Semitic, Bryan. It doesn’t matter that you’re agreeing with Israel’s own President about the behavior of the ultra-orthodox in Israel. Any criticism of any Jew anywhere for any behavior, no matter how awful the behavior, makes you either a self-hating Jew or a Nazi. I know this is true because AIPAC tells me so :twisted:.
– Badtux the WTF Penguin
I really worry about what people call me, as long as it isn’t late for dinner or a Republican.
I know what regular Jews call the ultra-Orthodox among themselves, and it isn’t ‘brother’. I figure that if you want to be a jerk, find an island somewhere and leave the rest of us alone.
I can’t tune an instrument, but I know when one is out of tune. It’s not that I hear it, as much as my brain telling me something is ‘wrong’, i.e. I can’t tell whether it is too high or too low, but I know it isn’t right – it doesn’t fit the pattern.