Yesterday, 1500 protesters denounced the Netanyahu government, carrying signs reading "Zionism is racism" and wearing yellow stars to emphasize comparison between the Israel and the Nazi state. “What’s happening is exactly like what happened in Germany,” said one man wearing a yellow star.
“It started with incitement and continued to different types of oppression. Is it insulting that we wear these stars? Absolutely, and it hurts people to see this, but this is how we feel at the moment, we feel we are being prevented from observing the Torah in the manner in which we wish.”
Wait,
what?
Yep -- the protesters aren't Arabs or latte-sipping Berkeley radicals, but ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem, angry about recent TV news coverage of
incidents in which haredim threw rocks at handicapped Modern Orthodox children in Beit Shemesh who were using their wheelchairs on Shabbat. The angry crowd was also protesting the jailing of Shmuel Weisfish, a member of the "Modesty Squad" who recently started a 2-year prison sentence for
beating and threatening employees of a computer store for selling MP4 players which might expose customers to inappropriate content. As always,
Failed Messiah is your (admittedly one-sided) source for bad behavior among the frum.
[more inside]
posted by escabeche
on Jan 1, 2012 -
75 comments
Rethinking the Idea of 'Christian Europe'. Kenan Malik's essay is awarded
3 Quarks Daily's Top Quark for politics & social science by judge
Stephen M. Walt: "Soldiers in today’s culture wars believe 'European civilization' rests on a set of unchanging principles that are perennially under siege—from godless communism, secular humanism, and most recently, radical Islam. For many of these zealots, what makes the 'West' unique are its Judeo-Christian roots. In this calm and elegantly-written reflection on the past two millenia, Malik shows that Christianity is only one of the many sources of 'Western' culture, and that many of the ideas we now think of as 'bedrock' values were in fact borrowed from other cultures. This essay is a potent antidote to those who believe a 'clash of civilizations' is inevitable—if not already underway—and the moral in Malik’s account could not be clearer. Openness to outside influences has been the true source of European prominence; erecting ramparts against others will impoverish and endanger us all."
posted by homunculus
on Dec 19, 2011 -
87 comments
"Question with boldness even the existence of a God... In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own... History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government." These heretical words, spoken by a government official now, would surely result in him being targeted for removal by the GOP in the next red-state "mandate." But they were written by Thomas Jefferson, one of the founders of the
increasingly pious,
"faith-based" United States of America. A
timely reminder from Robin Morgan in Ms. Magazine [via the sublime
wood s lot.]
posted by digaman
on Nov 24, 2004 -
48 comments
