By American standards this is a remarkable—and remarkably alien—news item from Ha’arets, the Israeli leftist, if excellent, daily. The reporting is unusual in its avoidance of biased epithets such as “racist, racism, bigotry,” etc. Just the facts, Ma’am.
Here’s the gist: Three of the nominally private, religious schools in the city of Petah Tikva refused to accept Ethiopian students “assigned to them by the municipality unless they [could] first determine if the children suit the schools’ character.”
Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar said Monday that students of Ethiopian origin could not be accepted into religious schools in Petah Tikva because of “halakhic reasons,” referring to proof of the immigrants’ Jewish status.
Sa’ar met with Amar on Sunday night and requested that he check the possibility that the Ethiopian students still not enrolled in schools be sent to secular state-funded institutions.
The laws of orthodox Judaism are exclusionary, and Ha’aretz makes that clear.
Against their propagandist, sanctimonious admonitions, Ha’artz manages to chronicle the events sans pejoratives. Imagine MSNBC living up to those journalistic standards, or “Pravda on the Hudson” (NYT) doing the same.
To condemn or not to condemn a “man [who is] behaving … just like the barbarous Prophet Mohammed, who married the six-year-old girl Aisha”—that is the question. An NIS News Bulletin, Via Jihad Watch, reports that the heroic Dutchman Geert Wilders—one of the few political leaders in the West to reject dhimmitude— “has compared the Islamic prophet Mohammed to a pig.” What prompted the fearless leader of the ascendant Party for Freedom (PVV) to pipe up recently?
Geert Wilders has seized on a news report from Saudi Arabia for peppery [sic] written questions to the cabinet. In these, he compares the Islamic prophet Mohammed to a pig.
Wilders has requested clarification from Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen on a marriage in Saudi Arabia between an 80-year-old man and a 10-year-old child. The child had run away from her elderly husband, but was brought back to him by her father, the English-language website Arab News reports based on a Saudi newspaper.
Wilders asks the minister if he shares the view that “this man is behaving like a pig, just like the barbarous Prophet Mohammed, who married the six year old girl Aisha.” The PVV leader wants Verhagen to summon the Saudi Arabian ambassador to express his repugnance.
[T]his puts those who will condemn Wilders in a peculiar position. If they take issue with his characterization of Muhammad, they will either be excusing the Muslim prophet’s marriage to a six-year-old and declining to condemn those Muslims who imitate their prophet by taking child brides, or, if they say that Muhammad didn’t actually marry a child, they’re in the position of denying evidence that is in the sources Muslims consider most reliable. Yet as this incident with the 80-year-old and his 10-year-old bride demonstrates ( “my marriage is not against Shariah,” said the codger), many Muslims take that evidence quite seriously.
Update I (August 31): JP writes: Jamie, you cannot try an Arab in his homeland based on Western Laws.
This is a point well taken and worth making. It is clear to me that unlike, say, an America leader, whose admonitions to the Arab world may carry the threat of an invasion, Wilders is merely being provocative. His intention and consistent modus operandi are to expose the West’s self-immolating left-liberalism. I believe the same is the case here. Where are the Hildebeest-type feminists on this?
My mention of Daniel Hannan, the new-found darling of American conservatives and libertarians, in this context, is only tangentially related. Nevertheless, I’ve been meaning to bring Hanna up. Here’s what he had to say about Wilders:
It’s true that Geert Wilders is a controversialist, who takes pleasure in causing offence. He needs 24-hour protection, so serious are the death-threats he has attracted from jihadis. He revels in offending liberals as well as Muslims: his call for the Koran to be banned struck me as rather inconsistent with his stated commitment to civic freedoms. I wouldn’t vote for him if I were Dutch.
My Netherlands-based family are proud supporters of the heroic Wilders, the only man to understand the stakes. Hannan here is very much in the sneering mode of Mark Steyn, who lauds the manner in which America has dealt with fractious immigrant populations, and distinguishes between the American and European melting pots. I don’t know if he is one, but neoconservatives of the deepest dye do not allow for the questioning of immigration policy with respect to the future of western liberal societies.
“When America’s news cartel woke up to one of 2005’s biggest stories—Muslims running riot across France—the response from many a neoconservative was to gloat.
The Schadenfreude was tinged with a sense of American superiority. It’s not happening here because we’re better. And why are we superior? To listen to their accounts, it’s because we’ve submerged or erased aspects of the American identity. …
Perhaps the threat to both homelands is overplayed. I sincerely hope so—for the French and for us. But even if France isn’t the proverbial canary in the coal mine, shouldn’t Americans be rooting for this once-magnificent European country?
Not according to some prominent neoconservatives, for whom the destruction of 8,400 vehicles, dozens of buildings, and at least one life by the Muslim community of France has served to focus attentions on… the ‘bigoted’ French.” …
Undeniably “exceptionally intelligent,” the man speaks a superb English, something that seduced me initially too. However, I soon discerned that even Hannan’s pronunciations about American liberties sundered under Obama were somewhat shallow, or strategically tailored to his role as a star among Republican TV hosts.
Yes, he knows well and repeats often the principles of dispersion and decentralization of power inherent in the American system. But, like so many neocons, he conveys the false idea that up until recently those principles had been respected. Hogwash. Obama is continuing on the path of his predecessor, and Bush built on the wrecking Clinton did. And before that… well you know the story.
Update II: Via Jamie. It would appear that Hannan does subscribe to the neoconservative concept of a propositional nation. Accordingly, and to quote from my upcoming book, a nation is nothing but a notion (the last is Buchanan’s turn of phrase), “a community of disparate peoples coalescing around an abstract, highly manipulable, state-sanctioned ideology. Democracy, for one.”
SHE’S IN. SotoSetAsides Mayor has been confirmed as a United States Supreme Court Justice. Let the deluge of original commentary vis-a-vis the history-making nature of the event commence. (For one of my older columns, read “Media’s Judicial Jiu-Jitsu For Da Big Man,” or search the blog archive for the many debates we’ve had about Sonia.
At LRC.COM, my good friend Tom DiLorenzo, comments about her worldview (sealed with Tom’s vintage humor):
“The newest black-robed deity talks the language of pop-Marxism, the fundamental belief system of the man who appointed her. Sotomayor’s now-famous comment about how she possesses special and unique legal insights by virtue of being a “Latina woman” is an expression of what used to be called “Marxian class consciousness,” that is, one’s views are determined by the social class one belongs to. In the old days the relevant Marxian classes were the working and capitalist classes. After the worldwide collapse of socialism in the late ’80s/early ’90s, the pop Marxists of academe switched their tune to a different sort of class struggle: Now it’s the White Heterosexual Male Oppressor “class” versus all of the various mascot groups of the academic left, i.e., women, minorities, homosexuals, Latinos, the transgendered, etc., etc.
P.S. A friend who is married to a Latina woman makes good use of Sotomayor’s lingo whenever his wife asks him to perform various chores around the house: He tells her that as a Latina woman she has special skills in doing the chores, and should therefore do them herself.”
What happens when a “community” is no longer a community, but “a conglomeration of competing ethnic groups and social classes” like New York City, New Haven or the United States? The peerless Thomas Fleming breaks it down for us in “New Haven’s Poor Little Lambs.” We disagree only slightly in that although the backdrop to the case of the New Haven firefighters warrants cynicism, it doesn’t change the fact that men such as Ricci have been wronged, and that women like me think—as any right-thinking individual would—that Ricci et al should not “go gentle into that good night,” but put up one hell of a fight.
Over to Dr. Fleming:
“[If] blacks and Mexicans owned and operated New Haven, we should expect them to act on their own behalf. But, in fact, they transparently do not own and operate New Haven, which is actually controlled by a white elite, some of whose power is based on the ability to manipulate minorities and thus to suppress the upwardly mobile European ethnics. Some of the elite is a residue of the old Yankee WASP elite; some are Jews, and some are converts from the European ethnics, children of parents stupid enough to send them to Ivy League schools that destroyed their minds and characters. Like other members of the American Elite, the people who run Connecticut are anti-Christian leftists who despise all our country’s traditions. Instinctively, they aim at power through the shortest route possible—today, that is minority politicking and Marxism—but most of them appear genuine in their leftism. They really do think that black firemen fail intelligence tests because of the history of racism and discrimination.”
