ISRAEL Women Take On the Orthodox

[ConsAreLiars]

JERUSALEM, Aug 2, 2010 (IPS) - Jerusalem is a city blessed but also cursed by its own holiness. No more so than here at 'Ground Zero', the religious epicentre within the walled Old City, beneath the most disputed holy site -- the Haram al-Sharif or Noble Sanctuary as known to Muslims, Har Habayit or the Temple Mount for Jews.

The Western Wall is the last remnant of the ancient Jewish Temple, Judaism's holiest site. Since Israel took control of the Old City in the 1967 Arab-Israel War, the Wall has been a symbol of national unity. More recently it has exposed rifts among Israeli Jews. And, threatened dissent between Israel and liberal Jewish groups in the U.S.

An unseemly episode in this rift took place at the Wall last month. The fracas involved Israeli police, Orthodox Israelis and a group of Jewish women from Israel and the U.S. who are trying to assert their claim to a place in Judaism's religious practices. In Orthodox Judaism, women are denied this.

The fighting broke out when the 'Women of the Wall' tried to pray at the Wall with a Torah scroll, a parchment copy of the Books of the Bible, Judaism's founding text. The Torah took quite a battering and Anat Hoffman, chairwoman of the women's prayer group, was detained. As she was unceremoniously bundled into a police van, she shouted, "We're doing nothing wrong. We're fully within the guidelines of the Supreme Court ruling. There's absolutely no reason for me to be arrested."

Under pressure from Orthodox rabbis, in 2003, Israel's Supreme Court prohibited women from reading from the Torah within the Western Wall plaza.

edit to add the link: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52349

[CJvR]

1. Politics.

The more sane parties have bought political power from the fanatics for a long time, the effects of that deal with the devil is starting to show more and more. The secular elements in Israel need to unite at least long enough to castrate their fundies, particulary the fundies lazy parasitic life style is not something a state in Israel's position can take in the long run.

[Ken Burch]

2. They need to pass legislation allowing civil marriage and recognizing ALL conversions

to Judaism as equally valid for the purposes of citizenship. There's no justification whatsoever for Israel's fundamentalist whackjobs to be given control of who gets to be an Israeli citizen and which Israeli citizens get to marry.

And, after all the massive support Israel has received for decades from the American Jewish community, a community that will always be overwhelmingly Reform, there is no justification for Israel to continually insult that community by implying, through the marriage and citizenship laws, that its members aren't "real Jews".

[ConsAreLiars]

3. This is another reminder that Fundie misogynists are found within all religions.

There is far more in common among these "Orthodox" and the Talibanish trends in Islam and the Hindu "traditionalists" and the Xtian "fundamentalists" than their co-religionists will ever see or admit. These are all regressive trends.

Jingoistic or supremacist movements that attempt to pit one nation or religion or "race" or against another, using the injustices within or flaws of "the other's" society as some sort of justification for mass murder (to help the ladies) end up relying on and strengthening the most repressive tendencies within their own societies, as well as in those they butcher.

See this analysis for more:

Western media is awash with reports about Taliban mistreatment of women in Afghanistan and Pakistan that feature countless voices in support of the war to secure a 'brighter future for women's rights'. This week's Time magazine cover story is a case in point.

If Western wars 'liberate' Eastern women, Muslim women would be - after centuries of Western military interventions - the most 'liberated' in the world. They are not, and will not be, especially when liberty is associated with Western hegemony.

Afghanistan has had its share of British, Russian and American military intervention to no avail. In fact, reports from credible women's groups there signal worsening conditions for Aghan women since the US invasion a decade ago.

The Taliban's social norms might be an affront to modern values, but they cannot be replaced summarily with Western values, let alone by force.

If, as General Petreaus insists, US soldiers should "live" with Afghans in order to defeat the insurgency, expect more hostility towards the foreign invaders and their values.

White Man's Burden

The same Orientalist civilising rationale that was used over centuries to justify bloody colonial wars is being used nowadays to manipulate a war-averse public into supporting military escalation in Central Asia.

More at: http://blogs.aljazeera.net/imperium/2010/08/05/western-wars-vs-muslim-women

This is true in the US -- had you ever, before Cheney and his Monkey, imagined that such insane belief systems would be presented and represented to the degree we now see in US media and government? And the same with Israel. The should-be inmates are running amok and will murder all those unlike them.

Fear and hate and cause pain to and murder "the other." That is the whole of their "strategy."