Having secular people on the buses is a problem
And then there is increasingly-Haredi Jerusalem.
Yoel Kreus…describes himself as a ‘shmira’, a Hebrew word that translates as ‘watcher of Israel’. ‘I make sure the rabbis’ decisions happen … I help you to be a moral person,’ he said…Signs warning women not to enter if they are wearing trousers, short sleeves or a skirt above the knees, hang in the neighbourhood. One is affixed outside Kreus’s two-room house…Extraordinarily, he admitted to slashing the tyres of women who have driven into the neighbourhood who, he said, were indecently dressed…’Now I’m trying new creative methods, not using violence. Now I make a small hole in their tyres and the air deflates slowly. I’m not destroying their car.’
He’s not destroying their car, he’s helping them to be a more moral person. Wearing trousers, of course, is self-evidently immoral.
He maintained that separation was necessary beyond the boundaries of the neighbourhood. ‘Having secular people on the buses is a problem. They go like animals, without clothes. Non-religious girls don’t dress properly. They encourage me to sin,’ he said…The transport ministry, which regulates and funds bus transport through private companies, has allowed operators to provide ‘kosher’ or ‘pure’ routes, where women are required to sit at the back and cannot board unless appropriately dressed. More than a dozen women have filed complaints after being verbally or physically attacked on the buses.
Just the other day we were arguing about how secular Israel is. More secular than Iran or Saudi Arabia, certainly, but not as secular as it could be. Not secular enough to prevent women being physically attacked on city buses because religious zealots don’t like the way they’re dressed. Not secular enough.
Message to Yoel Kreus: we ARE animals. There’s nothing inherently wrong with our bodies. Why worship a god who created your lust and the human body in the first place? Your issue should be with god, not the women he created.
“Kreus’s two-room house where he lives with his wife and 11 children.”
I am sure his wife is not in need of any jeans s as she is obviously too busy breeding rabbis, for Kreus sake.
It would be more in his moral line to seek to work to house his children more appropriately than to spend his time obsessing about the state of women’s attire.
The Haredi are pretty disturbing. Riazat Butt (she of the ‘ninja’ veiled sister, 1 Sept.) wrote a laudatory report of their schools in Britain in the Guardian on 13 May. (Doubtless she’d like something similar for the niqab-wearing end of Islam.) I find it horrifying that headteachers and parents can conspire to rob their children (especially their daughters) of educational opportunities:
It was the emancipation from the ghettos that led to the magnificent flowering of Jewish intellectual culture in the 19C. Recreating 18C shtetl life, behind self-imposed ghetto walls, seems utterly perverse and self-destructive. Deliberately stunting children’s intellectual lives seems to me a form of child abuse.
Quite. I say the same thing about the Amish, but people land on me like a ton of bricks if I say so.
But the Amish are picturesque! Surely a few damaged lives is a price we are willing to pay for that.
Yeah, especially since we’re not the ones paying it.
At least in Israel if this man is caught vandilising cars the secular law will punish him for it whatever his motivation. Marie I so agree this creep ought to house his own kids before he worries about other peoples morals.
Re; Silverwhistle’s link.
“Girls, however much they excel academically, will not have careers – but they will have jobs”
They sure will indeed have jobs and and a half in-say, like having families, for their Haredi husbands, numbering in the region of fifteen.
But then again the activity of rearing children would not be considered work – but Haredi duty.
They shan’t either have many problems with their domestic lives as the British government has come to their rescue.
“He switches on the lights in the generously proportioned kitchen used for home economics classes. The worktops sparkle.
Wow, the British government will even fund the girls (future Haredi women of fifteeen children – who will be forever hidden in their sparkling homes) in home cooking skills that will see them excel in their homes for life.
‘Haredis lead extremely modest lives. Homes do not have TV’s and parents ensure their children do not have access to the Internet or radio’.
They sound to me like typical New- agers – even most nuns, who live austere lives in enclosed cloistered monastic settings have access to the Internet.
“Boys will, more than likely, remain in education, learning the Torah, for anything up to 50 years.’
Unlike the male monastic Benedictine religious who study theology for life – the Haredi men have the best of both worlds. They get to keep their uneducated women and their religion.
I’ve come to the conclusion that perhaps the single most important issue for feminism is fighting the idea that, if a man wants a woman, it must be because she’s MAKING him want her.
The world no longer tolerates people having to go to the back of the bus (literally, and in the wider metaphorical sense of being pushed to the back) because they are of different skin colour. It should not accept it because they don’t have a Y chromosome. It’s the same re: the Amish and other similar groups. Wilfully stunting a child’s intellectual opportunities is psychological abuse and runs counter to what any decent parent ought to be doing.
I am horrified by the way that faith schools are being supported with public money in this country, and have been increasingly promoted since the Blair years. They should be abolished, but here in Scotland, the Catholic church (a minority institution, but a vocal one) complains about “sectarianism” if integration is discussed. (This, when it was the Catholic Bishop of Motherwell who objected to the idea of shared playgrounds and shared staff-rooms for adults on a shared-campus school!)
Yoel Kreus: “They encourage me to sin.”
This reminds me of the justification often produced by children: “S/he made me do it!”
We try and teach them to grow up and take responsibility for their own actions.
It has just sunk in (to me), how conservative and paternalistic religions stunt this development.
That’s a very interesting point. In fact it suggests all sorts of subjects about which one could come over all irritated/parental – ‘Just never mind what Billy/Sally/gay people/women/’the Jews’/infidels are doing, you just worry about what you’re doing.’ Conservative paternalistic religions foster this kind of obsessive tattle-tale spying finger-pointing ‘She’s not wearing her hijab right!’ childish mentality where men obsess over what women are doing while giving themselves a blank check. It’s a kind of moral idiocy, along with everything else that’s wrong with it.