Religious Extremism In Israel

I've written about Jewish extremism on a few occasions (Jewish Taliban Women and Women Need to Sit In The Back Of The Bus), but the video above,well, it just turns the faith-based crazy dial to 11. The captions are a bit difficult to read, but it's clear that the children who are disabled are targeted for abuse by the Haredi (a far right religious group). The reason is that these kids dare to use their motorized wheelchairs on the Sabbath. That is considered work, and we all know what Moses said about working on the Sabbath.

While the Israelites were in the wilderness, a man was found gathering wood on the Sabbath day. Those who found him gathering wood brought him to Moses and Aaron and the whole assembly, and they kept him in custody, because it was not clear what should be done to him.  Then the LORD said to Moses, “The man must die. The whole assembly must stone him outside the camp.” So the assembly took him outside the camp and stoned him to death, as the LORD commanded Moses. Numbers 15:32-36 

What is really scary (yes, abusing disabled children is not the scary part of this story) is that the religious right is on the march and making political progress in Israel.

Once a small minority in Israel’s state-building project, Orthodox Jews are now at its forefront. They comprise 40% of the ruling coalition’s members, and over 40% of new army officers and combat soldiers. As their birth rate is more than double that of secular Jews, their power is set to mount.

The spectrum of political Judaism is as wide as political Islam’s. A bit like the split between Muslim Brothers and Salafists, religious Jews loosely divide into religious Zionists, who want Jews to control biblical land, and the ultra-Orthodox, who seek to enforce literal rabbinical dictates. The former pride themselves on leading Israelis into battle. The latter staunchly defend their exemption from the military draft.

Though intense ideological rivals, they have forged working relations under Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition. Both defend their assets, be it settlements in the West Bank, where they form at least 70% of the Jewish population, or the separate Torah education systems they have created, both with state backing. Both argue that Israel’s Jewish character is more vital than its democratic one. [emphasis mine]

I find that the separate education systems funded by state money to be particularly dangerous, and has the potential of turning Israel into something like a Jewish version of Pakistan -- complete with nuclear weapons.  

Secular Jews, who founded the state and are still a narrow majority, used to fret that the religious were carving out no-go areas for the authorities with their own legal and morality police and using their power as parliamentary kingmakers.

The video gives an example of such no-go areas where the police refuse to assist those who have been targeted by Yahweh's thought police.

Now they fear religious Jews are the state. Secular Jews continue to leave Jerusalem for the coastal cities, ceding it to a volatile cocktail of religious Jews and resentful Arabs in the east of the city.

Under pressure from rabbinical authorities and their disciples, the hotter-headed religious soldiers boycott military pageants at which women perform. Municipalities cancel concerts with female artists or insist that they fully cover their bodies, and remove advertising of even modestly-clad women from streets and buses. In ultra-Orthodox suburbs of Tel Aviv, women, like their Saudi counterparts, do not drive. The American secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, recently said she was worried that women’s rights in Israel were being eroded. In the ultra-Orthodox press her photograph was airbrushed out.

The Atheist Rabbi reports that at last the authorities have started to crack down on the Haredi. It should no surprise to any atheist that the Jewish fanatical followers of a despotic deity have decided to use a tried and true tactic of religious loons in America: comparing the state with Nazi Germany.

To do this they [Haredi] dressed themselves and their kids up as concentration camp victims, replete with striped uniforms and yellow badges.

This is Purgatory.