How do you know when the theocrats are winning? Women start to disappear, and at the same time, the ones who haven’t disappeared yet are subject to spittle-flecked hatred…including those who are six years old.
Like that. Posters that feature women have been “defaced” in Jerusalem, the SMH article says, and by defaced it means defaced, as you can see. That poster says, “You think you’re pretty, bitch? I’ll give you pretty, you whore. How pretty do you think you’ll be after I stick a razor in your eyes, you cunt?”
That’s not “segregation”; it’s not “modesty”; it’s not “religious obligations”; it’s just loathing.
“Shut your filthy mouth, bitch.”
Not content with segregated streets, queues and buses, extremist members of the Haredi have turned their attention to the city of Bet Shemesh, 30 kilometres to the west of Jerusalem.
Here, Jewish girls as young as six, wearing a conservative uniform of skirts below the knee and shirts to the elbow, are being targeted by the Haredi, called ”pritzas” (prostitutes) for being ”immodestly dressed” as they walk into Orot girls school, a state-funded religious-nationalist school. The Haredi are demanding the girls cover up.
That’s how you know when theocracy is winning – when men start calling little girls prostitutes. In public. Outside a school. At girls on their way to school.
Hah! Solidarity.
I’d wondered why the place has such a high birth rate. These guys are having twice as many kids as even Israel’s Muslims.
Fucking. Ridiculous.
It’s just as Ophelia says – it’s such brazen violence. I’ll cut your eyes and mouth up, bitch. Shudder.
It’s quite frightening to contemplate what must be going on in their minds – or, more to the point, what must be prevented at all costs from going through those minds. You know, empathy, respect, . . . actually anything that isn’t unthinking hatred, hostility and self-righteousness.
I really want to say something intelligent to this, but it’s really hard to say anything that hasn’t already been said much more eloquently.
And thinking that it can’t get worse seems somehow to manifest itself to fundamentalists as a double-dog-dare.
I agree with you about the implied message in th first defaced poster. However, if you hadn’t told me it had been defaced, I would have thought it another weird example of the strange images in high fashion that sometimes suggest a woman has been battered.
Francisco – most people find those fashion images appalling, too.
And the fundies here want to make things the same.
And because of the way government works in Israel, they punch above their weight politically. The ultra orthodox control about half a dozen seats in their parliament, enough to keep the party in power and gives them (the ultra orthodox) the ability to get away with building new settlements.
And we’re funding the government that gives so much power to such bigots? The US-Israel alliance has become an alliance of Christian and Jewish right-wing extremists, with non-extremists like us being their common enemy.
Christopher Hitchens is right. Religion really does poison everything. All the evidence points to the same thing, the less influence religion has over a society the better off that society is. I’m sick of religious nutjobs trying to corrupt the modern world with their dark ages belief system and at this point nobody can convince me that religion deserves respect after all the irrational havoc it has caused over the past 5,000 years and is still causing in the world today. Religious people act as though religion is so moral and stabilizing but in reality its a twisted, authoritarian form of morality that simply uses the concept of morals rather than true morals to oppress people. What I mean by this is that religion makes up its own rules and calls them “morals” because calling them that encourages obedience, but there is nothing inherently moral about them, they bear striking resemblance to the “morals” that dictators and tyrants push on their citizens.
People need to embrace logic and see past religion’s lies and other non-religious people need to stop being so timid about criticizing an ideology that is designed to oppress, it doesn’t matter how many people you’ve met from that religion that happened to be good people it doesn’t change the fact that religion itself will always be an oppressive force in society unless the religions agree to change the fundamental tenets of their ideology. People need to leave religion to put pressure on them to do this. If enough people leave then maybe they’ll finally realize that “hey, these archaic rules we’re imposing on everybody is really rubbing a lot of people the wrong way, maybe we should just eliminate that aspect of our religion”.