Author: Ophelia Benson

How religion makes people better.

The chairman of the Yesha rabbinical council and chief rabbi of Kiryat Arba, Rabbi Dov Lior, on Wednesday issued a halakhic ruling stating that it is forbidden by Jewish law to employ Arabs or rent homes to them…Lior said that “since this is a matter of endangering souls, it is clear that it is completely forbidden to employ them and rent houses to them in Israel. Their employment is forbidden not only at yeshivas, but at factories, hotels and everywhere.”

Ah well if it’s a matter of endangering souls, then there’s no more to be said. Clever of this god fella to have created good people and bad people and to have told the good people not to employ or rent homes to the bad people – clever of him to have created a set of people to be mistreated by another set of people. Nice arrangement. Pleasant. Amiable. Kind-hearted.

And what was that about Oradour again…?

Recently, several rabbis led by Rabbi Lior have issued a precedent setting halakhic ruling that Israel must shoot civilian populations in areas from whence attacks on Jewish communities originate.

Oh right; that was it.

Attorney Einat Horvitz from the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism said in response to the interview that “we view with great concern the wave of calls against Arabs since the terrible terror attack. This is an ever growing phenomenon of racist incitement that distorts Judaism and is also illegal. We call upon the attorney general to shake off his apathy and take action to enforce the laws that prohibit these calls.”

Best of luck with that.

So, another industrial school. How sweet.

Haut de la Garenne has a darker past. It opened in 1867 as an industrial school for young people of the lower classes and neglected children…The gruesome secrets escaping its imposing stone walls today are ugly and deeply disturbing: stories of beatings, rape, torture, imprisonment of children…The prison-style solitary confinement cells contained just a bed and a potty. Le Monnier, 43, says: “It made you feel depressed, lonely and degraded.”…Turner recalls being hit over the head with pillows filled with boots and shoes. “You’d go to bed and pow, they’d get you,” Turner says. “Times change. It was acceptable back then. It wasn’t just me, it was a lot of the children, most of the children.”

That’s just the impression you get from Goldenbridge, from the testimony of the nuns as well as that of the children – it was acceptable back then. It’s scary to contemplate the kinds of things that have been acceptable in the past.

Former victims say they were chained and physically abused in underground cellars. Based on this information police began searching Haut de la Garenne. Human bloodstains, a pair of shackles and a large concrete bath were discovered in a bricked-up cellar last month. Officers reportedly found a message scrawled on a wall saying: “I’ve been bad for years and years.” Police also discovered part of a child’s skull together with a girl’s hair clasp, a button and a piece of fabric buried in a stairwell. Jersey’s deputy police chief Lenny Harper, the officer in charge of the inquiry, says the discovery of a trapdoor into the cellar corroborates what victims told police. It leads down into a complex of at least four cellars.

Oh, Christ. And the former victims are being threatened, and corrupt cops and pols are trying to discredit the inquiry.

“There is no doubt allegations were made by children in the past and they were simply not dealt with the way they should have been; that includes the police, the social services and everyone else.”

That’s Haut de la Garenne.

A little more on Yelena Shesternina.

Jyllands-Posten, a little-known Danish newspaper, managed to cause an uproar in the whole world with just one publication. Its cartoons depicting Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) offended 1.5 billion people. Islamic traditions prohibit the publication of any images of people, not to mention the prophet. As a result, massive protests swept the Muslim world, and in some countries Western diplomats had to go home within 24 hours…About 50 people fell victim to pogroms and demonstrations.

Wrong. She has her facts wrong. She left out several very important points, points which make her ‘argument’ look ridiculous. J-P did not manage to cause an uproar in the whole world with just one publication or to offend 1.5 billion people. It took the protests by the OIC and then, months later, the road show of the imams with the three extra cartoons including the fake one of a guy in a pig snout to do that. It took all that before ‘massive protests swept the Muslim world’ and people were killed. It’s amazing how many people get all this completely wrong. It’s extraordinary how many people get it all wrong and on the basis of a fundamental misunderstanding of what happened, scold the cartoonists for getting people killed over a mere nose-thumbing joke, while saying not a word about the energetic malice and trickery of the imams. It’s almost as if they think the imams are not such bad guys while the cartoonists are deplorable.

Shesternina of course also doesn’t say a word about the plot to murder Kurt Westergaard. I think that’s a tad deplorable.

Consider Oradour. 642 people were murdered by a German battallion there on June 10 1944, after Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann was told that a German officer was being held by the Resistance in Oradour (in Oradour-sur-Vayres, that is, which is not Oradour-sur-Glane; it was the latter that got it in the neck).

[T]he Wehrmacht regarded members of all resistance movements as guerilla terrorists who would strike quickly before merging back into civilian life. As such, reprisals were indiscriminately violent. Oradour, indeed, was not the only collective punishment reprisal action committed by German troops: other well-documented examples include the Soviet village of Kortelisy (in what is now Ukraine), the Czechoslovakian villages of Ležáky and Lidice (in what is now the Czech Republic), the Dutch village of Putten, Serbian towns of Kragujevac and Kraljevo and the Italian villages of Sant’Anna di Stazzema and Marzabotto. Furthermore, the German troops executed hostages (random or selected in suspect groups) throughout France as a deterrent.

So. There’s clearly a moral quandary here if you’re in the Resistance (and presumably if you’re not in the official Resistance but you help it when the occasion offers). You know with certainty that your activities put random guiltless people at risk. You know with certainty that any real success you have will result in anguish for a lot of people who are not the aggressors but the bystanders; in death for some and grief for others. Everything you do as part of the maquis has a high moral cost.

Of course, it’s also true that doing nothing has a high moral cost too. If you do nothing and the Germans win, the outcome will not be an end to the killing of innocents. You’re in a situation in which anything you do has a high moral cost. You’re in a nightmare.

So the Resistance in some sense is responsible for the collective punishment of other people. But in what sense? Is it responsible in the same way, albeit to a lesser degree, as the Wehrmacht? Or is it responsible in some different way. Does it make a difference who is doing what to whom, and for what reasons, and in what context? It seems to.

Try a thought experiment. Suppose a newspaper publishes some satirical cartoons about neo-Nazism, the BNP, and other far-right nationalist and/or anti-Semitic groups. One cartoon has Hitler wearing a military cap in the shape of a crematorium labeled Auschwitz, with smoke rising out of it. Nothing much happens, then after a few months a couple of neo-Nazis travel around Europe with the cartoons plus three new ones, one of which is Hitler in drag being sodomized by a donkey – no, by a Jewish donkey. The neo-Nazis show this collection to other neo-Nazis, and with persistent effort get them worked up enough to go out into the streets and cause riots. Some people are killed in the riots. Death threats are made against the cartoonists. A group of neo-Nazis is arrested for plotting to murder the cartoonist who drew the Hitler cartoon; the cartoonist and his wife are forced to leave their home, then told to leave the hotel they move to; the cartoonist’s wife is told to stay away from her job at a kindergarten.

Would you say that the cartoonists put other people at risk by drawing the cartoons? Would you call the cartoons trivial exercises of the right to free speech? Would you say the deaths were predictable and that the cartoonists’ action led to the deaths and therefore they are accountable? Would you say it’s not precisely as if they had done that thing, but the weight of it is on their shoulders? Would you point out that the vast majority of people think neo-Nazis are violent people, that that’s just conventional wisdom, and that the cartoons just reinforce it, instead of saying something brave and new and eye-opening? Or would you think that we don’t want neo-Nazis telling us what we can and can’t draw, can and can’t publish, can and can’t laugh at? Would you think that the neo-Nazis who worked people up to rioting and the rioters themselves were to blame while the cartoonists were not, on the grounds that the cartoonists had in fact done nothing wrong? Would you cringe at the very idea of blaming the cartoonists?