Author: Ophelia Benson

So Ben Goldacre reads Gillian McKeith’s PhD – all 49 stapled pages of it.

Inside is what I could only describe as Cargo Cult science: she’s going through the motions, but the content, only closer inspection, is like an eerie parody of an academic text. There are lots of grand statements about research, with nice superscript numbers relating to references in the back. But when you chase to the back of the book to see what these academic documents are, they include such august periodicals as Delicious, Creative Living, Healthy Eating, and my favourite: Spiritual Nutrition and the Rainbow Diet…She expands grandly and uncritically – with anecdote, but no data – about her many dramatic treatment successes, like a physician from the dark ages. She talks about her own “clinical research”, with huge claims for its findings, but wherever this clinical research is, all you can find here are her anecdotes…Since people like me started digging, the McKeith industry – worth millions – describes her as a holistic nutritionist. There is no such thing as “holistic nutrition”: if you make statements about food and are backed up by academic/scientific research, as McKeith does, repeatedly, in her books, her shows, her semi-academic work, and products … then that’s just nutrition. The word “holistic” is at best a piece of branding; but at worst, it’s a cloak for accepting inadequate standards of referencing and evidence.

Ah yes…Did we remember to include ‘holistic’ in the Dictionary? What a silly question.

Holistic
Everything good. Whole, pure, sincere, whole, integrated, spiritual, whole, centered.

And of course nutritionistic, and healthy, and natural, and (as an unexpected bonus) scholarly.

Bunting produces another lead balloon. For once it’s worth reading the comments (well not all two million of them, but some) because they’re so uniformly, shall we say unconvinced. Of what? Of Bunting’s sweet suggestion that, good heavens, people, sharia isn’t as bad as all that.

Sharia’s basic meaning is “path to God”; it is a set of spiritual disciplines, which any serious Muslim abides by. The basics are such things as prayer, fasting and the Haj. But it also covers such instructions as no gambling, no backbiting, no alcohol and no cheating. Any devout Muslim is attempting to follow sharia. But that doesn’t mean they want to impose sharia on anyone who is not a Muslim, nor does it mean they agree with the most extreme interpretations of sharia law. Every faith has its laws – churches have canon law, Orthodox Jews have rabbinical courts – and no one argues that this represents separatism as Cameron did of Muslims this week.

No one? No one? Man, Bunting has a short attention span. The fight with the archbishops was only last week, Mads! Keep up!

Don’t get me wrong, there are some exceptionally horrible elements of how sharia has been interpreted – and still is, in some parts of the world – but reducing this vast body of thought to the barbaric practices of the Taliban is a gross simplification, which will do nothing to assist our understanding of the attitudes of Muslims in this country.

It might do something to assist your determination not to be subject to sharia though.

Noga pointed out two more articles, and I’m feeling slightly peeved at being told not to ‘blame the Jews, for Chrissakes,’ as if I had, so I’ll say a little more. The articles are interesting. From The Canadian Jewish News, which says the Canadian Jewish Congress doesn’t agree that the synagogue should have asked the Y to frost its windows.

[C]ommunications director Leyla Di Cori…said CJC is trying to get the message out to the public that the entire chassidic population represents only five to 10 per cent of the Montreal Jewish community and “does not reflect the community as a whole.”

Well of course it doesn’t, and neither does anyone else, because there is no such thing as ‘the community as a whole’ except in the case of a town or neighborhood, in which case there is still no one who can ‘reflect the community as a whole’ because that doesn’t mean anything, because people don’t think in a bloc. Why would anybody think that the people at the synagogue did ‘reflect the community as a whole’? I suppose because people keep talking about ‘communities’ that way, just as Leyla Di Cori does.

What the people at the synagogue may ‘reflect’ is a growing tendency for religious zealots to think they can tell everyone else what to do, but that’s not the same thing as reflecting a ‘community.’

Di Cori said she thinks this seemingly minor incident has been played up in the media because it fits into the “reasonable accommodation” debate going on in Quebec today about how far a society that prides itself on being secular and progressive should go to tolerate practices of religious and cultural minorities that are at odds with the majority.

I’ll tell you how far. Zero far. Unless of course there’s no issue, which is no help, because when there’s no issue there’s no debate about how far anyone should go. If there’s no harm and nothing at stake, no problem; if there is harm, the society should go zero far.

B’nai Brith Canada legal counsel Steven Slimovitch “commended” the Y administration for good neighbourliness and finding a “compromise” that poses little or no inconvenience to the institution or its members. In fact, it appears to have been a plus for the Y, because the congregation paid for the change to the windows.

Why is that a plus? The congregation paid to make the windows opaque so that there is less light inside. Why is that a plus? Many of us like natural light.

“Was the space rendered any less comfortable? Can they not work out there any more? No. If it had been, for example, a sewing class that was held there that required a lot of natural light, it would be a different story.”

Ah – so it’s up to him to decide how much light the people at the Y get to have in a situation where the people at the synagogue want them to have less. It’s up to him, not up to them. I see.

He deplored what he regards as the visceral “us versus them” mentality among some Y members. In an increasingly diverse society, he said, it’s necessary more than ever to co-operate and show respect and understanding.

Respect and understanding for the religious zealots who want women to hide, not respect and understanding for people who don’t share their religion and don’t want it telling them what to do and how much light they’re allowed to have in a public gym. No, it’s not necessary to show that, it’s necessary to refuse to show that.

Slimovitch said he doesn’t see this case as a status of women issue in any way, or one that endorses a view that women are somehow shameful and must be kept out of sight.

Well he would say that, wouldn’t he. And he’s not the one who’s being told to cover up, is he, so I really don’t think his opinion is interesting or relevant.

And here’s an ugly little finale:

Alex Werzberg, president of the Coalition of Outremont Chassidic Organizations and a Satmar community member, called “the whole thing a big joke…Everything was fine for months, and then somebody came in and made a big deal out of it – an agent provocateur – who says, ‘Those Jews are not going to tell us what to do,’ called the media and made a hullabaloo.”

Did she? Did she say that? Did she? Or did he just say she did? I know what I think.

So if there are ‘devout’ people around, then anyone living or working or exercising or playing sport in a building near them has a responsibility to make sure that the devout people don’t see anything that they (or, really, some of them) don’t like. Even if that means that a subset of the devout people can see what the other people are doing only by going outside, around the corner, into the alley, where they peer into the windows – it is the responsibility of the horrible non-devout people next door to wear armour or paint their windows black or turn all their lights off, because after all what right does anyone have to wear shorts and a skimpy top for athletic purposes if there are devout people nearby? No right at all of course. Devout trumps non-devout. Right? Right.

Some members of the Avenue du Parc YMCA are upset with the centre’s administrators, who allowed windows on the building’s west side to be tinted in order to placate leaders of a Hasidic synagogue across the alley. The Y members claim the tinted windows compromise the building’s interior lighting and make it hard to practise tai chi and yoga.

Oh grow up. For heaven’s sake. So the Y is a little darker than it used to be; get used to it.

Members of the Yetev Lev synagogue, on Hutchison Street, paid for tinted windows at the Y after they complained their children and youth were unwittingly watching too many women in various states of undress work out at the gym. The congregation’s rabbi said public nudity is not acceptable to his members, nor to any religious Jew.

Public nudity in the sense of inside a building, next door to another building containing people who ‘unwittingly’ watch women in various states of undress. Right; well that makes sense. It’s perfectly fair, too.

But some people just won’t see reason.

[N]ow the windows have opened up a rift over whether the institution went too far to accommodate a minority. Some Y members have circulated a petition demanding the opaque windows be removed because they not only deprive the room of light, but allow a religious group to impose its ways on the majority.“It’s like getting us to wear a veil. Since we represent temptation, we’re being asked to hide,” Renée Lavaillante, who started the petition, said yesterday. “We shouldn’t have to hide in order to exercise in Quebec. We’re a secular state, and shouldn’t hide ourselves for religious reasons.”

It’s also like ordering you to go to the back of the bus – but hey, be reasonable; the back of the bus is a perfectly nice, homey place. Settle down, get comfortable.

The Hasidic community says it is not out to stop women from exercising the way they like. Members just want to find a way to maintain their strict traditions in a secular world, and felt the windows – for which the congregation footed the $3,500 bill – were a reasonable solution.

Of course they were! Perfectly reasonable! Hey, if a neighbour of mine decided he couldn’t stand the possibility of getting a sight of me reading a godless book (which he couldn’t, because I live at the top of a hill and my windows face into thin air, but never mind), of course it would be perfectly reasonable of him to demand that I have the windows painted black, especially if he footed the bill. Why should I mind a darkened living room if it makes a neighbour happy? I’m not so petty, I assure you!

“We have a belief in being dressed modestly, and we want our kids to see women dressed modestly,” Mr. Weig said.

Not just in our own living rooms, but also in their living rooms. We want our kids to see women dressed modestly, therefore we think we have a right to demand that all women everywhere ‘dress modestly’ according to our definitions and no matter where they are. We don’t want much, do we.

Serge St-André, director of the YMCA branch, said the Hasidim’s request had been submitted to an advisory committee, which judged it to be reasonable…“We are geographically at the junction of several communities, and the YMCA has to take on the colours of those communities,” he said…“We try to be responsive to the requests of the community. It’s a challenge to satisfy everyone.”…a Y member walked up to say he objected to the windows. “We can’t let ourselves be imposed upon by extremist religious groups. What’s next? Separate gyms for women and for men? Wearing long pants and long sleeves to exercise?” Outremont resident Robert Dolbec asked. “They [the Hasidim] should cover their own windows. I respect their right to practise their religion, but not their right to impose their religion on us.”…The frosted-window kerfuffle is just the latest flare-up between the fast-growing Hasidic community in Outremont and the larger secular community that surrounds it. In the 1980s, Outremont passed a bylaw banning the wearing of bathing suits in its public parks; the law was struck down as unconstitutional by Quebec Superior Court in 1985…Asher Wieder, a rabbi at the Yetev Lev synagogue, said he hoped the window row would be resolved peacefully. “We felt the way we worked it out was very fair. They still have light in the room and we help our children keep their traditions and religion,” he said. “I think it’s a good compromise.”

They don’t have as much light, but hey, that’s what ‘compromise’ means. So if that neighbour wants me to paint my windows black and I agree to paint just half of the windows, everybody is happy. Compromise is great.