Bigotry in Israel

July 1, 2002

by Steven Plaut

The United States has a long history of anti-Catholic bigotry, especially in the 19th century. Much of this bigotry was focused on arousing suspicions that Catholic politicians would be disloyal and place allegiance to the Pope ahead of obeying the American law or carrying out their civic duties. Such bigotry was widespread when John F. Kennedy ran for office.

Israel has a similar wave of bigotry, with similar false accusations, but in Israel the bigotry is aimed against Orthodox Jews and it is currently being led by the Israeli radical secularists and in particular the Shinui Party, a leftish anti-Orthodox party that is in effect Israel’s Klan.

A Knesset Member from Shinui, Joseph Pritzker, has a letter in Haaretz the morning of June 30 demanding that Orthodox Jews be barred from serving as court judges in Israel. Pritzker says they cannot be relied upon to place the law ahead of their primitive religious prejudices. The trigger for this is the weekend closing law for shops that is in effect in Israel. The law requires stores to shut down for the sabbath (unless they are not owned by Jews, in which case they can choose an alternative day). In a recent case, a "labor court" rules that for purposes of the law, the Jewish "sabbath" starts at midnight Friday night, which is something a person might reasonably believe if he had never stepped outside of a Buddhist monastery. On appeal, the higher Israeli Labor Court overrode that and stated that sabbath is what everyone means by sabbath and starts just before sunset on Friday and ends with three stars on Saturday. The head of that appeals court is Orthodox.

That in turn set the Shinui Klansters on the warpath. The same party that in the past demanded that shrimp and pork be served in the Knesset cafeteria and that has urged a national boycott of kosher foods - now has a new cause: preventing Orthodox Jews from serving on the bench.

A few months ago we nominated Prof. Michael Ardon as Israel’s stupidest professor of the year. Ardon is a chemistry don at the Hebrew University. He makes a habit of proposing incredibly stupid ideas in little outbursts of his in the media. He won the Cyber Samizdat Award for Stupidest Professor of the Year for a piece he had in the Herald Trib demanding an international minimum wage that would create 100% unemployment in 2/3 of the planet.

A few days ago, Ardon had a letter in Haaretz demanding that the paper refuse to run ads by the Rightish protest group Gamla that demand that the initiators of the Oslo "peace process" be prosecuted. You may agree or disagree with Gamla, as you wish, but Ardon thinks their ads demanding that the Osloids be put on trial is itself illegal "incitement" and that the Gamla people are the ones who are breaking the law and so should be prosecuted. The Leftist First Amendment strikes again.

Only one itsy bitsy problem. Haaretz runs ads almost every day by commies and other peace-loving leftists urging Israelis to organize mutiny in the military and to disobey orders and to paralyze the military with insubordination, and neither Haaretz nor the brilliant Professor of International Unemployment through Oversniffing his Chemistry, Michael Ardon, finds anything at all objectionable about THOSE ads!