There was a time, not long ago, when I viewed the French as arrogant Arab-lovers whose leaders chose to protect Yasir Arafat’s wealth and reputation, a people which sought to expunge their record as brutal colonizers and to continue their work as Holocaust collaborators by joining the jihad against the Jewish state.

As a lover of French literature (my college dissertation was on Stendhal) I was nevertheless clear that France was no longer the capital for expatriate artists and revolutionaries in search of each other. I could never embrace France as a place of refuge or exile.

But now, France under Sarkozy is becoming attractive once more. This President has stood up for the rights of democracy, both in France and in Iran. He believes that human and individual rights apply to all French women, including Muslim women. He does not see immigrant and/or Muslim women as a separate or subordinate species. Sarkozy understands that woman’s equality is the bottom line issue in terms of assimilation and integration.

President Sarkozy is absolutely right. Based on my own research, it is clear that when those Muslim women who wish to assimilate or modernize actually do so– they are often shamed, persecuted, and even murdered by their own families, by their religious leaders, and by those western leftists who argue for “multi-cultural relativism.”

Today, the French government has announced that immigrants (all and any immigrants) who wish to settle in France must make a commitment to “integrate.” This means that new citizens must agree to give up polygamy, forced marriage, the Veil, and female genital mutilation; such practices are forbidden. According to Nadine Morano, the French Secretary of State for Family: “Equality between men and women is a fundamental principle of French society.”

According to the French Prime Minister, Francois Fillon, a French “national identity” must be understood and embraced by all. To accomplish that, Fillon said “that French schools will now be ordered to fly the French flag and to have a copy of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in every classroom.” Young French citizens will have to “speak better French, know more about the values of the republic,” and engage in certain (undefined) ceremonies.

What will be most stressed is the importance of equality between men and women.

These plans are being mocked and scorned by French socialists and certain academics who view them as inflammatory, culturally insensitive, subject to challenge in European Union courts, etc.

As a thousand Norwegian-Muslim taxi drivers a day continue to demonstrate against the Mohammed cartoons; as the mad Dutch judges continue to try the heroic parliamentarian Geert Wilders in a case that is stacked against him; as the Danish government employs a prison imam who guides husbands on wife-beating; as the leftists and Muslims of Malmo continue to persecute the small number of Jews in Malmo, I say: Vive La France!

And, may America soon follow its example.

Western civilians — a journalist (Daniel Pearl), a businessman (Nicholas Berg), a civil engineer (Kenneth Bigley), and an aid worker (Margaret Hassan) — have been captured, beheaded, and shot in Pakistan and Iraq. Western troops have also been captured, tortured, and barbarically slaughtered.

The mindset that American troops face is very different from our own. For example, if a Muslim jihadist wants to kill someone, he might stage an elaborate ruse and kill someone else entirely — all in order to have people say that his primary target was killed by accident. Or, he might kidnap a high value civilian as a bargaining chip in order to free other, imprisoned jihadists.

With this in mind, let’s try to understand what is now going on in Iraq in the matter of the captured American.

First, you can’t necessarily trust the mainstream media to get the facts exactly right.

For example, according to an AP dispatch in the Wall Street Journal, an “American contractor, Issa T. Salomi, went missing Jan 23 in Baghdad.” The New York Times also identifies him as a “contractor.”

However, Salomi is not a “contractor.” He “transitioned” out of that category as soon as he was sworn in to the Department of Defense as a civilian attached to the Army. Salomi is an Iraqi-American Human Terrain Team (HTT) member. And he is now definitely in captivity.

A video released on the internet this very weekend has identified his captors as the “League of the Righteous.” They are demanding the “release of militants and the prosecution of Blackwater security contractors accused of killing 17 Iraqis in 2007 in Baghdad.”

Issa Salomi spoke on video in Arabic-accented English. He spoke gravely, in a deep and monotonic voice. He seemed to be wearing an American Army uniform and he spoke from a prepared script. Salomi spoke for the “Islamic Resistance of Iraq” and, in their name, called for the withdrawal of all foreign troops and the punishment of those soldiers who killed 19 Iraqis in 2007. He also said:”I would like to express to all the members of my family, especially my wife, my children and my friends and to assure everybody that I’m being treated kindly and I’m in good health.”

According to the Washington Post, Salomi’s wife, Muna, 52, confirmed “that the man pictured in the video was her husband and she was distraught at the news. ‘I’m very sick. I cannot talk,’ she said.”

Who is Issa T. Salomi?

According to a source who cannot be identified, “it was known that (a man named Issa) put human terrain team members at risk outside the wire in Iraq.” In addition, according to another source, (a man named Issa) also continually disappeared, always alone, often for many days at a time, ostensibly to visit relatives. This is not the preferred practice. This last time, while visiting relatives, (this man named Issa) was kidnapped.

Are we talking about the same Issa? Can there be two 60 year-old Iraqi-American men named Issa active in Iraq? No, it is one and the same man. Issa T. Salomi lives in southern California. And, either Salomi was very sure of himself, very foolish, or very poorly trained. According to John Stanton at Cryptome.org:

“Steve Fondacaro and Montgomery Clough, senior program management of the US Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS), were warned as early as 2007 that Human Terrain Team members in Iraq and Afghanistan would become prey for insurgent groups. They were advised repeatedly that training must emphasize the dangerous environment HTS employees would be operating in. That training needed to focus on practices and procedures for handling life threatening situations to include kidnapping.

Issa Salomi, a 60-year-old HTT member operating in a combat zone, was taken in January 2010 by an Iraqi insurgent group, and a video of him was released on the Net in February 2010 by the same group. This tragic event drives home, once again, the core failings of the Human Terrain Team System: the inability to find qualified personnel, to train them properly and to, quite simply, take care of them. Some allege that many team leaders and HTS management itself have no clue where many of their teams are. “Some HTT members disappear for days and then return.”

* * *

Observers also indicate that those in charge of revising the HTS curriculum and training new batches of HTS students are not qualified to do so as their expertise is in private sector organizational behavior. Some have had no military or field experience and, what’s more, hardly understand the US military culture they are embedded in.

That’s Salomi and Salomi’s team that Stanton is talking about.  (Parenthetically, yesterday, the Department of Defense finally listed Salomi as having an “excused absence” and noted that his “whereabouts are now unknown.”)

In Turkey — a country which was nearly accepted as a member by the European Union — a father and grandfather recently buried Medine Memi, a sixteen-year-old girl, alive — and all because she was seen talking to boys. Medine was repeatedly beaten. She ran to the police but they did not help her. When the men buried her she was “alive and fully conscious.”

This savage, heartless, primitive act is the ultimate, logical consequence of burying women alive — shrouding them — while they are still allowed to roam the earth. One becomes claustrophobic under the burqa, until one gets used to, indeed becomes dependent upon, being seen as a ghost, a phantom, invisible, not-quite-human, as good as dead.

All this past week, I received news of this “buried alive” atrocity in Turkey. I refrained from writing about it. What can one say? There is nothing to say. There is everything to do. No one is doing anything.

But, all over Europe, they are fighting about the Islamic Veil. Should burqas (full body shrouds) and niqab (face masks) be banned? Should hijab remain banned in school in France? The Council of Imams in Ireland has just had a press conference. It said that “a ban on the niqab — a veil worn by Muslim women that covers everything except the eyes — violates personal freedoms guaranteed by democratic systems. It added that such bans also constitute an obstacle to multiculturalism, integration and human rights.”

Well — that ought to shame the Europeans.

Imams do not have to shame the government in a place like Egypt (or Afghanistan), where Muslim girls and women are being buried alive in another way: literally shrouded, face-masked, and hijabbed. Few women are protesting. They have no better, indeed no other option. On January 28, 2010, I ran a photographic series about the graduates of Cairo University. Mid-way though the last century, no female graduate was veiled; by the beginning of the 21st century, many were veiled. And now, a reader of this blog has sent me three recent photos of girls and women in Alexandria and Cairo, circa 2009.

Somewhere in my library, I have a treasured set of late nineteenth century photos taken in Egypt in black and white and then artistically colored in. Graceful, sultry palms, ancient ruins, a Biblical caravan, a party of tourists, the Nile. I always assumed I’d go; I never have.

She studied at MIT and at Brandeis where she received a Ph.D in Neuroscience. Thus, she was both an educated and in some sense, a westernized woman. Both her Pakistani-born father and Pakistani husband are physicians who trained in the West, in England and America, respectively; her brother and sister are also highly trained professionals. Nevertheless, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui learned to hate America, hate Jews, and hate Israel right here in liberal America.

Aafia Siddiqui

Like a small but increasing number of “westernized” Muslim women, Aafia Siddiqui joined her local mosque (in her case, the Roxbury, MA, mosque) and started to veil, and as she did, her ambitions became aggressively jihadic. This is not a contradiction. Obediently veiled Muslim women can be very aggressive, murderously so. They certainly police other women in savage and self-righteous ways in Iran and Indonesia. In Iraq, veiled Muslim women have blown up other Muslim female religious pilgrims. And, Muslim women who were normatively spurned by their mothers were manipulated by Samira Jassim, an attentive, “loving” Iraqi mother-figure, who carefully turned them into suicide killers.

Samira Jassim

Women are very aggressive—but usually towards other women. I have written about this in Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman. Traditionally, women do not go up against men whom they view as their potential protectors and as more powerful than they are. Ironically, Islamic jihad wishes to reverse, upend, both Nature and human evolutionary history. Just as normatively degraded mothers are “turned” into hero-mothers who publicly praise their suicide killer sons—just so, are normatively self-hating women “turned” into Al-Qaeda heroines who not only directly attack men, but who directly attack infidel male soldiers.

Although Al-Qaeda officially wants its women to breed and bear future male jihadists and to keep the homes and secrets of Al-Qaeda warriors, they have now publicly called for women suicide killers. The West has been threatened with a horde of veiled suicide killers, both male and female.

Today, the Islamic Veil is not a religious symbol—read Marnia Lazreg on this. The Veil is a politically manipulated symbol of jihad. The French understand this and are trying to ban or limit the Islamic Veil, which they view as a security risk as well as a human rights violation. The Americans had better start this conversation now, not later.

These photos, sent by my good friend Tareq Heggy, speak volumes about the politicization of the Islamic Veil. In the 1950s, Cairo University graduates were not veiled. By the twenty first century, the veiling of educated women was fully underway.

Class of 1959

Class of 1978

Class of 1995

Class of 2004

Who, really, is behind the epidemic of global terrorism against civilians? Whom should airport security personnel view carefully—respectfully—but very, very carefully?

A friend just sent me the following “laugh until you cry” quiz. One hopes that the folks screening us at airports are given this quiz and are guided accordingly. Perhaps passengers should carry it with them; as they say: “Don’t leave home without it.”

1. In 1972 at the Munich Olympics, young Israeli athletes were kidnapped and massacred by:

a. Darth Vader

b. Sitting Bull

c. Arnold Schwarzenegger

d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40

2. In 1979, the US embassy in Iran was taken over by:

a. Lost Norwegians

b. Elvis

c. A tour bus full of 80-year-old women

d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40

3. During the 1980’s, about 96 Americans and Europeans were kidnapped in Lebanon by:

a. Michael Jackson

b. The King of Sweden

c. The Boy Scouts

d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40

4. In 1983, the US Marine barracks in Beirut were blown up by:

a. A pizza delivery boy

b. Pee Wee Herman

c. Geraldo Rivera

d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40

5. In 1985, the cruise ship Achille Lauro was hijacked and a 70-year old American passenger was murdered and thrown overboard in his wheelchair by:

a. The Smurfs

b. Davey Jones

c. The Little Mermaid

d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40

6. In 1985, TWA flight 847 was hijacked at Athens, and a US Navy diver trying to rescue passengers was murdered by:

a. Captain Kidd

b. Charles Lindberg

c. Mother Teresa

d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40

7. In 1988, Pan Am Flight #103 was bombed by:

a. Scooby Doo

b. The Tooth Fairy

c. The Sundance Kid

d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40

Update

I sent this piece together with a letter to the editors at Lancet and to the authors whose emails were contained in the Lancet article. I offered to shorten the piece so that Lancet might print it as an article or even as a letter in their pages. I did this on Sunday. To date, I have received absolutely no answer. I also sent this article to Rita Giacoman at Birzeit University who introduced the study in Lancet.

I’ve heard nothing back but I know I’m on their radar. Why? Because I began to receive persistent, sarcastic, slightly hysterical, and fairly articulate, pro-Lancet comments at this site–comments which denigrate my article and my site’s “right wing” point of view. I have posted them all–but then stopped doing so at least in one case which involved someone who had been posting very long and very frequent comments.

Once Lancet agrees to publish my point of view in their pages, I promise to post these long and freqent pro-Lancet comments here. Let’s see what happens.

**I have just heard back from Lancet. They have asked me to submit my critique. I will certainly do so. Stay tuned.

I just heard from Lancet. 

Lancet Study Does Not Mention Honor Killings, Forced Veiling, Arranged Marriages, etc.

It’s official. Britain’s premier medical journal Lancet has been completely Palestinianized. It no longer bears any relationship to the first-rate scientific journal it once was. Perhaps Lancet is no longer a standard-bearer but has become a follower in the global movement in which standards have plunged, biases have soared, and Big Lies now pass for top-of-the-line academic, scientific work.

The post-colonial academy is itself thoroughly colonized by the false and dangerous ideas of Edward Said (please read my dear friend Ibn Warraq’s most excellent book Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism). However, I once believed that Said’s paranoid perspective had primarily infected and indoctrinated only the social sciences, humanities, and Middle East Studies. We now see his malign influence at work in a new article, just out today, by professors who work at the Department of Medicine at Harvard University; the Division of Epidemiology and Community Health at Minnesota University’s School of Public Health; The Boston University School of Medicine; the School of Nursing at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey; and at the School of Social Work and Social Welfare at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University.

Their study is titled: “Association between exposure to political violence and intimate-partner violence in the occupied Palestinian territory: a cross-sectional study.” And yes, they have found that Palestinian husbands are more violent towards Palestinian wives as a function of the Israeli “occupation”— and that the violence increases significantly when the husbands are “directly” as opposed to “indirectly” exposed to political violence.

I believe that Arab and Muslim men, including Palestinian men, are indeed violent towards Arab and Muslim women. I also believe that war-related stress, including poverty, usually increases “intimate partner violence,” aka male domestic violence. But beyond that, how does one evaluate this study?

First, let’s follow the money. This study was funded by the Palestinian National Authority as well as by the Core Funding Group at the University of Minnesota. The Palestinian Authority is not a disinterested party. But even worse: The data was collected by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Palestinians are the people who once told the world that Israeli soldiers shot young Mohammed al-Dura, committed a massacre in Jenin, and purposely attacked Palestinian civilians (who just happened to be jihadists dressed in civilian clothing or hostage-civilians behind whom the jihadists hid).

Second, let’s note that the study has a political goal which trumps any objective academic or feminist goal. (These researchers claim to have a “feminist” perspective). In my view, this study wishes to present Palestinian men as victims even when (or precisely because) those men are battering their wives. And, it wishes to present Palestinian cultural barbarism, which includes severe child abuse, as also related to the alleged Israeli occupation.

Third, therefore, the study has purposely omitted the violence, including femicide, which is routinely perpetrated against daughters and sisters in “occupied Palestine” and has, instead, chosen to focus only on husband-wife violence and only on couples who are currently married. The honor murders of daughters and sisters by their parents and brothers is a well known phenomenon in Gaza and on the West Bank.

I have written about some high profile cases before. “Souad” barely survived being set on fire by her West Bank family because she became pregnant out of wedlock by the man who promised to marry her; Israelis nursed her back to health and she fled the area for Europe, where she wrote a book about her near-death experience. Asma’a al-Ghoul, whom I interviewed in 2008, was fired for writing a series of articles about honor killings on the West Bank and in Gaza. These barbaric, misogynist, and femicidal customs are not due to any alleged political, military, or economic “occupation” by Israelis.

Fourth, if one is completely serious about violence against women, the researchers would have factored in the role of Hamas, which has “occupied” Gaza both militarily and religiously. Since they have done so, more and more (previously modern) women have been forced to veil; more child marriages as well as arranged marriages are now taking place.

Wilders and Levant Today, You, Me, Tomorrow

As we all know, the bravest man in Europe is on trial for telling the truth. This matter is obscene, and, according to Bruce Bawer, “surreal,” in part because Holland prides itself on its tolerance and commitment to free speech. Ah, but the Dutch do not mean “truth speech” because in the picturesque land of tulips and windmills, not all of Orwell’s pigs are equal. Truth is relative, subjective, ever-changing. Thus, if something is true but that truth offends the most reactionary Muslims — then it is not protected speech; in fact, it is criminalized.

How low can these Dutch dhimmis go?

I have been privileged to meet and hear Dutch Parliamentarian and possible future Prime Minister, Geert Wilders, speak in New York City. Together, with other invited guests of the Hudson Institute, we watched Wilders’ short film, Fitna, which shows terrorist scenes of devastation around the world — we have all seen them on the nightly news. Fitna also has real mullahs reading aloud from the Qu’ran — reading passages that in all truth are contained there. The film, accompanied by a brilliant musical soundtrack, allows us to connect the dots. It does not preach so much as “show.”

Nevertheless, just as Kurt Westergaard’s “Danish Muhammed cartoons” were hardly offensive by Western standards — that did not stop a global jihad against them which continues to this very day. Yale University Press refused to publish the cartoons in a book they themselves commissioned about the cartoons. And Canadian author Howard Rotberg had to become a publisher himself in order to have his say despite Canada’s political correctness where certain subjects are concerned.

And, “lawfare” (war by legal action) and the lawsuits do not stop coming. The same litigious Muslim-Canadian who sued Mark Steyn for telling the truth and for daring to venture his own witty opinion, (which opinion “offended” certain professional easy-to-offend Muslims), is now suing Ezra Levant. Kathy Shaidle has a good piece about this here. Shaidle quotes Levant himself about Khurrum Awan, the man who is suing him. And, by the way, Awan is a second-generation Canadian Muslim. Levant writes:

Awan is the shakedown artist who targeted Mark Steyn and Maclean’s magazine with three human rights complaints in 2008, for Steyn’s political offence of criticizing radical Islam. Awan lost those suits, and his demand to censor Maclean’s was rejected, but he still managed to waste a lot of Maclean’s money – and even more taxpayers’ money, too.

That’s Awan’s strategy: abuse our courts to bully his opponents. It’s a shocking thing for a lawyer to admit to, but Awan isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. As he told an anti-Semitic meeting in British Columbia a while back, he was proud to have “cost Maclean’s two million dollars in legal expenses and lost circulation.” Awan’s friend, the notorious anti-Semite Greg Felton, approvingly quotes Awan saying “we attained out strategic objective—to increase the cost of publishing anti-Islamic material.”

And so, despite the all the naysayers and second-guessers, the lawyers in the Rifqa Bary case have negotiated a reasonable and potentially life-saving settlement which will allow Rifqa to remain in state custody until she becomes 18 (which will happen in August), at which time she herself will decide whether or not she wishes to be reunited with her family.

Rifqa Bary with her lawyers

According to the Columbus-Dispatch, Rifqa has admitted that she’d been “unruly” when she’d fled her home, and the “family will try to resolve their issues with counseling.” In a statement read by Rifqa’s attorneys, ‘both she and her parents said they loved each other and believe counseling is the best route.”

Ahem. The family’s honor has now been slightly salvaged by Rifqa’s open admission (clearly, an admission that had been required) that she’d been…”unruly.”

Is it “unruly” to choose one’s own God, or to try and save one’s own life? I’m just asking. In any event, in grand American tradition, “counseling” is seen as an all-purpose, face-saving panacea, a way of avoiding a more superficial or harsher rule of law—a way of dealing with problems that are far beyond (or beneath) a judge’s purview. Thus, “The case plan for Rifqa and her parents says they should talk about their respective religions and visit and communicate regularly.”

Had there been no settlement, I would have testified as an expert witness in this case. Luckily, thanks to the good lawyering involved, my testimony was not required.

And so, the Bary family (the teenager and her parents) will now enter counseling—always a dicey proposition in my opinion; girls and women are especially vulnerable to false promises of happy endings and true love. Many grown, battered women, report how well their sociopathic batterers bond with their counselors, and how their own anxieties and justified paranoia is minimized, scorned. Ultimately, these women may not only be diagnosed as “crazy,” they may also lose their children, their homes, even their lives—right under their counselor’s nose.

One can only hope that the counselor in the Bary case will know a great deal about the nature of honor killings and the fate of apostates in Islam.

For example, in the tragic case of Toronto’s Aqsa Parvez, the counselors at the shelter for battered women to which she fled did not understand the dynamics involved in an honor killing family and, when Aqsa’s mother called to say she missed her, they simply allowed Aqsa to go; Aqsa went home and was promptly killed by her father and brother. Aqsa’s crime? She did not want to wear hijab.

Speaking of honor killings and what counselors do and don’t understand: I am about to publish a new study about honor killings (due out in the next issue of Middle East Quarterly) in which I studied 230 honor killing victims on five continents. Therefore, I am not at all surprised by the “surprising” news coming out of Finland concerning a potentially “new” kind of victim.

Native Finnish women who marry “immigrant” men (the article simply will not use the word “Muslim”) have begun to flee for their lives to avoid being honor-killed—but not only by their husbands, but by their husbands’ family, even by his entire clan. One Finnish woman who married into an “immigrant” family says:

“They’ve threatened to kidnap my children, and my husband has repeatedly threatened to kill me. He says nobody can stop them, that horrible things happen, and he doesn’t even have to do them himself, that revenge will come from the clan…. The Multicultural Women’s Association Monika, which runs a safe house for immigrant women and their children, says that more and more Finnish women are turning to them when Finnish authorities fail to understand the threat of honour violence.” According to Nasima Razmyar, Monika’s Project Manager:

“You can have 200 people involved in honour-related violence, that is, the entire extended family. And not just the family in Finland, but relatives abroad and back in the home country. In general, our laws need to understand much better this type of group threat…One problem is that Finnish authorities in social services and on the police force treat honour violence just like any other case of domestic violence. They don’t take into account the fact that instead of a dispute between two individuals, honour violence pits a single woman against the wrath of a large group of people.”

One hopes and prays that the counselor assigned to the Bary family understands the nature of honor killings. They can certainly read my first study, which appeared in Middle East Quarterly. And, I will gladly send him or her my new study as soon as it is published.

P.S. Tundra Tabloids reports that Finnish state news had pulled the article about honor-related violence in Finland but restored it recently in a more sanitized form. Here’s what was deleted from the original article:

“Among immigrants honor violence has occurred in Finland for many years.” “She said that her marriage was hell, but no one believed her.” “The woman is the man’s property and thus can assault the woman however he pleases, if the woman refuses to obey the rules.”

“Honor violence has been increasing in recent years in Finland, when unmarried young women immigrants from a foreign culture struggle under the pressure. They may be forced to marry and be prohibited from socializing with Finns.”

“We’re currently unable to secure and protect the lives of people in the way that the authorities should do, Hukkanen says.”

Once again, I wish to acknowledge Esther’s fine work at IslaminEurope.blogspot.com

For years now, Israel has been routinely condemned by the United Nations for trying to defend herself; a veritable public relations hailstorm has been unleashed against the only Jewish state. Orwellian Big Lies have dominated the world media’s reportage on Israel. Jews/Zionists have been falsely accused of controlling the world, committing massacres, purposefully murdering civilians, poisoning Palestinian babies and causing Palestinian sterility, etc. Since 2005, Israeli officials have been unable to travel to Britain lest they be arrested and tried as “war criminals” in the UK.

I began actively defending Israel from the moment Arafat launched the malevolent Intifada of 2000 against her. Although anti-Semitism had been on my personal and intellectual radar since the early 1970s, it was not until the 21st century that I began to document a new and lethal form of anti-Semitism, a “perfect storm” in which fundamentalist Muslims, jihadists, and western progressives all agreed that human suffering, every world problem, was Israel’s fault, and could be corrected only if Jews were defamed, forced to suffer, and if the Jewish state  were abolished. I published a book about this (The New Anti-Semitism) in 2003.

I was demonized for breaking with the politically correct intelligentsia and thus, perhaps, have earned the right to criticize the Jewish state when such criticism is warranted. It breaks my heart to have to do so. But I must—and my criticism has absolutely nothing to do with how Israel treats the Palestinians or its own Arab citizens—which, as we all know, is far better than the way in which most Muslims are treated in Arab and Muslim countries. My criticism has everything to do with how Israel treats religious Jewish women.

Let me be clear. The utterly corrupt United Nations has not earned the right to criticize Israel; I have. If they want to challenge the internal affairs of a nation state, I suggest that they begin with the major human rights atrocities being committed in Afghanistan, Burma, China, Congo, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. And that’s just for starters. Once they have done so, I have a human rights abuse for them to explore in Israel.

Ironically, Israel does protect the holy sites of all religions in a way that no Muslim country does. Muslim governments and Muslim mobs routinely desecrate and destroy non-Muslim houses of worship, do not allow other religions to openly flourish and, in addition, persecute, abduct, exile or murder those of other faiths. Israel does not do this.

The Western Wall

But the Jewish state does look the other way when Jewish women, who are praying in a modest and religiously acceptable fashion at Jerusalem’s Western (Wailing) Wall, are attacked, both physically and verbally, by ultra-religious goons. I am talking about Women of the Wall, a group that has now been in existence for twenty-one years.

The Western Wall is the outer remaining wall of the Second Temple and, for 2000 years, was the precise spot where exiled, Diaspora Jews longed to pray and where those who made pilgrimages to the Holy Land actually did pray.

On December 1st, 1988, I was among the women who prayed together out loud in the women’s section at the Wall for the first time in history; it was a life-changing event. Rivka Haut, the woman who organized this first prayer service, and I eventually co-wrote a book about this struggle, Women of the Wall: Claiming Sacred Ground at Judaism’s Holy Site, which we published in 2002. We dedicated the book to the State of Israel but declined to promote its ideas in the non-Jewish media given that Israel was engaged in an existential fight for its very survival.

Women of the Wall with tallitot

Please understand: At the Western Wall, there is a very high barrier (a mehitza) between the male and female prayer sections. Only someone who is purposely standing on a chair can look over the barrier into the other gender’s section. The high barrier has not protected women worshippers from violence. Ultra-religious men have thrown heavy metal chairs, tear gas, garbage, and excrement at members of Women of the Wall (WOW) while they were praying; ultra-religious zealots, both male and female, have also cursed, stalked, threatened, and physically wrestled with WOW members.

In all this time, the Jewish state has never arrested an ultra-religious male or female for disturbing the peace and the prayers of our sincere and devoted female worshippers. Ultra-religious women have harassed, taunted, screamed, and tried to drown out the prayers of Women of the Wall members. They have behaved with extraordinary inhumanity towards other women. Over time, Women of the Wall members have prayed more and more quietly, as far away from the men’s section and the barrier as possible, as far away from the actual Wall as possible.

These religious women have been forced to cower, tremble, and to pray fearfully—just like Jews were once forced to do in Muslim and Arab countries. And during the Spanish Inquisition, I might add. It is an apt comparison given that Jewish and Israeli women in the twenty-first century are now literally being told to “hide” their prayer shawls (tallitot) under their coats when they approach the Wall.

Once, long ago (in 1989), the state hired female guards to drag the softly praying women away. Believe it or not, WOW members were seen as “disturbing the peace” of the real worshipers—whose concentration was too easily shattered by the very idea that women were actually praying autonomously and authoritatively.

What we were doing was never viewed as contrary to an Orthodox interpretation of religious law, but it was seen as disturbing the “sensibilities” of the haredi (ultra-religious) worshipers who, increasingly, have taken over control of the Wall and have turned it into the kind of synagogue where women are meant to pray silently, each alone, and to never, ever be heard, not even by other women. In addition, for a variety of reasons, the authorities have allowed less and less space for female worshippers. They have still not provided shelter from the elements.