Tel-Chai Nation

Here's some more news about another delay that might've been caused by Haredis who supposedly wanted to travel to Israel (via JTA), you have to wonder if they intend to embarrass the Jewish community deliberately:

A Delta Airlines flight from New York to Tel Aviv was delayed Monday night after ultra-Orthodox men and women refused to take their seats next to members of the opposite sex. Instead, the Haredi passengers decided to get off the plane, rather than take their assigned seats for the flight to Israel. Their baggage then had to be located and removed from the baggage compartment, causing the plane to take off about an hour and a quarter late.

Delta Airlines said that its flight, 468, from Kennedy Airport to Ben-Gurion Airport, which was to have landed on Tuesday at 14:35 would arrive late because a number of passengers had chosen to disembark.

According to the Jewish Press, the Haredi passengers told a Haredi website it wasn't the case:

“The airline messed up and threw their mistake on Haredi passengers,” one of the sources said. “Delta overbooked with 25 extra passengers, and when the company realized the embarrassment, they offered people a credit of $1,000 and a hotel room. A number of passengers jumped on the opportunity and disembarked, but it took around two hours before they could get their luggage off the plane.”

The source also claimed that the allegation that Haredim refused to sit in assigned seats is misleading because the overbooking caused a mix-up on where to sit. Yeshiva students on the plane wanted to sit with their friends and probably did not want to sit next to women, but this was no reason for the take-off to be delayed, they argued.

Even if that's so, any Haredi communities going by this absurdity are going to have to reevaluate their bizarre custom and recognize there's things much worse than sitting next to the opposite sex. And they definitely shouldn't exploit El Al's own weaknesses in policy because they think they can get away with it. If they think sexual arousal is something bad, that's ridiculous. That's not the worst thing that could happen at all. And as for having sex out of wedlock, even Christians who believe in abstinence until marriage don't think it's the worst thing in the world, so I don't see why the Haredis should either. They have to climb off their high horse.

Labels: haredi corruption, Israel, misogyny, Moonbattery, New York, United States