Tel-Chai Nation

For this week's special march against anti-female discrimination in Bnei Brak, local rabbis asked their constituents to refrain from any trouble:

Leading rabbis from Bnei Brak have called on residents not to interact with participants of a women’s rights protest march planned to take place in the predominantly Haredi city on Thursday evening.

“Do not end up in a confrontation with [protesters] in any way, shape, or form,” Rabbi Yitzchak Isaac Landa, an influential rabbi, said in a statement cosigned by several other local rabbis Thursday, ahead of the march. “Do not react to them, for better or worse, and do not end up around them. Certainly do not argue with them lest you desecrate God,” the text reads.

The march, which is planned to start in nearby Ramat Gan and end with speeches in Bnei Brak on Thursday night, comes in response to reports in the media in recent weeks on multiple incidents involving girls and women who said they’d been coerced, intimidated, ignored or denied service in connection with their sex aboard public transportation or in other public circumstances.

I'll give them this - at least they're wisely asking not cause any trouble for attendants, even on the issue of judicial reform. I will say it's a shame there's left-wing activists who organized this march. But let's consider the ultra-Orthodox, many of whom adhere to the socialist beliefs secular leftists are okay with, went and handed them a valid issue on a silver platter. There were, however, some leftists who didn't support this rally, interestingly enough:

Several prominent individuals have criticized the decision to hold the rally in Bnei Brak.

Tamar Ish-Shalom, a secular news presenter for Channel 13, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that she shares the impression that women are being excluded and harassed by some Haredim and that community leaders are largely silent on this issue. But “demonstrating against a whole section of the population, a whole city, men, women, and children, is not the way. It’s wrong on a moral level and may not serve the struggle, which is more important now than ever.” She called the planned march “wrong and unnecessary.”

Others defended the march. Tomer Persico, a lecturer at the Schechter Institute in Jerusalem and the Department for Comparative Religion of Tel Aviv University, said it was “necessary to demonstrate in Haredi cities, if this is done respectfully.”

He wrote on X that “the Haredi population needs to understand that its representatives have started a fight with the liberal public in Israel and that this public will not take it lying down: It will come at a price.”

Regarding the channel 13 reporter, I'm sorry, but when the very same community doesn't act responsibly and work to prevent aforementioned discrimination, and its leaders keep quiet on the topic, they're equally guilty as the culprits who committed the acts per se. So what a shame we've got here yet another media coward. But maybe it's not so surprising, considering this was a reporter for a left-wing channel who said that.

Now since we're on the subject, I was dismayed to see that a writer at Mishpacha, the mainly Haredi-catering magazine would rather take a victimology approach than argue whether Haredis are going on a most exaggerated path at the expense of the fairer sex:

The extremely well-organized and well-financed opposition has deliberately staged provocations designed to bring the “pushing women aside” issue to the fore. In one such incident, a group of bathing-suit-clad teenage girls got on a bus in Ashdod that was headed for a separate men’s beach. The bus driver told them to sit in the back of the bus. The girls subsequently told a Jerusalem Post reporter that they felt “helpless and humiliated” because the passengers on the bus “looked away from us to the floor. There were only chareidi people on the bus, and they did not react.”

Oh, so he's claiming this was all entirely a setup, is that it? As noted earlier, it was the driver who actually imposed a variation on Islamic shariah upon these girls and their boyfriends, not the Haredi passengers themselves, and they didn't have any serious issues with the girls and boys sitting together. And this columnist has the gall to obfuscate the details? For shame. What's he trying to prove anyway? All he's doing is evading questions of whether the Haredi community has allowed hysteria to get the better of them, and whether there even needs to be a Haredi community at all. Or whether there even needs to be dress codes for women. The above certainly doesn't aid this kind of column.

Now here's a more up to date item about the march, which says:

Protesters began marching from Ramat Gan’s Ayalon Mall towards the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak on Thursday night, according to Hebrew media.

The protest was organized by women's protest organizations and is intended as a counter-push to what they see as efforts to make Israel more religious and less equal.

[...] During the day, protesters appeared in Bnei Brak to face off against counter-protesters who held signs with messages such as, "The world cannot exist without the Torah".

For heaven's sake, nobody's saying the Torah's wrong, except the Haredis themselves, whether they think so or not. Because they don't provide any evidence to justify their censorious beliefs.

Previously, citing reasons such as that protests would only serve to further escalate tensions and result in conflicts, officials have refused to approve protests in Bnei Brak.

Well that was always cowardly, and the authorities made horrible errors that only made things worse, depending on the elements involved. Seeing what we arrived at, it's fortunate they were willing to it this time. Update: here's more from afterwards. Also more over here.

Labels: communications, haredi corruption, Israel, misogyny, Moonbattery