Muslim Virginity, Times Front Page

Es Nisht di Khale far a-Moytse!

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

Is an article like Muslim Women and Virginity: 2 Worlds Collide, which also appeared on the NY Times web site today under the titles In Europe, Debate Over Islam and Virginity and Surgery Offers Muslim Women Illusion of Virginity, really news, and did it belong on the front page?

I do not follow the Times as I do the Boston Globe, but the Times has also put MEMRI propaganda on the front page. Is there an ongoing propaganda effort to marginalize Muslims as primitive exotic Orientals alien to American norms?

Tamar Fox at Jewcy.Com pounced on the article to give the real dope about revirginization among Catholics without bothering to point out that Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish circles generally place at least as much importance on virginity as Muslims.

She asks: "Is faking virginity really the best way to deal with a young woman's sexuality?," but do all groups in modern society have to approach sexuality in exactly the same way?

Do all Muslims from Lithuania to South Africa or from Mauritania to Indonesia have exactly the same sexual morality? Or were Lithuanian Muslims traditionally like Lithuanian Christians and Jews, and is there perhaps a common Balkan or Arabic sexuality that correlates more with regional than with religious culture?

Because the Times article provides no contextualization, its purpose seems more to inculcate prejudice -- perhaps on the basis of superior American sexual practices -- than to provide any real information.

[Emancipation of Jews and Women discusses the connection between sexuality and chauvinism. Note that when Harvard Graduate Masoko Owada married Japanese Crown Prince Naruhito in 1993, and she had to be certified for virginity, the NY Times did not run a front page story on Japanese sexual morality.]

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Nationalen Sozialisten für Israel

This group maintains a blog at http://nasofi.blogspot.com/. The concept is not unreasonable. Zionism is simply ethnic Ashkenazi Nazism and is exactly comparable to German Nazism.

 

Both are politicized forms of völkisch racist ethnic fundamentalism.

 

In understanding the post-1939 hostility of German Nazism to Zionism, one must remember that Nazis from different ethnic groups are more naturally enemies than allies. Yet finding examples pro-Zionist and pro-Jewish Nazis is fairly easy. See Challenging the Holocaust Paradigm (especially the comments).

 

One can legitimately consider reflexive German support for Zionism today as a sort of vicarious German Nazism.

 

German neo-Nazis: We're pro-Israel, condemn anti-Semitism

Mon., June 09, 2008 Sivan 6, 5768

_{By Ofer Aderet, Haaretz Correspondent}

Nazis against anti-Semitism? As bizarre as that sounds, a group of Germans which calls itself "National Socialists For Israel" launched its Web site in support of Israel.

"Stop the hatred of the Jewish people," the Web site reads. "The Jews are a healthy, strong nation."

The organization - whose members have yet to reveal themselves to the public - claims that Israel's right to exist is anchored in the principles of social Darwinism, the same principles which the Nazis adopted prior to the Second World War.

"Israel earned the right to live among the nations [after emerging] from unending wars," the group writes on the site. "Israel also has a right to exist. This nation also has culture... The nation of Israel is appreciated... It is our duty, as neo-Nazis, to defend this supreme success. Not just for the German people and the European cultural sphere, but also, especially, for Israel."

As such, "Nazis for Israel" also leveled criticism at their colleagues in the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD), calling them "politicos, cowards, and reactionaries."

"Show us proof of a Jewish plot to dominate the world," they wrote in a rare manifesto which was posted on their Web site.

These unusual statements on the internet compliment the group's other public campaigns, including the dissemination of bumper stickers. One of the stickers features a picture of Reinhard Heydrich, the senior Nazi official who chaired the Wansee Conference where the Final Solution was hatched. Underneath the photo reads: "As a Nazi, I'm a Zionist."

Another sticker shows a photo of Israel Defense Forces soldiers during the Second Lebanon War under the heading: "2,000 years of struggling to survive - respect to those worthy of it."

In terms of the group's attitude towards the Holocaust, the organization says: "We must view what is referred to as 'the Holocaust' within the context of acts of self-defense undertaken by nations under threat." It added, however, "that there is no justification for it." Instead, the Nazis ought to have supported the Zionist cause, the group states.

The group claims it held its first meeting of activists in Berlin last month. It said the meeting touched on issues ranging from "solidarity with Israel, anti-Semitism, capitalism, and Islam."

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Playing the Islamic card (letters)

Followup: First Taste ME political violence

June 9, 2008

I WAS dismayed that Alan Dershowitz referred to Sirhan Sirhan's assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as the "beginning of Islamic terrorism in America" ("Slaying gave US a first taste of Mideast terror," Page A1, June 5).

Sirhan, a Christian Palestinian immigrant, said he was angry at Kennedy because he supported Israel in the 1967 war over the rights of the Palestinians. This was an instance of one Christian killing another Christian for political, not religious, reasons.

Why does Dershowitz conflate Palestinian with Islamic, other than to spread fear of Muslims? I think it is for a similar reason that he equates Israel with Judaism. Therefore, any criticism of Israel's policies toward Palestinians can be denounced as anti-Semitic.

MARILYN LEVIN
Arlington

ATTEMPTS TO spin the tragic assassination of Robert Kennedy as a prelude to today's problems between the United States and the Middle East collapse under the weight of the facts.

Alan Dershowitz's suggestion that a 40-year-old crime committed by a lone gunman - a Christian Arab who moved to the United States at age 12 - could be plausibly counted as "the beginning of Islamic terrorism in America" strains credulity. This is as absurd as Ayman al-Zawahiri's claim that the modern state of Israel is a direct extension of the medieval Crusades. Such illogical readings of the past do nothing to advance the mutual understanding between peoples that is so urgently required in today's world.

DARRYL LI
Cambridge
The writer is a doctoral candidate in anthropology and Middle Eastern studies at Harvard University.

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Followup - Executing Apostates: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism

The Public Editor and Luttwak

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

President Apostate? by Edward N. Luttwak (May 12, 2008) inspired flak from readers throughout the world as well as from my blog entry entitled Executing Apostates: Christianity, Islam, Judaism.

The NY

Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt (pictured to the right) responded with THE PUBLIC EDITOR; Entitled to Their Opinions, Yes. But Their Facts? (June 1).

 

Hoyt reaches an important conclusion: 

Shipley, the Op-Ed editor, said he regretted not urging Luttwak to soften his language about possible assassination, given how sensitive the subject is. But he said he did not think the Op-Ed page was under any obligation to present an alternative view, beyond some letters to the editor.

I do not agree. With a subject this charged, readers would have been far better served with more than a single, extreme point of view. When writers purport to educate readers about complex matters, and they are arguably wrong, I think The Times cannot label it opinion and let it go at that.

In the body of the column Hoyt points out some problems with Luttwak's assertions:

Did Luttwak cross the line from fair argument to falsehood? Did Times editors fail to adequately check his facts before publishing his article? Did The Times owe readers a contrasting point of view?

I interviewed five Islamic scholars, at five American universities, recommended by a variety of sources as experts in the field. All of them said that Luttwak's interpretation of Islamic law was wrong.

David Shipley, the editor of the Op-Ed page, said Luttwak's article was vetted by editors who consulted the Koran, associated text, newspaper articles and authoritative histories of Islam. No scholars of Islam were consulted because "we do not customarily call experts to invite them to weigh in on the work of our contributors," he said.

That's a pity in this case, because it might have sparked a discussion about whether Luttwak's categorical language was misleading, at best.

Interestingly, in defense of his own article, Luttwak sent me an analysis of it by a scholar of Muslim law whom he did not identify. That scholar also did not agree with Luttwak that Obama was an apostate or that Muslim law would prohibit punishment for any Muslim who killed an apostate. He wrote, "You seem to be describing some anarcho-utopian version of Islamic legalism, which has never existed, and after the birth of the modern nation state will never exist."

Luttwak made several sweeping statements that the scholars I interviewed said were incorrect or highly debatable, including assertions that in Islam a father's religion always determines a child's, regardless of the facts of his upbringing; that Obama's "conversion" to Christianity was apostasy; that apostasy is, with few exceptions, a capital crime; and that a Muslim could not be punished for killing an apostate.

The claim of consultation of authoritative histories is simply not credible, for the editors would have found that Islamic religious professionals just like Jewish religious scholars and Christian clergy tend to have an idealized view that generally does not correspond to the actual practices as I noted in Executing Apostates: Christianity, Islam, Judaism.

 

In addition, by discussing Islam in a vacuum and by failing to note that Jewish and Christian religious legal systems in theory and at times in history have punished apostasy with execution, Hoyt consciously or unconsciously supports the Islamophobic argument that Islam is somehow fundamentally different from Judeo-Christianity and intrinsically incompatible with American values.

 

Overall, the public editor's attempt to address to problems associated with Luttwak's op-ed is inadequate and tends to support anti-Muslim incitement on a subtler level.

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Followup: Harvard -- Jews Better Than Muslims

Jews and Exposing Muslim Women

 

This response is far more succinct than Harvard: Jews Better Than Muslims.

 

Letter to the Editor:

 

A separate and unequal exercise by Harry Lewis was beyond dumb. Jewish communities often provide women-only AND men-only swim time. If a group of men wants to have private swim time, let them ask Harvard. It is really perverted of Mr. Lewis to be so "outraged" at the reluctance of any female to reveal her skin to him. Is the Boston Globe becoming a trash tabloid?

 

Karin Friedemann

Boston, MA

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Harvard: Jews Better Than Muslims

According to Professor Harry Lewis

Letter to the Editor of the Boston Globe

 

Dear Editor:

 

Harvard Professor Harry Lewis should probably spend more time in working on computer programs and less in writing op-ed columns like A separate and unequal exercise (Boston Globe, March 25, 2008, see below).

 

Setting aside six hours so that Muslim women can exercise without the presence of men is just a minor supplement to providing separate locker rooms for men and women.

 

Such minor accommodation has no similarity to the ROTC total exclusion of homosexuals.  If Lewis fails to understand the difference, perhaps he should find a less prestigious school where he can become a member of the faculty.

 

In any case, some religious Jewish female students as well as lesbians uncomfortable with male harassment will probably avail themselves of the women-only six hours at Harvard athletic facilities.

 

Lewis crossed the line into Jewish Islamophobic incitement by suggesting that Jews are somehow ethically superior to observant Muslims when he comments, "Everyone can enjoy Harvard's kosher food."

 

Lewis is wrong. Kosher wine that has not been "cooked" according to halakhah (Jewish law) becomes ritually unfit if a non-Jew touches or pours it. While Harvard Hillel is unlikely to provide such wine at services or meals, Chabad does use it at invitation-only gatherings that exclude non-Jews in order to increase the feeling among Jews that they are separate or "chosen."

 

With even more obnoxiousness both Harvard Hillel and Harvard Chabad sponsor Birthright Israel.

 

This program gives Jewish students a free trip to Israel as their birthright even though the vast majority of modern Jews have no ancestral connection to Palestine whatsoever as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has recently pointed out in Shattering a National Mythology (Ofri Ilani, March 21, 2008) and in An invention called 'the Jewish people' (Tom Segev, February 29, 2008).

 

Birthright Israel excludes descendants of the native Palestinian population that Eastern European Jewish invaders ethnically cleansed in 1947-8.

 

The program is a racist slap in the face to all Palestinian members of the Harvard community.

 

Jewish faculty and staff should engage in some self-examination before dumping on Harvard Muslims, and the University administration should carefully consider whether Jewish bigots have enmeshed Harvard in a pattern of racist practices jeopardizing the University's status as a 501 (c) (3) organization to which contributions are tax deductible.

 

Harry Lewis should apologize to Harvard Muslims forthwith, and the University should discipline him for the moral turpitude associated with public expression of prejudice.

 

Joachim Martillo HC '78

Boston, MA

ThorsProvoni@aol.com

 

 

HARRY LEWIS A separate and unequal exercise By Harry Lewis  |  March 25, 2008 PERHAPS it is simple politeness for Harvard University to close its secondary gym to men for six hours a week so conservative Muslim women can exercise without men seeing their skin. Religious accommodations are usually uncontroversial, but this is different. Everyone can enjoy Harvard's kosher food; half the students are excluded from the gym, however briefly. Surely only those with the most mean-spirited interpretation of gender equality could object - yet complain they did. "Today I was forced to wait outside in the cold until 5," wrote one man. "The policy seems sexist and discriminatory." "These hours have been put in place for equality reasons," read Harvard's announcement. The decision apparently resulted from a paradoxical collaboration between the Women's Center, which greets visitors with a sign reading "All Genders Welcome," and adherents to a religion that imposes unequal social strictures on men and women. Harvard didn't explain its thinking, but it seems to have adopted a postmodern version of equality: Equality might be achieved only by imposing unequal access, if those seeking equality do not share the consensus view. Freedom is useless without comfort, so liberation of some might require exclusion of others. Whatever the logic, the university failed in its educational responsibility. It missed an opportunity to model for its students the kind of moral reasoning it expects of them. The resulting standards are inconsistent, and the muddle has a history. This conflict is rooted in Harvard's uncompromising interpretation of equality since 1977, which was a response to its decidedly unequal treatment of women for most of its past. When Harvard assumed full responsibility for women's education from Radcliffe, it adopted an absolute nondiscrimination standard. Everything is open to men and women on an equal basis - nothing is "separate but equal" except some athletic teams and choral singing groups. Most student organizations desegregated voluntarily. The venerable all-male Final Clubs, which the dean's office used to coordinate, refused to admit women and were severed from the university. Harvard's nondiscrimination policies now cover "race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, age," and a few other things, and the same absolutism applies to all categories. Harvard has no ethnic or single-sex housing. Women's groups have to allow male members. The Black Students' Association can't close white students out of its meetings. And, until now, the athletic department didn't bar the doors of the gym against male students. Absolutism is not the only ethical approach to discrimination issues. Fraternities and sororities fall afoul of Harvard's equal-access policy, but most colleges find them unproblematic in principle. Perhaps Harvard has just been out of step with that "real world" in which constructive segregation and special interests sometimes trump integrationist principles. The new stance seems generous and tolerant: Be nice to people, even if it means excluding others, as long as the benefit is significant and the injury is minor. Which brings us to ROTC. Harvard bans ROTC because the military violates the "sexual orientation" part of Harvard's nondiscrimination policy. Harvard students can participate in ROTC at MIT, but Harvard will not provide them meeting space or any other support - even bus fare down Massachusetts Avenue. If there were ever a special case, this is it. ROTC's discriminatory policy is US law. Until Congress repeals that law, Harvard should accommodate ROTC anyway, in the interests of the nation and of Harvard students wishing to serve it. The counterargument goes, however, that if ROTC were accommodated, the benefit to cadets would be far less significant than the injury to gays and lesbians. Indeed, some claim that no price would be too high for Harvard to pay for uncompromising adherence to its nondiscrimination policy, even the loss of all government funding, if it came to that. Is the gym exception merely a reasonable kindness to conservative Muslim women? Then Harvard's failure of courtesy to its cadets suggests that politics determine what forms of discrimination are inoffensive. That is not what Harvard should be teaching. Tolerance is good, but absolute nondiscrimination is preferable to such politicized tolerance. Harry Lewis is professor of computer science at Harvard and former dean of Harvard College. He is the author of "Excellence Without a Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future?" and coauthor of "Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion," which will be published in June.

© Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
 

 

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