I never fail to be amused at how people become rattled and even irate at what is or isn’t going on in other people’s countries, societies, cities or homes while ignoring the exact same issues right under their noses.
Take Bush’s “love us because we’re Americans” person Karen Hughes, who recently toured our region shedding crocodile tears over the “poor, trampled-upon Arab woman”, who isn’t even allowed to drive herself to the supermarket. As Steven I. Weiss of The Forward points out, women who live in New York’s Hassidic village of New Square aren’t even permitted to sit in the front seat of the car, let alone grab the wheel.
And by the way, in case you think I’m talking about New York, circa 1870, or some namesake of the American business capital in some unpronounceable backwater of the planet, I’d better put you straight. This is happening today in the United States of America.
The women of the 7,000-strong enclave are further forbidden from riding bicycles and, worse, men and women must walk on opposite sides of the street on penalty of being ostracized by the religious community. Where is Ms. Hughes when she’s needed at home?
Indeed, when she gets back from her overseas finger-wagging, she might like to mosey on down to Pennsylvania Dutch country and lecture the Amish — who say publicly that women are inferior to men — on the way they their women are treated. These women (and men) are forbidden from traveling in motorized vehicles so the issue of whether a woman should there is a moot point.
In Amish country, where phones and televisions are also banned, a woman is valued according to how much work she can do in the home and the fields and, more importantly, how many offspring she can produce. Those who fail to marry for any reason are thought of as “old girls” and stigmatized.
But Ms. Hughes is far from being the only woman daring enough to throw stones from a glass house, Maayan Jaffe writing in the Israeli daily Arutz Sheva is passionate about a cause dear to her heart.
“The stories of pain and torture chill every bone in my body,” goes Jaffe’s dramatic prose. And, no, she isn’t talking about Guantanamo, Bagram or Abu Ghraib.
“Trembling, I sit before half-a-dozen women in the Lev L’Achim rehabilitation center for battered women, learning about how they lost their independence, lost their happiness, lost their lives...”
Worthy stuff, on the surface of it, but here comes the nub: “These women have been rescued from the misery of life in their husband’s Arab villages”, and they’re all Jewish.
Jaffe claims she has learned a lot from investigating Jewish-Arab intermarriage “but mostly I have come to realize this: The Arabs are trying to steal our land. Through their rhetoric, they are trying to do away with the inherent Jewish connection to Eretz Yisrael, and through their violence eradicate the Jewish people.”
In that case, a few million willing Arab bridegrooms with the right credentials are required. Could Omar Sharif or Kasem El-Saher be cloned?
Apparently, there are currently 25,000 Israeli Jewish women either married to or “involved with” Arab men, who according to Jaffe, they meet at work, on the bus “or even on the street”. Then, as soon as these Arab Lotharios, bent on destruction of the Jewish race, lure their innocent prey into the kitchen, the Jewish women are beaten and treated as slaves, says Jaffe, sounding more and more as though she’s just stepped out of the Twilight Zone.
“This is where Lev L’Achim comes in,” writes Jaafe. “Members of the anti-assimilation division launch clandestine missions to rescue women who are trapped in their husband’s Arab villages” before being taken to a hostel “where security cameras monitor the electrically-locked door.
There, they are given the chance to make a new start but wonder of wonders they often “think they still harbor affection for their former Arab husbands” with whom they have lived for many years and with whom they have had children. Well...well...fancy that! They actually love their husbands.
Jaafe’s article finishes with a plea to her compatriots. “We cannot sit idly by and let Jewish women fall into Arab hands,” she says. “We can’t allow even one daughter or sister to be lost,” adding, “Each woman stolen by an Arab abuser is a generation of children vanished”.
Apart from the inherent racism in this over-the-top, conspiracy theorist screed, Jaafe is apparently unconcerned about Israeli Jewish women abused by Jewish husbands or Israeli Arab women abused by Arab husbands. And, according to an article by Janet Silver Ghent, there are plenty of both. She says domestic violence in Israel is on the rise and approximately 200,000 Israeli women are battered annually with 40,000 reaching emergency wards.
In Jaafe’s fervor to save Jewish women from Arab abusers, she has also forgotten the 3,000-5,000 women, who have been smuggled into Israel during the last four years to be sold into prostitution at public auctions for up to $10,000, or so say the BBC.
As a woman, who has spent my life trotting around the world doing very much as I please, and who is lucky enough to have a wonderful supportive husband, I have every sympathy for oppressed women and fully respect caring individuals who seek to liberate them. But here’s the caveat.
People who use the misfortunes or the struggles of others so as to make a self-interested political statement are nothing less than despicable. There’s a word for those who allow the weeds to flourish in their own gardens, while criticizing their neighbor’s plots...hypocrites.
