Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Any Fundamentalist is Bad

Today I read a story about a group of fundamentalists causing havoc in their city. People forcing women off buses because they weren't wearing sufficiently modest clothes. Preventing men and women from socializing, to the point where men and women walk on opposite sides of the street, self-proclaimed morality police who go so far as to prevent the sale of mp3 players, even assaulting women who had the audacity to divorce their husband.

The city in question is Jerusalem and the fundamentalists in question are Haredi Jews. I say this not to cast aspersions on Jews, but to point out that fundamentalists of all creeds tend towards the same means and ends. Violence and isolation aimed at preserving some idealized status quo.

Hopefully, such actions will be condemned as strongly as similar actions from those of other creeds have been, but I think further coverage will be minimal since Israel is on the nominal good side in the current scheme of things. This is a double standard which I don't foresee being dropped anytime soon.

Ideally it would be the forces of intolerance and fundamentalism would be the ones being put on notice regardless of which particular creed they followed. Unfortunately, that is not yet the world we live in.

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