Beware
the
Modesty Police

Harold Hark prefatory comments:

Male religious fundamentalism: The root of all evil?

The following article should make it clear that Islamic fundamentalism is not alone in its hatred of evolution. It is equally joined by the fundamentalist wings of Judaism and Christianity.

Each fundamentalist group has its way of enforcing primitive beliefs in the fire-breathing demon they call "God". Each is willing to enslave or murder to maintain this evil delusion.

Islamic fundamentalism condemns women to death by stoning them for the sin of extra-marital sex (while exacting no retribution on the male partner). Christian fundamentalism bombs abortion clinics and cynically manipulates the wallets of its ignorant followers. And ultra-Orthodox Jews, combining simple-minded naivety in a world advanced far beyond their Biblical mindset, with the hubris that sees themselves as the chosen people of God, continue to treat the Palestinians as if they were sub-human.

Read it with much gnashing of the teeth.

Net closes on Illana
Michele Gershberg
The Australian IT, 6 August 2002

TEL AVIV: Ilana has come to rue the day she ever bought a computer.

The 27-year-old petite mother of four never dreamt the terminal she brought home to study web page design would make her an outcast in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish town where she lives and turn her life into a waking nightmare.

Ilana's former husband, in the heat of divorce proceedings, complained to the ultra-Orthodox "modesty police"--a self-organised community watchdog for breaches of religious purity in Israel--about the computer she brought into the home and the CD-ROMs she viewed with her children.

Members of the modesty police confiscated the machine and threatened to take her children away in legal proceedings in ultra-Orthodox courts, she says.

But Ilana's "sin" is almost as widespread in her community as in any secular society, though few suffer such punishment.

Media experts on the ultra-Orthodox community estimate that computers have made their way into 80 per cent of its households, many of which still shun such windows to the modern world as television sets and mass-circulation newspapers.

In addition, an entire industry of movies, talk shows and other entertainment specially tailored to the conservative morals of the ultra-Orthodox has emerged in the past few years in the form of compact discs viewed on computers. But even the careful efforts to produce "kosher" content have not spared them the wrath of rabbis who issue decrees against sinful CDs and view computers as a gateway to yet another abomination, the internet.

In some cases, one user is made to be an example. "They called my mother and my two best friends and told them I work in a brothel. They also said I'm a lesbian and if (my friends) don't cut all ties with me, their children will be pulled out of the school system and their pictures would be plastered on every street," Ilana says. "When you get a call from the modesty police...you are scared to death, just like in Russia when the KGB came knocking," says Ilana, who immigrated from Moscow in 1990 and embraced the strict Jewish religious lifestyle as a teenager.

The allegations are among the harshest against a woman in the religiously conservative society, but opponents of computers mince no words against the technology either. "We live in a licentious generation unparalleled since the days of the flood (of Noah)," declares a pamphlet issued by a self-appointed Rabbinical Court on Computers.

"The modern age with its mighty means floods our streets with the culture of sinners...internet, movies, computer games, secular songs disguised as religious tunes, the garb of Sodom and Gomorrah...modernisation turned out streets into hell."

The technology first made headway among the religious as an indispensable work tool in a country whose hi-tech prowess is compared to that of Silicon Valley.

From there it was a short leap to using the terminals for recreation, an unknown phenomenon for the observant, who believe they must live in God's service, not in pursuit of leisure. "We wake up in the morning and know exactly how our day will look religiously-speaking," a developer of controlled internet access for religious Jewish institutions, Yossi Miller, says. "We know which shoe we will put on first...which arm should be put into its sleeve first."

Ilana eventually got her computer back, but only after they had removed its CD-ROM drive and modem. Unrepentant, she says she will continue to use it.

"There may be a group of primitive and square people who still think they can control the situation," she said. "But people need education, they need to make a living and to be just a little bit more intelligent."

Reuters

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