How a Modern Democracy Regresses to the Dark Ages

By empowering conservatives and freakazoids, of course.

This week, the Republican National Committee rejected 35 years of bipartisan U.S. diplomacy to declare itself in favor of genocide in the Middle East.

The Republican National Committee (RNC), at their winter meeting in New Orleans, unanimously adopted a resolution that appears to support a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"One-state solution" is neo-con for "eliminating all non-Jews from biblical Palestine and annexing the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights - and what the fuck, Jordan and southern Lebanon, too - into Greater Israel."

For more than 50 years, we liberals held up Israel as the epitome of the modern secular democracy. Israel's founders were secular socialists who despised the Orthodox freakazoid minority and worked hard to marginalize it.

That Orthodox freakazoid minority, by the way, vehemently opposed the establishment of the Nation of Israel 64 years ago, and loudly and repeatedly denied its very existence. Their objection was that according to their invisible sky wizard, only the return of the messiah could bring about the rebirth of Israel as a nation. Not even Palestinian terrorists were as shrill in their refusal to acknowledge Israel as were the Orthodox freakazoid minority.

That is the same Orthodox freakazoid minority which is now forcing its insanity on every aspect of Israeli society. Israel today is about half an inch away from being as fanatic and ridiculous a theocracy as Saudi Arabia or Iran.

Digby:

Perhaps we should all stop for a moment and contemplate how an advanced nation can suddenly take this regressive turn:

In the three months since the Israeli Health Ministry awarded a prize to a pediatrics professor for her book on hereditary diseases common to Jews, her experience at the awards ceremony has become a rallying cry.

The professor, Channa Maayan, knew that the acting health minister, who is ultra-Orthodox, and other religious people would be in attendance. So she wore a long-sleeve top and a long skirt. But that was hardly enough.

Not only did Dr. Maayan and her husband have to sit separately, as men and women were segregated at the event, but she was instructed that a male colleague would have to accept the award for her because women were not permitted on stage.

Though shocked that this was happening at a government ceremony, Dr. Maayan bit her tongue. But others have not, and her story is entering the pantheon of secular anger building as a battle rages in Israel for control of the public space between the strictly religious and everyone else.

At a time when there is no progress on the Palestinian dispute, Israelis are turning inward and discovering that an issue they had neglected — the place of the ultra-Orthodox Jews — has erupted into a crisis.

And it is centered on women.

“Just as secular nationalism and socialism posed challenges to the religious establishment a century ago, today the issue is feminism,” said Moshe Halbertal, a professor of Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University. “This is an immense ideological and moral challenge that touches at the core of life, and just as it is affecting the Islamic world, it is the main issue that the rabbis are losing sleep over.”

The list of controversies grows weekly: Organizers of a conference last week on women’s health and Jewish law barred women from speaking from the podium, leading at least eight speakers to cancel; ultra-Orthodox men spit on an 8-year-old girl whom they deemed immodestly dressed; the chief rabbi of the air force resigned his post because the army declined to excuse ultra-Orthodox soldiers from attending events where female singers perform; protesters depicted the Jerusalem police commander as Hitler on posters because he instructed public bus lines with mixed-sex seating to drive through ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods; vandals blacked out women’s faces on Jerusalem billboards.

Without wading into Israeli politics, let's just say that this is disturbing on any number of levels. But one thing is clear: fundamentalist religious influence always leads to the repression of women.

And there's nothing that says a Western democracy can't go backwards. It's the whole point of conservatism.

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Perhaps women, racial minorities and other "traditionally" second class citizens can be forgiven for being somewhat appalled at the idea that these people could be empowered even more than they already are. It's really not all that abstract to them.

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Devolution means regressing to traditional hierarchies. It's something those who were only recently second class citizens understand in their bones.

And of course that's just the way America's Xian freakazoid minority wants it. If the freakazoids can turn back the clock to the Dark Ages in a modern secular democracy like Israel, they can do it here, too.