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The British Government Wants to Shut Down a Jewish School for Declining to Teach Eight-Year-Olds about Homosexuality

The United Kingdom’s Office of Standard in Education has censured a ḥasidic girls’ school three times for its refusal to teach its students—who range in age from three to eight—the latest ideas about homosexuality and “gender reassignment.” Now the school is threatened with closure, as Elliot Kaufman explains:

Even though it appears to excel at teaching secular subjects—a challenge for many Orthodox schools—the school [according to the official report] does not “teach explicitly about issues such as sexual orientation” and thereby “restricts pupils’ spiritual, moral, social, and cultural development and does not promote equality of opportunity in ways that take account of differing lifestyles.” Consequently, the inspectors conclude, “pupils are not able to gain a full understanding of fundamental British values.” It is important to remember that they are writing about girls under the age of eight.

This is nothing short of the imposition of secular dogma. The government’s arrogance is astounding; how exactly do they presume to know what is necessary for the “spiritual” and “moral” development of these Orthodox girls? In that realm, bureaucrats are simply out of their depth and unfit to dictate rules to parents who know well enough how to raise their own children. Indeed, why should we presume that the bureaucrats’ fashionable dogmas about “lifestyles” are any wiser than the dogmas of the rabbinic or Christian traditions?

Simply put, religious liberty is an empty promise if it does not extend to the education of children. That is the issue here. Orthodox children will be fine, productive members of society even if they do not approve of gender reassignment. Far more important than crushing all dissent on issues of sexuality and gender is preserving the bedrock right peaceably to express one’s religion. Is this any less a “fundamental British value” than teaching about gender reassignment to prepubescent children?

Read more at National Review

More about: Freedom of Religion, Hasidism, Homosexuality, Jewish education, Religion & Holidays, United Kingdom

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic