from haAretz

If indeed I was ever there, I morphed from spiritual piety to contemplating seen and unseen, especially seen, decades or even lifetimes ago, reinforced during our Pennsylvania years as I watched the widely publicized shunning of a local area man, a husband and father, by his Amish community, for his refusal to submit to the authority, order and discipline of the religious elders, who were also in control of everyday life. Everyone, including his family, wife, children, parents, siblings, cousins, friends, in-laws, aunts and uncles, were forbidden to speak to him or have anything to do with him. He was "shunned". It was often in the evening news, and from Time to Time I used to see him or his family at the Saturday farmers' market in Camp Hill.

It must have been puzzling to his children, and confusing, mentally, emotionally distressing. Evil at its most elemental overlaying loyalty and love in the family, as poisonous as carbon monoxide seeping into the home while little ones sleep.

Those years of watching it, my first exposure to a faith equivalent of fascism, pretty much demonstrated to me the selfish, consumate evil of fundamentalist religion, driven as it is by certainty, and obsessed with power and control, the drive to force compliance among outsiders. It isn't just the Amish, gentle, meek and pious as they seem, under the cloud of thought-control and behavior direction. It's Big Brother in any number of orders, movements, denominations, drink-your-kool-aid religion and gather the political power to make everyone around you drink too. It's all over the nation and world, yes currently most prominently the Taliban, but the below essay, which I copy-and-pasted from Haaretz, a dissenting Israeli newspaper, suggests, discussing what fundamentalists do to women, that we have our own religious/political Taliban in America, offensively here in the protestant Bible-belt of the Old South and in non-protestant Christianity everywhere - - the rising darkness of religious fundamentalism coming to political power. 

With humans it has been ever thus, which, experiencing the tyranny of established religion in England, may be why our Founding Fathers gave us our First Amendment - - currently to increasingly lessening benefit of the American people as fundamentalism worms its way into state and national power structures, and finds ways to erode the liberties of, and force their ways upon, all who disagree with them; a troubling but nevertheless application of legal and constitutional tyranny in a somewhat democratic republic - - still and nevertheless part of the democratic process in action!

But then I remember, when I was studying American government at UFlorida and later in graduate school at UMichigan, when the term "protecting the rights of the minority" would come up, professors would respond, "what rights? specifically what rights?"

In a republic like ours, its democratic traditions and its citizens' "rights" only exist as long as those elected to power acknowledge and honor them. Otherwise there are no "rights" and the structure as it was crumbles. 

 



Haaretz

Opinion | From Texas to the Taliban, the Dark Politics of Fundamentalism Is Rising

The ties that bind the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, Texan lawmakers and Israel’s ‘Torah-true’ political parties – and the secular patrons who enable them


Anshel Pfeffer

2 Sep 2021


The late journalist Marie Colvin once described it to me, dismissively, as the “story every Western journalist in Kabul does.”


At that time, it was the story of the last two Jews living in Afghanistan, not speaking to each other due to some long-forgotten slight, maintaining their broygez in separate parts of the old shul in Kabul.


In the last few weeks, as the latest episode of the Afghan tragedy enfolded, journalists, both Israeli and international, eager for yet another personal angle on the saga returned to the story. This time, it was to the last Jew in Kabul, as Yitzhak Levi had died in 2005, leaving his old enemy Zabulon Simantov alone among the moldering relics of what was once a proud community. 


Would Simantov flee the country with the departing Americans? If he remained, how would the Taliban treat him? Why wasn’t he packing and queuing up outside the airport?


Compelling questions which thankfully were laid to rest by Haaretz’s Sam Sokol and Tzivka Klein of Makor Rishon when they reported that the real reason Simantov is holed up in Kabul has little to do with preserving Jewish history and everything to do with him being a massive piece of shit.


Simantov has a wife and two daughters living in Israel whom he has not seen for over two decades. The poor woman has for many years been begging her useless husband for a get, a traditional bill of divorce, which would have allowed her to resume her life without him.


Simantov however, who obviously has unlimited reservoirs of spite, which fed his dispute with Levi as well, refuses to grant her a get. If he were to emigrate to Israel, which is probably the only country that would have him, he would be exposed to various sanctions for his actions. 


There are countless tragic cases of individual Afghans in peril more worthy of attention. Simantov should fade into ignominy, and unless he’s prepared to finally sign that get, he and the Taliban are welcome to each other. But he continues to stick in my mind, only because his case serves as the most grotesque example of how religious fundamentalism works.


Not that the lamentable Simantov seems particularly devout, despite living in a synagogue, but religious fundamentalism, both of the Jewish and Muslim types, have served him well in ruining his wife’s life. Because all types of religious fundamentalism have a lot in common and controlling the lives and bodies of women is their universal trademark.


Various experts and pundits have expanded at length in recent weeks on the myriad reasons that 20 years of Western military presence in Afghanistan, and the trillion dollars the U.S. and its allies spent on trying to build up a new democratic Afghan state, failed so miserably. I’ve never had the chance to go to Afghanistan and therefore can’t point to any unique attributes in its history or culture, but I’d like to highlight one element which isn’t unique to that country. 


Fundamentalism, no matter of what religious brand or flavor, is extremely effective when combined with any of the other challenges to liberal democracy. Our own versions of Jewish or Christian fundamentalism in the West may seem more benign, since our days of burning heretics at the stake and stoning adulterous women may be in our more distant past, but the fundamental dynamics haven’t changed that much.


The Taliban didn’t topple the Afghan government because the Afghan people are any more religious or conservative than other countries, but because the corruption and dysfunction of the ersatz state put in place by the Americans was always going to be particularly vulnerable to the drive of religious fundamentalism.  


There is one basic difference of course. The Taliban, after 20 years, has re-established their Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, neighbor to the Islamic Republic of Iran just across the border. Fundamentalist theocracies are still rare, certainly in the twenty-first century. But the confluence of interests between fundamentalist groups and seemingly less religious politicians is clear to see.


For all that has been written about the rise of populist-nationalist leaders across the globe in the last couple of decades, one aspect that begs more attention is how they have all linked up with the most fundamentalist-minded elements of their local religious establishments, to acquire and perpetuate their power.


Be it Donald Trump and his ardent Christian evangelical supporters, Narendra Modi and his Hindutva base, Vladimir Putin and the Russian Orthodox church or Benjamin Netanyahu and his Haredi allies. The story repeats itself wherever you go.


Of course, no-one anywhere wants to be compared to the Taliban. After all, they cover women from head-to-toe and then force them to stay home. I mean, no one does that. Not even the Iranian Shia fundamentalists, who allow their women to show their faces and even have two or three of them as ministers in government and a few more in parliament.


Our own Jewish fundamentalists are slightly more permissive in body covering: faces and necks can be exposed, as long as everything is covered. But heaven forbid Shas or United Torah Judaism ever let a woman, no matter how well-concealed, represent them in the Knesset.


Christian fundamentalists get to dress more freely, and can be politicians and even Supreme Court judges – as long as they vote to deny women control over their own bodies.


This is not about religion per se. Last week, we saw in the White House the first openly religious Israeli prime minister meet a president who by all accounts, takes his Catholic faith quite seriously. Both men came to office overcoming secular leaders who had rock-solid alliances with the fundamentalists. And while neither of them have framed their victory in those terms, the fundamentalists certainly have.


A significant faction among U.S. Catholic bishops are in favor of denying communion for Joe Biden due to his support of abortion rights. The leaders of Israel’s Jewish fundamentalist parties have castigated the Bennett government as a “desecration of God’s name,” “the uprooting of Judaism in the land,” and called on their followers to boycott its members. Yet the fundamentalists were perfectly fine with the so obviously godless Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. 


Fundamentalism is essentially about insisting upon only one truth and one legitimate way of life. But what they lack for in religious flexibility, they make up for in political pragmatism. If they can’t achieve absolute power by co-opting the corrupt and suborning the susceptible, they are prepared to become partners in power with the populists. No matter how secular those populists are.


Because fundamentalism is basically authoritarianism couched in religious language, and dictators and the autocracy-adjacent will always find it easier to engage with each other than with democrats. And the fastest way to assert control over an entire group of people is by first controlling half of it.


When it comes to the rising power of religious fundamentalism, women are always the canaries in the mine. It’s as true this week in the State of Texas as it is on the streets of Kabul. It’s about time we started calling this threat to the freedoms of all of us, women and men of all faiths and none, by its real name.


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pic: 1935 Hudson Terraplane. The fabric roof insert was fast being obsoleted by new metal forming/bending fabrication process that yielded such as General Motors' new Turret Top: