Posted on 06/02/2016 5:10:43 PM PDT by SJackson
The New York Times takes issue with women-only hours at a public swimming pool in Brooklyn. Photo: Wikipedia.
The latest salvo in the New York Times campaign against Orthodox Judaism is an editorial condemning the New York City Parks department for accommodating religious swimmers — and, for that matter any other women who prefer not to be gawked at by men while bathing — by providing women-only hours at a public swimming pool in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
The Times complains of what it calls a “strong odor of religious intrusion into a secular space.” The classically nasty antisemitic trope of accusing Jews of emitting a distinctive odor has been in the news recently as the result of a Harvard law student asking a visiting Israeli lawmaker why she was so “smelly,” drawing a condemnation from the dean of the law school. The Times didn’t see fit to cover that story; if it had, perhaps the editorial writers would have been more careful in their word choice.
But poor word choice is only the beginning of the trouble with this editorial.
It also displays alarming ignorance of the political geography of Brooklyn. The editorial refers to Dov Hikind as “the local assemblyman.” But Mr. Hikind represents Borough Park and Midwood, not Williamsburg, which is miles away. It’s almost as if those Times editorial writers can’t tell one smelly Jewish neighborhood, or politician, from another.
Additionally — and not least — the Times editorial is massively hypocritical. Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, the grandmother of the publisher of the Times, was from 1937 to 1968 a board member of Barnard College, a women-only institution. We’re waiting for the Times editorials calling on the federal government to cut off research funding and Pell Grant availability to Barnard, on the grounds that its doors are closed to male students. The Times complains that allowing women-only swimming for a few hours a week at one of the city’s many public pools renders the pool “unmoored from the laws of New York City and the Constitution, and commonly held principles of fairness and equal access.” What about a man who wants to attend Barnard?
The Times, in a 1997 editorial, even acknowledged, albeit grudgingly, that “it is possible that offering quality single-sex education as part of a diverse menu of voluntary choices available to all public-school children could pass muster under Federal civil rights law and the Constitution.” So single-sex math and gym classes can be acceptable, at least in theory, but if a New York woman wants to swim some laps in her bathing suit without the male gaze, the Times declares that it is prima facie unconstitutional? It’s almost enough to make a person imagine that what the Times is against is not taxpayer-funded single-sex environments, but anything that Orthodox religious Jews — most of whom, by the way, are paying taxes for public schools that they do not use — might find useful or enjoyable.
There’s one final way in which the Times editorial is hypocritical, which is its rejection of what it calls “a theocratic view of government services” or the “odor of religious intrusion into a secular space,” and its preference, instead, for what it calls “public, secular rules.” There are at least two recent instances where the Times itself pleaded for religion to influence public policy.
There was the June 2, 1962 editorial, headlined “Guilt,” in which the Times reacted to Israel’s execution of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann by concluding, “The statesmanship that might help us today is found in several of the great religions. It is known to many of us as the Sermon on the Mount.”
And, as Adam White astutely pointed out on Twitter, there was a September 2015 editorial, “Pope Francis’ Challenge to America,” in which the Times delighted in the Pope’s pressing Congress to abolish the death penalty, save the environment and fight income inequality.
In other words, when it’s liberal Christian ideas influencing public policy, the Times seems to be considerably less absolutist in its opposition to theocracy. It’s only when Orthodox Jews are around that the Times turns up its nose at the “strong odor of religious intrusion.”
If anything stinks around here, it’s not the Jewish swimmers, but the ignorance and double standards of the Times editorialists.
FIRED.
Socialists want to goosestep so badly they trip over themselves.
The NYTimes is becoming famous for their “smell” of bigoted stupidity.
Bingo.
Also, if it were billed as a lesbian event, the Times would applaud with glee.
Yes, indeed there was. That was my first thought.
But Jewish or Christian women? THAT they find galling.
How about Muslim prayer rooms in airports?
The only citizens are the secularists.
Same thing with the schools. The only parents who paid taxes were the atheists, who of course didn’t want beliefs opposed on their children, so the atheists were allowed to impose their beliefs on other people’s children, whose parents also pay taxes.
If you’re not an atheist and pay school taxes, you should be getting a rebate.
My Filipina wife says that all the Filipinos say the muslims smell very bad
Just say their moose limbs
Problem solved
Thanks S Jackson.
I don’t have a problem with whatever accommodation a private industry wants to offer to its customers - that seems to be something driven by the marketplace, and something that businesses should decide on their own. (If they do things like letting men into the women’s bathrooms, they’ll suffer the consequences. I’m wondering again: what happens when a Muslim woman is freaked-out because she finds a strange man in the bathroom with her?)
As far as public swimming pools and religions go: If you have ‘women-only’ swim-time, then all of the women can have their time together, out of the ‘male gaze’. The Jewish ladies can swim with the Muslim ladies. Problem fixed.
People keep trying to solve things with ‘general rules’. but nothing is ever solved that way. Expediency is often an excuse these days to impose ideology upon others.
-JT
Liberals are surprisingly silent on Europe adopting women’s only swimming hours and train cars - and not out of religious preference of the women but to protect them from rape and hands up their skirts by Muslim men.
I worked at a swimming pool during the summer when I was a teen. My favorite time of the week was Thursday mornings. It was women only.
But what if I now identify as a Jewish woman? Can I go?
Their distaste is spectacularly selective.
Maybe the NYT should change their name to Die Sturmer.
The author has identified the above culprit as Husam El-Qoulaq, a third-year student at Harvard Law School and a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions activist.
https://canarymission.org/individuals/husam-el-qoulaq/
Some of his dhimmi friends at HLS have come to his defense.
Can the Muslim women prohibit Jewish women from swimming in the same pool? Are there not swimming hours specifically limited to Muslims, prohibiting ALL others fromentering?
Or does the NY Times only discriminate against those religions it discriminates against?
"Women" brought the "wo" to men.
;)
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