As a non-Orthodox Jew of the political centre-right, I find myself in a position of increasing opposition to the virulent, authoritarian and sometimes dangerous left wing attitudes and behaviour being shown by Rabbonim of Britain’s Reform and Liberal Judaism movements. Whilst like any other reasonable person, I accept that others will have different political and religious views to those that I hold, a recent article in the Jewish News by Liberal Judaism’s Director of Strategy, Rabbi Charley Baginsky, shocked me to the core.
In this article she attacked, using to my mind, remarkably intemperate language for a Rabbi, those parents who wish to remove their children from Religious Education (RE) lessons or from trips to mosques. She called these parents, who may have good and sound reasons for not wishing their children exposed to teaching that may be biased and pro-Islam, ‘bigots’ and ‘prejudiced’. She said that parents should be prevented from removing their children from RE lessons in order to tackle ‘Islamophobia’.
This is a blatantly authoritarian view and not one that I would, or should, have expected from a Rabbi of Liberal Judaism. This is because Liberal Judaism was originally founded on the principle that there can, and should be, a diversity of opinion and indeed practise in religion.
In Liberal Judaism, for example, it is not compulsory or expected for example for men or women to wear prayer shawls or cover their heads, though most men do wear a skullcap during services and there are no restrictions on women being in religious leadership positions in a religious community, which is the case in Orthodox Judaism. Also, things like observance of the dietary laws of Judaism, such as the strict prohibition against cheeseburgers for example, which are mandatory in Orthodoxy, in Liberal Judaism, are left to the personal choice and conscience of the individual Jew.
In the past, Liberal Judaism has been truly liberal in the best sense of the word, with a wide variety of opinions, both political and religious, being tolerated and encouraged. Liberal Judaism has also been at the forefront of moves to give every Jew, whether they are gay or straight, male or female, black or white, an equal opportunity to be heard. In the main this has been achieved by re-interpretations of the Torah for our modern times, and sometimes these are or have been radical ones. However, this classically liberal situation has changed very much for the worse over the last decade or so. Liberal Judaism has seemingly abandoned true liberalism and embraced authoritarianism, socialism and most worryingly, the appeasement of Islam. This woeful situation has come about not just because of left-wingery by individual, more junior Rabbonim, but by the rise to senior positions of those who seem to want to hammer the square peg of secular socialism into the round hole of Torah. This decade-plus period has seen some individuals come into the Rabbinate with left wing views that could best be described as extreme. Some of these far Leftists are now, as Rabbi Baginsky is, in positions of both influence and power within Liberal Judaism and outside of it with LJ’s partner organisations and those who make decisions about the sort of public policy that affects all of us, whether we are Gentile or Jew, or on the political Left or Right.
Unfortunately Rabbi Baginsky is not the only LJ Rabbi who has authoritarian views or who has made bad choices of campaigns or has consorted with political and religious extremists, there are others. This blog for example has documented the case of Rabbi Janet Darley of Liberal Judaism, now retired from her pulpit, who has shared a platform with the left wing and pro-Islam group Citizens UK and with the Islamic extremist Shakeel Begg of Lewisham Mosque. Shakeel Begg, as many people will know, is the Imam of the mosque at which the Islamic murderers of Fusilier Lee Rigby worshipped and he is a man proven in a civil court to be an Islamic extremist who called for ‘Zionists’ to be fought. Shakeel Begg is an individual that no responsible Rabbi or anyone else should share a platform with, due to his Islamic extremism and his mosque’s association with terrorism. Another Rabbi, Janet Burden, took an appallingly bad moral decision to side with the Gypsies and Travellers who illegally developed the Dale Farm site in Essex. Back in 2011 she made statements to the Guardian newspaper backing the Gypsies and Travellers who had made life a complete misery for local law-abiding, settled local people. Disgracefully, she used this media statement to draw equivalence between the often criminal and antisocial Gypsies and Travellers and Britain’s Jews. This was a statement that was not only dishonest but also insulting to Jews and that can be shown via evidence of crime rates and other data. In my opinion, supporting those who break the law without good cause, such as the Travellers of Dale Farm, is a perversion of the concept of justice. Rabbi Burden should not have promoted the interests of the law breaking Travellers above the interests of law abiding local people. This is most surely not behaviour that defends ‘the peace of the City’, which a Rabbi should be promoting.
Senior Rabbis in Liberal Judaism are also intimately connected to the Labour Party, despite the party’s ongoing anti-Semitism scandal. This association is so deep that the Liberal Judaism Chief Executive / Senior Rabbi Danny Rich was yesterday voted in as a Labour councillor in the West Finchley ward of the London Borough of Barnet. At a time when it should be somewhat beyond the moral pale for a high profile Jew to support Corbynite Labour because of Labour anti-Semitism, Rabbi Rich has deepened the connection between his religious movement and a party that has become the natural home for Islamic and left wing Jew haters.
The point of this rather lengthy introduction, before we get to the meat of the issue of a Rabbi stomping on parental rights, is to show that we are not just dealing with one rogue Rabbi here. Leftist Rabbis and other influential people in the Liberal Jewish movement have relentlessly promoted and hired those with left wing views. The result of this advancing Leftist mindset is that there appears to have been a left wing takeover of Liberal Judaism. This may not have been what the founders of what became Liberal Judaism intended, when they founded the Jewish Religious Union over a century ago. This is not good for Liberal Judaism itself and neither is it good for the image of Jews as a whole in Britain today.
Now we get to Rabbi Baginsky’s article itself. It would only be fair to reproduce all her article from the Jewish News and deal with it line by line, which I shall do. As is usual policy for this blog the original text from Rabbi Baginsky is in italics whereas this blog’s comment will be in plain text.
Rabbi Baginsky said, in response to the question: ‘Should prejudiced parents be allowed to remove their children from lessons about Islam’
Unusually for a question answered by a rabbi, this one can be resolved in just one word – NO.
I disagree with the Rabbi on this for several reasons. Firstly because such a ban would interfere greatly with parental rights and freedoms. Respect for parental rights includes a parent’s right to guide their children’s spiritual and moral outlook by the means and path of their choice. This is a right that has benefited many British families in the past, whether they be atheist, Christian, Jewish or a follower of any other peaceful religious path. Rabbi, the right that you have to bring up your children, if you have any, in the manner that you may choose, is encompassed by the very parental right that you are attacking. My second point of disagreement with the Rabbi’s statement is the use of the word ‘prejudiced’. I am not at all sure that these parents are removing their children from Islam lessons merely because of prejudice, as the Rabbi said. From my observations of the phenomenon of parents removing their children from Islam lessons, some of whose stories this blog has covered, they do not involve parents who know nothing about Islam, which could constitute a prejudice, but instead it is because they know quite a bit about this ideology. As far as I can see from previous stories about this issue and reading social media posts from such refusenik parents, these parents know a lot about Islam. They don’t like it, as is their moral right, and because of this knowledge they do not want their children exposed to what may well be dishonest propaganda lessons, that revolve around the lie that Islam the ideology is a ‘religion of peace’. As subjects or citizens, we can perceive perfectly well the evidence of our own eyes and of our own often diligent researches, which can show that although many individual Muslims may be peaceful, Islam as an ideology is plainly not so peaceful. I contend that these many peaceful individuals of Muslim background, surface belief or heritage, are peaceful not because of Islam, but in spite of it.
As the parent of a child who is approaching school age, I can assure the learned Rabbi that I do not wish my right and duty as a parent to guide my child’s moral and religious education to be removed. This is what would occur if I and other parents were denied the right to remove our children from Islam lessons that we either suspect or can prove are teaching dangerous falsehoods about the ideology of Islam. The Rabbi’s suggestion that our rights to guide our children morally and to lead them on paths that are honest and based on evidence be removed, is a monstrously authoritarian suggestion, which pays scant respect to the genuine human rights of these parental Islam dissenters.
I can assure this Rabbi that when the time comes for my child to go to school, I will also be one of those telling that school that I will not consent to them being subjected to what I believe is indoctrination about an ideology that I and many others consider to be a threat. My child will not be taken to a mosque or encouraged to bow down to an Islamic deity that is cruel and bloodthirsty and which has never, unlike the G-d of Israel, given its human subjects the free will which has been vital in causing humanity to grow in stature and knowledge as a species. I will fight for my child’s right to be uncontaminated by an ideology that is for me akin to that of Stalinism or Nazism, because of its inbuilt and avaricious hatreds. I would no more want my child told in history lessons that Stalin or Hitler were good people, than I would want them told that a 7th century murderer, robber and paedophile, whose ideology has inspired the rape and murder of millions, is a man to be emulated or admired.
Like most, I was shocked to read reports – stemming from the Association of Teachers and Lecturers’ annual conference – that parents with prejudices, including Islamophobia, want to remove their children from certain lessons or visiting places of worship.
I’m not surprised at this at all. I’m certainly not shocked. The followers of Islam, not all of them I must concede, but a goodly number of them, have not behaved well. I don’t need to go into too much detail on this here, but it is plain to those who live outside of the bubble of the religious Left that Rabbi Baginsky seems to live in, that all too many of Britain’s Muslims do not have the best interests of Britain’s Christian, Jewish, atheist, Sikh, Hindu or whatever subjects at heart, or even in their world-view. This has been noticed by the people who often have to suffer Islam-related problems, such as sex crime, violence and other antisocial behaviour. These same people have also noticed that what is being taught in school about Islam is radically different from the Islam that they see with their own eyes. They, rightly in my view, perceive dishonesty in what the schools are teaching about Islam and equally rightly do not want their children exposed to what they see as pro-Islam propaganda. In my opinion, which I base not on prejudice, but on my accumulated knowledge of Islam, these parental refuseniks are correct in not wanting their children indoctrinated with unnaturally positive messages about an ideology that they see causing problems daily.
I also have to take issue with the Rabbi’s use of the word ‘Islamophobia’. Islamophobia is not a real thing. If she means anti-Islam hostility, then she should say so. A phobia, according to most definitions, is a fear of something about which there are no real grounds to be scared. There is nothing to be genuinely scared of about balloons, or clowns, the dark, cats or open spaces. This is because phobias are irrational and often groundless. This is not the case with anti-Islam hostility. This comes from a genuine and well-founded disgust and fear of an ideology which has violence and hatred running through it, like the name of a seaside town on a stick of rock. People are right to fear and be hostile to Islam because it often acts, as the Talmud states, like ‘someone who is coming upon you with intent to kill you’ and therefore we have the moral right to defend ourselves. However we should not do this by, as the Talmud said ‘getting up earlier and killing your potential assailant’, but instead by stating clearly why fear and disgust about Islam are not irrational and are indeed based on verifiable evidence. I do not wish to kill, the Torah of course tells me not to, but I find I do not and cannot have any goodwill towards an ideology, that on numerous occasions in its scripture, states that Jews should be murdered.
One such letter from a parent to the school was so full of racist language that authorities had to be informed.
This sentence sums up in a few words the cesspit that Britain has become. We should not be in the position that we are in, with teachers acting as petty police informers and doing this for politically motivated reasons. We should be disgusted at the way that teachers have now become that most hated of creatures, the grass and how they are using the power and threat of the State to coerce parents out of what Orwell called ‘wrongthink’. It saddens me greatly to see a Rabbi, of all people, appearing to be so ambivalent to the wrongness of the concept that the teachers the subject pays to teach their children, are betraying the idea of freedom of conscience. Does the Rabbi not remember that our ancestors crossed the Sea of Reeds under the outstretched arm of the Eternal One, from slavery into freedom? Do not the refusenik parents, no matter what language they use, not also deserve the right to the same sort of freedom to believe and freedom of conscience as we or anyone else does?
To stand against, or to be ambivalent, to the idea of freedom of choice or conscience with regards children’s education, as this Rabbi is doing, is to my mind a little bit like a Hebrew slave deciding that he would rather be standing with Pharaoh as a slave, rather than making the bold flight to freedom. This is really not a good or moral position for a Rabbi to be taking.
This is clearly indefensible. These lessons are vital to preparing children to live in modern Britain alongside people of multiple faiths and none and the bigotry of their parents should not be able to prevent this.
Why are these parental views or voices ‘indefensible’? They are no more indefensible than the right that anybody of any religious belief or none has, to bring their children up as they choose. I know of many Jews who attended schools which were either run by or influenced by the Established Church, who opted out of religious services or religious education at their parent’s request. This seems to have left them with no real negative effect when it came to their knowledge of Britain’s majority Christian derived culture. In effect this Rabbi is expressing the very authoritarian view that parents have little or no rights over their offspring. I find this attitude both chilling and disappointing coming from a Rabbi. I also find it shameful to hear such authoritarian words coming from a branch of Judaism that used to exemplify the ideas of individual choice and conscience and of open and honest debate.
However, there is debate as to whether parents should be able to pull their kids out of religious education lessons, because of their own deeply-held religious beliefs.
There should be no debate about this. Parental rights should come ahead of others in this area, including the rights of the educators, who are, after all, supposed to be the servants of us the public. To deny parents the right to opt out of religious education for their children is counter to the principle, that it is believed originated with Queen Elizabeth I, that the government or the monarch, should ‘not have windows on men’s souls’. This Rabbi is opposing a basic right that all should have and that is to teach their children or have them taught according to the dictates of their conscience. I must admit I’m pretty disgusted to see a Rabbi, standing against the concept of free will and free choice, it’s as incongruous and wrong as it would be to visit a otherwise Kosher restaurant that had bacon sandwiches on sale. Restricting freedoms in this manner should not be what a truly liberal Jewish person should be about.
If you are devout, then surely putting belief in God up to academic scrutiny seems odd. If you believe your children are on the right path, should it be challenged?
There is nothing wrong with intellectual challenge, this is not what is at the core of this issue. The main issue, as I see it, is that parents who are RE refuseniks are not in my experience and observation, concerned that their child’s own religious beliefs will be challenged. It is more that they will be told lies and falsehoods about Islam. As I stated earlier it has become noticed that the Islam that is being taught in the schools is a pale, de-racinated and ‘Disneyfied’ Islam that bears no relation to the reality of the Islam from which many Britons across the country suffer. School Islam lessons do not deal with the reality of Islam the ideology. It does not, at least as far as the details of the curricula I’ve seen, deal honestly with matters such as jihad, terrorism, Islamic misogyny, the cruelty of the still contemporaneous Shariah punishments, the sex crimes that scar our towns and cities, the fascistic supremacism and the fanatical and centuries old Jew-hatred. This is the Islam that our schools are not teaching, instead they opt for the naked lie of a concept that is without evidence, that Islam is a ‘religion of peace’. There is nothing wrong with teaching religions honestly and in an age-appropriate way, but too many people feel that what their children are getting when it comes to Islam education is not honest, either in what it says or in what it does not say.
Interestingly, this is a key part of Judaism. Since the beginning we have always questioned and wrestled with the ideas of God and belief.
Questioning the idea of G-d and belief is not the same as promoting falsehoods about an ideology that has been more than plain in stating in both its scripture and its history, that it mainly wants to kill, kill, kill. I would have no problem, for example, with an RE teacher challenging my child over the issue of certain Biblical incidents, such as that of the Golden Calf. Although some Jews may reject the idea that this incident is a folk memory of a gruesome civil war among the Israelites, which some believe is the case, I would have little problem with my child being challenged by this hypothesis. This would be an example of a proper intellectual and religious education challenge. However I would have a problem, and I consider I would be justified in having one, if my child’s RE teachers told my child that a religion or an ideology that was built on Jew hatred and has never departed from such a path, is little or no threat to them, or other Jewish children. If there is one awful, profound and dearly bought message to come out from the Shoah, then it is that when someone or some ideology promotes the idea that killing Jews will bring on paradise or the ideal ethnostate, then you should believe them and fight back against it. You should fight such an ideology, not just for your own account or that of your children, but for the sake of mankind and for freedom.
This is why the Talmud always records the minority opinion. This is why Liberal Judaism was born 115 years ago and thrives today.
The fact that minority points of view and opinion are recorded, whether in the Talmud or in any other debating medium or record of debate, should not be used as an excuse to rob parents of their rights to bring up their children according to the parent’s own conscience. It saddens me to see Liberal Judaism producing Rabbonim who are showing so much favouritism to such an authoritarian policy as removing people’s right to opt out of Religious Education.
I had a Catholic grandmother, so learned about Christianity from her as a child.
So what? There are lot of people who either come from religiously mixed families or who have chosen to follow a particular religious path of their own desire. You don’t need to have a Catholic grandmother to know about Christianity, that can be picked by a study of Britain’s history, culture and the evolution of its jurisprudence.
Rather than making me question or leave my own Judaism, it actually gave me a fascination of faith and led me to study theology at university.
Well, bully for you. Well done on getting a theology degree and well done for making a living out of it. A lot of people with such degrees are not so lucky. They are often having to work in environments where their major contribution to the economy is asking ‘do you want fries with that burger?’ There are also a lot of people without impressive degrees who have made studies of religion and faith, myself included, and our rights and our knowledge deserves respect too.
The only way we can expect people to be tolerant of our beliefs is through education, and so the same must be true the other way around.
Not necessarily. Whilst, of course, finding people who are tolerant of peaceful differences is all well and good, building such tolerance takes a bit of work. Unfortunately, although British Jews have learned the lesson that to build tolerance means, if you are a minority, not to piss off your majority hosts, this is a lesson that too many of the followers of Islam have not learned or refuse to learn. It is impossible to placate an ideology that has, because of its record for bloodshed and violence, all the characteristics of a modern day Moloch. Like any believing Jew, I pray for peace, I try to walk the path of peace but I will not and cannot approve of British children being fed into a furnace of lies about Islam. Therefore I support unequivocally the continued right of parents to decide whether or not their children are permitted to engage in school religious education lessons.
If all we know about Islam is what we read in the press or see on social media then that gives us an entirely warped view.
It’s not just the press and social media that make people anti-Islam. It is what this ideology and its followers are doing to our towns and cities and most importantly, to our families. There are too many British families who live in fear that their daughters will end up being victimised by Islamic rape gangs and too many people who fear Islamic violence when they traverse the streets of areas that were once relatively safe to roam. It is noticeable that these fears are not attributed to any other group who may share any physical characteristics with Britain’s Muslims, such as Sikhs or Hindus or Buddhists and especially not Jains. Nobody fears an extremist Jain, I wonder why that could be?
Instead we should see the beauty in Islam, which in turn will help us build a more tolerant society.
There is no beauty in Islam. We may, to give an analogy, admire the artistic prowess of those photographers who produced Stalinist ‘Socialist-Realist’ images and even, at a pinch, the technical expertise of the cinematographer Leni Riefenstahl . However what we should not do, is excuse or tell lies about the monstrous ideologies which used and abused these talented people’s skills. There is no more beauty in Islam than there is in Stalinism or Nazism. Telling lies, such as that Islam is a religion of peace, does nothing to build a tolerant society and on the contrary may be an action that will help to destroy such a society.
By taking our children out of religious education classes with the worry they will somehow be radicalised by Islam, all we are achieving is radicalising them against Islam instead.
It is not ‘radicalising’ to tell children the truth about Islam, which is that it is not a genuine religion of peace. It cannot be so, compared to either Christianity or Judaism and as I pointed out earlier, even the character of the Islamic deity is different from the conception of the deity in Christianity or Judaism. Not all religions are the same, not all ideologies are the same and much damage can and will come from falsely making those claims. It is not radicalising children to remove them from Islam lessons, it is doing what all good parents should do for their children, and that is protecting them from harm.
I say again that I am utterly disgusted at seeing a Rabbi recommending such a path which is authoritarian in the extreme, especially a Rabbi from a branch of British Judaism that in the past had a record for respecting the right of individuals to exercise their conscience. If I was an active Liberal Jew, not one of the bovine and sometimes malevolent Left wingers that are guiding LJ onto the rocks, then I would be ashamed of Rabbi Baginsky’s remarks. It does no good for Jews to attempt to remove our rights to exercise our consciences when it comes to our children’s education and it certainly does little good for anyone else. I am also very disturbed to see a Rabbi of Charley Baginsky’s stature and position calling for authoritarian policies that will hurt all Britons by lying to our children and will tarnish Jews with the false stamp of ‘censors’ and thought police. I should have no need to remind Rabbi Baginsky that such misplaced and mistaken images will cause hatred to be aimed at the Jews, from those parents and others who have been so unjustly and arrogantly censored.
I conclude by appealing to those within British Jewry, especially those in Liberal Judaism itself, who are angry about the sort of authoritarian left wingery as espoused by Rabbi Baginsky, to speak up against it. Maybe it’s time for people to make Liberal Judaism truly liberal again and to ask awkward questions of some of Liberal Judaism’s more left wing and authoritarian Rabbinate. It is not liberal to deny rights of parents and children like this, as Rabbi Baginsky is suggesting, in fact it is the height of illiberalism and must be opposed.
