Catholics... Muslims... Haredim?

Identical daughters of the same parents

From the comment pile:

Your parallels between the Catholics and the Charedim (those that quake - or quakers?) brings to my mind Huxley - “A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.” Seems to me that the increase in fanaticism - among American conservatives, fundamental islamists, and our own charedi velt - is built on their recognition that they are wrong, and their primal fear of having to change is driving ever more angry, separationist, and violent behavior.

For American conservatives, the bush tax cuts, the iraq war, the emasculation of regulation nearly destroyed our economy, and yet the grown up who is trying to fix it is evil, unamerican, socialist, so no compromise, self-destructive fundamentalism of the tea party.

For fundamental Islam - centuries of charedi-like attitudes towards the secular has driven the world's leading culture of year 1000 into one of the most backward. Confronted with happier, better off Europeans, Mohammed Atta (yemach shemo) retreated into fundamentalism to lead the largest mass murder on US soil ever. So too with nearly all fundamental islam, perhaps the greatest global threat today.

Not le''havdil, our Charedi world has retreated over the past several decades into the walls of the beis medrash. The self-indulgent fantasy that everyone (i.e., men) can be a talmid chacham. But this leaves the women to make life happen with day to day things like jobs, earnings, etc. But these more worldly women then pose a threat to their menfolk who haven't a clue about the outside world, so they cage their women and ban the outside world. Then the Internet happens - penetrating their homes, removing the filter of Daas Torah that covers up sex abuse scandals and letting too many of the masses see that life is really in full color outside of Pleasantville (or as R Wozner put it "blue shirts"). We may be less violent (lack of exercise?) than our islamic/tea party cohorts, but the lack of any exhortations from the Citifield Dais to look at ourselves (Beit Shemesh riots and concentration camp uniform demonstrations from Israel, and sex abuse scandals in the US) are certainly as damning. -- Solomon

Search for more information about things that are the same at4torah.com