Eideard

The ideal

Iran’s morality police are cracking down on the sale of Barbie dolls to protect the public from what they see as pernicious western culture eroding Islamic values, shopkeepers said on Monday.

As the West imposes the toughest ever sanctions on Iran and tensions rise over its nuclear program, inside the country the Barbie ban is part of what the government calls a “soft war” against decadent cultural influences…

Iran’s religious rulers first declared Barbie, made by U.S. company Mattel Inc, un-Islamic in 1996, citing its “destructive cultural and social consequences.” Despite the ban, the doll has until recently been openly on sale in Tehran shops.

The new order, issued around three weeks ago, forced shopkeepers to hide the leggy, busty blonde behind other toys as a way of meeting popular demand for the dolls while avoiding being closed down by the police…

Pointing to a doll covered in black long veil, a 40-year-old Tehran toy shop manager said: “We still sell Barbies but secretly and put these in the window to make the police think we are just selling these kinds of dolls.”

Iran has fought a running battle to purge pervasive western culture from the country since its Islamic revolution overthrew a western-backed king in 1979, enforcing Islamic dress codes, banning Western music and foreign satellite television.

Just to give you an inkling of what lies ahead for any nation that decides that theocracy is needed to “improve” society. There truly ain’t anything as foolish as some silly git who thinks puritan life was so wonderful in the good old days.

To the dismay of Israeli ice cream lovers, Haagen-Dazs may soon be disappearing from Israeli supermarket shelves following an announcement from the Chief Rabbinate banning the product.

A notice issued last week by the kashrut, a rabbinical body that sets Jewish dietary law, states that because Haagen-Dazs ice cream is made with real milk it is not suitable for Jewish consumers.

According to Talmudic law, milk produced by non-Jews can only be consumed if it is produced under Jewish supervision to ensure it has not been contaminated with milk from non – kosher animals. There is thought to be less chance of contamination with powdered milk.

As long as Haagen Dazs continues to use real milk, it will be off the menu for Jewish consumers. Selling the ice cream in kosher stores and restaurants also constitutes “a severe infringement of kashrut procedures”…

Israel’s largest supermarket chain Shufersal has already pulled the product off the shelves in all 270 of its stores. On Sunday a Shufersal representative confirmed they would not be selling the ice cream for the foreseeable future.

General Mills, which markets Haagen-Dazs in Israel, has hit back claiming its product has been sold in Israel and enjoyed by Jewish consumers across the world for years bearing kosher certification from the Orthodox Union in the US.

Why the ban has been issued now remains unclear. The rabbinate claim their notice about Haagen Dazs has been issued several times previously but gone unheeded, recommending Israelis turn to home-made kosher ice creams to fill the gap.

The crap regulation of public life by theocrats is as foolish and backwards in Israel as India, America as Afghanistan. Dedicating oversight of food purity to a religious circle-jerk is absurd. Bowing to so-called standards devised centuries ago and reinterpreted to satisfy a religion’s control rather than safety and nutrition based on science and reality – is absurd, inexcusable.

The historic meaning of “fool” is sanctified by a population that lets itself be led around by the nose by such foolishness.

I have a special pocket for my driver’s license

Allowing women drivers in Saudi Arabia will tempt them into sex, promote pornography and create more homosexuals, according to some conservative Muslim scholars.

Academics at the Majlis al-Ifta’ al-A’ala, which is Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council, said the relaxation of the rules would inevitably lead to “no more virgins”.

Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world where women are banned from driving.

The academics, working in conjunction with Kamal Subhi, a former professor at the conservative King Fahd University, produced the conclusions in a report for the country’s legislative assembly, the Shura Council.

It warned that allowing women to drive would “provoke a surge in prostitution, pornography, homosexuality and divorce“. Within 10 years of the ban being lifted, it claimed, there would be “no more virgins” in the Islamic kingdom.

It pointed out that “moral decline” could already be seen in those other Muslim countries in which women are allowed to drive…

The Saudi government is currently considering a proposal to ban women – already forced to cover up most of their body in public – from even displaying their eyes, if they are judged too “tempting”.

It’s useful once in a while to be reminded how completely useless and backwards a theocracy can be. Like monarchies. Or Congressional fact-finding committees.

When politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn arrived in France last week, cleared of a New York sex scandal, he returned home smiling despite facing a frosty reception. Maybe he should have gone to Mexico, instead.

Pay attention Anthony Weiner, Tiger Woods, Brett Favre and others caught up in public, sexual indiscretions.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday shows 57 percent of Mexicans would be either very likely or somewhat likely to tolerate the sexual indiscretions of stars and politicians.

They were followed by Belgians at 55 percent. In the United States, the tolerance factor was 48 percent. France, in fact, was way down the list at only 33 percent, while Japan was the least forgiving country at only 28 percent…

In recent months Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund and a presumed candidate for the French presidency, faced a possible trial in the United States for allegedly attempting to rape a hotel maid.

Last week, New York City prosecutors dropped charges, allowing him to return to France where he faced a mostly chilly public reception and unease among his political allies.

Former U.S. congressman Weiner, golfer Woods and football star Favre faced their own sex scandals in the last two years.

A slight majority of the respondents around the world, 51 percent, said women were just as likely as men to engage in sexual indiscretions but less apt to get caught in the act. Perhaps it’s no surprise, Mexicans agreed, at 51 percent.

I can only supply subjective feelings on the subject – though based on many years of travel and discussion, a worldliness that reflects my attitude about being a citizen of Earth rather than restricted by nationality.

In general human beings are masters of self-deception and hypocrisy. More so men than women. More so True Believers than secular folks who try to deal with material reality.

Should we dress like carnival time year-round, too?

Australian Christians are furious over changes to the national curriculum that will drop the terms BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) from text books, replacing them with neutral, non-religious language.

Under the new politically correct curriculum BC and AD will be replaced with BCE (Before Common Era), BP (Before Present) and CE (Common Era) .

Peter Jensen, the Archbishop of Sydney, said that taking references to the birth of Jesus Christ out of school books was an “intellectually absurd attempt to write Christ out of human history” that he likened it to calling Christmas “the festive season”.

“It is absurd because the coming of Christ remains the centre point of dating and because the phrase ‘common era’ is meaningless and misleading,” he told the Sydney Daily Telegraph.

The changes have also angered conservatives in the opposition Liberal National party.

But the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, which is responsible for developing the secondary level national curriculum, said the new terms were the increasingly common standard for the representation of dates.

While BC and AD, which translates to “in the year of Our Lord” are designations used to number years in the Christian Era, the terms BCE and CE are widely applied as their secular counterparts.

Although they were first devised in the 6th century, BCE and CE became popular in the late 20th century to emphasise sensitivity to non-Christians. However, they still use the Gregorian calendar on which BC and AD operate.

The little-known term BP (before present or before physics) is a time scale traditionally used by scientists to refer to the era before 1950, when carbon dating technology became more reliable.

The “political correctness” as usual lies in the dim brains of the religious professionals who have relied on their correctness. The rest of the world – as usual – has been changing.

In every country with self-important fundamentalists of one or another flavor, the blather about Judeo-Christian heritage is not only holy writ in their view – it is supposed to be requisite. As they always wish it had been. As they always wish it would be. Self-deluded.

Pakistan’s Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed an appeal by gang rape victim Mukhtar Mai against the acquittal of five men she accused of attacking her…

Mai, now 40, was gang raped in June 2002 on the orders of a village council in Meerwala town of Punjab province as punishment after her younger brother was wrongly accused of having illicit relations with a woman from a rival clan.

The boy was 12-years-old at the time.

A local anti-terrorism court (ATC) had sentenced the six accused men to death, but the Lahore High Court acquitted five of the men in March 2005, and commuted the sentence for the main accused, Abdul Khaliq, to life imprisonment.

A four-judge bench of the Supreme Court on Thursday “dismissed” all appeals and ordered the release of those arrested, according to a copy of the court order received by AFP. It however upheld the life sentence for Khaliq…

Mai, whose case garnered much attention in the West as an example of oppression suffered by Pakistan’s women, expressed her disappointment over the Supreme Court verdict while human rights groups also voiced discontent…

Mai, who now helps protect women facing threats at the hands of influential men, said she would not file any appeal against Thursday’s judgement…

“This is a setback for Mukhtar Mai,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement urging the government to “ensure her safety.”

Pakistan’s government refuses to ensure honesty. Why should you expect safety?

Almost a thousand women were raped in Pakistan during 2010 while more than 2,000 were abducted and almost 1,500 murdered, according to the Aurat Foundation, an organisation working for the protection of women in the country.

A further 500 were the victims of “honour killings”, a custom under which relatives and other fellow tribesmen kill a woman if they believe she had an affair.

There are many nations devoting every opportunity afforded to bring the lives of their families, their neighbors, their nation to a healthier, better life. I’d be hard pressed to qualify Pakistan as one of those progressive nations.

Dr. Eli Landau has written “The White Book,” touted as the first Israeli pork cookbook.

With 80 mainly Mediterranean recipes and Eastern European dishes, “The White Book” tries to reveal the secrets of the pig for cooks who have never prepared it nor perhaps even tasted it.

Since the mid-1950s, Israel has had laws restricting the sale of pork and banning its farm production in deference to biblical proscriptions. But because of legal loopholes, it was possible to raise pigs for science or in areas considered Christian. Pork buyers included secular Jews, Christian Arabs and more recently, immigrant workers and the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who don’t keep kosher.

Now it is up to individual municipalities to determine whether pork can be sold in each neighborhood and whether shops will incur fines for selling it, much as they would for staying open on the Sabbath. Many Jews who ignore other kosher rules will not eat pork for cultural and historical reasons. Observant Muslims also abstain from it.

Even more than other nonkosher foods, pork is seen by many Israelis as an affront to Jewish nationalism. Pork sellers routinely face protesters, and in recent years, arsonists have attacked shops in cities like Netanya and Safed, where Orthodox Jews live near secular immigrant communities.

“People are reluctant to cook pork at home,” said Dr. Landau, who is not an observant Jew. “I want to make it easier for chefs and personal cooks to bring it home and to the menus. If that happens, I’ll be more than happy.”

The book, which Dr. Landau self-published in January, has not caused much of a stir so far.

Dr. Landau said that ultra-Orthodox Jews, who would be most likely to protest, haven’t heard of it because they don’t watch cable news or read the mainstream press.

Pretty interesting tale. Landau reaches out to modern Mediterranean cuisine, shows good sense.

Life in a theocracy has got to be incredibly frustrating to anyone who makes contact on a regular basis with the real world.

“His hair feels so nice!”

Iran’s culture ministry has released a catalogue of acceptable hairstyles for men to help them avoid “decadent Western cuts”…

The pictures of mostly clean-shaven male models sporting short hair, some styled with gel, are contained in a “journal of Iranian hairstyles approved by the ministry of (culture and Islamic) guidance”.

“The proposed styles are inspired by Iranians’ complexion, culture and religion, and Islamic law,” said Jaleh Khodayar, who is in charge of a Modesty and Veil Festival later this month where they are to be promoted.

“We are happy that the Islamic republic of Iran’s government has backed us in designing these hairstyles,” she said, adding that a catalogue of haircuts for men would soon be published.

Iranian police carry out regular morality crackdowns, arresting and warning women in figure-hugging short coats and flimsy headscarves as well as men sporting spiky hair and tight, low-slung jeans…

Several barber shops have reportedly been shut down and penalised in recent years for offering “decadent Western cuts.”

Conservative clerics have called for firmer action against un-Islamic dressers and hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came under fire last month for expressing opposition to a tough police crackdown on immodest attire.

Are you clear, now, about the differences between fundamentalist Muslims and fundamentalist Christians?

Because I’m not.

Kibbutz Lahav is a controversial enterprise in Israel, the world’s only predominantly Jewish state.

Eating pork is prohibited under Jewish dietary laws, and to many Jews the pig has a deep cultural symbolism representing all that is unholy. Raising pigs for pork has been banned in Israel since 1963, apart from in a small, traditionally Arab-Christian area in the north of the country.

But the kibbutz maintains vehemently that the primary purpose of its herd is for medical research, which makes the operation legal.

However, it also has a factory, in which it processes excess animals, and those raised to provide organs for research, to be sold for meat. And when the day’s medical trial – testing of equipment for screening for colorectal cancer – is over, some of the researchers tuck in as the institute’s manager doles out plates of sizzling pork chops from a barbecue.

Ofer Doron is passionately secular and a proud pork eater. But he says about a quarter of the Kibbutz’s staff are kippa-wearing, religious Jews, happy to work with the pigs for research, but not to consume their meat. “Saving lives is one of the biggest Jewish commandments,” he says…

His father, Eri Doron, says…in early days…The Kibbutz was strongly socialist, and “very revolutionary”, based on utopian Marxist ideals, he says. And there was no debate at all, he stresses, about keeping pigs – “we are atheists,” he says simply.

Secularism in the Kibbutz movement was strongly linked to the post-holocaust mentality…”It was a shared view that we will never be victims again, we will work our own land, we will be strong, we won’t take part in the superstitions that comprise religion, we’ll see a new clear rationalistic way.”

But over the years, the Kibbutz’s identity has changed. Pork is on the dining room menu less – just Fridays and holidays – these days, as more traditional and religious Jews have moved in. Nevertheless, in Israel as a whole, demand for what is sometimes euphemistically dubbed “white meat” has grown in recent decades…

As pork imports are generally banned, most of the meat on sale is domestically produced – with Kibbutz Lahav providing just under a tenth of the total produce…Animal rights activists object to its research and say the pigs’ conditions are not good enough…and although many religious Jews accept the use of pigs for medical purposes, they accuse the kibbutz of using the research as little more than an excuse for selling pork for profit.

Problems which don’t become mainstream in modern nations rejecting theocracy.

It feels good to catch a little breeze in summertime

Iranian police have issued warnings to 62,000 women who were “badly veiled” in the Shiite holy province of Qom as part of a crackdown on dress and behaviour.

Colonel Mehdi Khorasani, the provincial police chief, said police had also confiscated around 100 cars for carrying improperly dressed women and said that “encouraging such relaxations are among the objectives of the enemy.”

The population of Qom is more than one million, with most of them concentrated in the city itself which is Shiite Iran’s clerical nerve-centre.

By law, women in the Islamic republic must be covered from head to foot, with their hair completely veiled and social interaction is banned between men and women who are not related.

Iran is known particularly for summertime crackdowns on improperly dressed women but the issue has sparked debate after the hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he “firmly” opposed the crackdown…

His remarks have drawn the wrath of fellow hardliners and several top clerics who have criticised him for opposing the police crackdown…

Meanwhile, like any theocracy, individual sects and their ideological pimps leaders joust to assume the mantle of living prophet.