2023-11-12
The following is an excerpt from page 106 of “Japanese People! Wake Up!” by Masayuki Takayama, who is not only a journalist without equal in the postwar world but also a writer without equal and, at the same time, a true artist who sheds light on hidden truths.
Essential reading not only for the Japanese people but for people throughout the world.
Asahi Shimbun’s International Reporting Was Superficial After All
Failing Even to Get to the Reality of Israel’s Black-Clad “Haredim”
A Country Where a Wife Pays Compensation to Her Abusive Husband
Israel’s Netanyahu, whose corruption had been exposed, contested a general election in a desperate bid to revive his fortunes.
The result was a resounding defeat.
He is currently struggling to put together a coalition government, but behind this lay domestic problems more serious than the Palestinian issue.
The other day, Asahi Shimbun correspondent Ryo Takano reported on “the appalling domestic problems Israel faces today.”
However, in what might be called an unfortunate coincidence, the international edition of The New York Times carried an article on the same subject on the same date.
Such an overlap might be understandable with a breaking news story, but with a feature of this kind, a coincidence in both subject and publication date is exceedingly rare.
Newspaper reporters dislike such coincidences more than anything.
Everything from their choice of perspective to their news judgment is directly compared, and, if things go badly, even the newspaper’s very substance may be called into question.
Takano, too, is probably thoroughly disheartened, but let us turn to his report from Israel.
He introduces the plight of Marie, a wife who wants to leave her husband, a violent drunk who readily resorts to hitting her.
In Japan, she could run to the police or, at worst, obtain an immediate divorce by giving up compensation, but in this country, no matter how terrible the husband, she cannot divorce him unless he agrees.
Takano refrains from saying so, but women are looked down upon in Jewish religious society.
As in the Book of Job, women are treated as half a person.
Women are considered inherently promiscuous, and therefore are required to wrap their hair in scarves and be modest.
Their very existence is also regarded as unclean, and they were not even allowed to touch the sacred Western Wall.
In the end, far from receiving compensation, Marie had to pay two million yen herself before she could finally obtain a divorce.
Incidentally, this contempt for women was passed down intact to Islam, Judaism’s religious grandchild, where the status of women, regarded in Judaism as half a person, is expressed numerically as “half the rights of men.”
The rule concerning scarves became the chador requirement to “conceal both the contours of the body and the hair.”
Even Rest Is Compulsory on the Sabbath
The Koran also says, “Since men feed women, if a woman speaks insolently, beat her and sow your seed in her in bed.”
One may regard the Jewish world as being the same as Islam in this respect.
Beate Sirota, who grandly wrote women’s rights into the MacArthur Constitution, saying such things as “Japanese women have no human rights,” should first have liberated the miserable women of her own homeland.
For these reasons, there are countless Maries in Israel today.
Why is such injustice allowed to prevail in the twenty-first century?
Only at this point does Takano mention “ultra-Orthodox people in black hats and black suits.”
They are called the “Haredim.”
They do more than look down upon women and impose a form of divorce that gives priority to men.
On the Jewish Sabbath, from Friday evening until sunset on Saturday, the people of Israel are compelled to rest, and, astonishingly, public transportation such as trains and buses is halted, while shops and supermarkets are made to close.
Anyone who arrives in this country on the Sabbath has a truly difficult time.
Shops wishing to avoid such disruption and remain open must petition the Haredim and obtain permission.
New York Times correspondent Isabel Kershner reports on the tyrannical behavior of these Haredim, who also interfere in school education and impose as many as nine hours of Jewish religious education a week.
Consequently, children influenced by this teaching reportedly return home, see their mothers wearing T-shirts and shorts, and look down on them as “immodest.”
This is scarcely different from Iranian citizens being forced to immerse themselves in Islam.
Devout Jews Recruited with Money
Why, then, do these black-clad people wield such unchecked power?
Neither correspondent touches on this, but it is said that a little trick devised to deceive the world at Israel’s birth was in fact the cause of this abnormal situation.
In 1948, politically influential Jews proposed at the United Nations General Assembly in Lake Success that they wished to establish a Jewish state in “the land of Canaan given by God,” namely Palestine.
The establishment of Israel was decided by a vote of 33 to 13.
Thus, Jews scattered around the world by the Diaspora began returning to Jerusalem one after another.
Seeing them, the first prime minister, Ben-Gurion, was bewildered.
He had proclaimed to the world that this was “the founding of a nation that devout Jews had yearned for over two thousand years,” yet the returning people drank alcohol and ate pork.
They had even forgotten how to pray.
This would not do.
So, to demonstrate their piety to the world, the prime minister recruited Jews who would pray all day long.
He did not ask them to do it for nothing.
They would be exempted from conscription and given welfare payments as well.
No sooner had Israel been established than it was hit by the First Arab–Israeli War, and thereafter the wars continued through the sixth.
Ordinary citizens were required to perform three years of military service at the age of eighteen, followed by one month of service every year until the age of forty-five.
If war broke out during that month, they went straight to the battlefield.
They were being offered exemption from all of this, and money into the bargain.
There could hardly have been a more welcome privilege.
Thus was born the black-clad group of two thousand Haredim.
They prayed and ate kosher meals that did not even taste good.
To vent their frustration, they sternly scolded immoral citizens.
Marie, who dared to defy her husband despite being a woman, would have been an ideal target for their bullying.
They were households on welfare.
Since there was no need to limit births, they had child after child.
As a result, those two thousand have now grown to one million, or twelve percent of Israel’s population.
They also hold seats in parliament and have urged, “Allow no compromise whatsoever with the Arabs,” “If we coexist with them, they will become thorns in our eyes and briars in our sides,” and “Strike the Gaza Strip.”
In the 1990s, when Prime Minister Rabin finally pledged coexistence with Arafat, one of these fanatical black-clad men even assassinated the prime minister as an apostate.
The Haredim have now become more than a nuisance to Israeli society; they have become an impediment.
The Haredim’s Power, Sustained by Organized Votes
In this election, political parties had emerged demanding that welfare payments to the ever-expanding Haredim population be cut off, that they be made to work, and that military service be imposed upon them as well—indeed, that they be made to stand on the front lines of fighting the Arabs.
The result was that Netanyahu’s ruling party lost seats, but “Yisrael Beiteinu,” the leading force in the campaign to bring down the Haredim, also received fewer votes than expected, and only the Haredim, with their organized voting blocs, were left smiling.
In Japan, Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu emerged and sternly admonished and prohibited the Christian missionaries, the Ikko sect, and religions in general from interfering in politics.
It is regrettable that neither correspondent touches at all on the pitifulness and folly of a country where no such heroes emerged and which instead clings to religion.
(November 2019 issue)