Mitchell Silk, an ultra-Orthodox writer who once worked for the US Treasury, warns that the attacks occurring against Jews in NYC could also happen to other faiths, but made a most absurd mistake that won't help in dealing with the war against Islamic terrorism either, nor in defending Jews from Muslim antisemitism. First:
My Chassidic Jewish community in Brooklyn is confronted with an unprecedented level of hostility. Hate crimes abound. Chassidic Jews have been shot at, punched, kicked, violently shoved, or almost run over. During Covid, politicians prohibited our community from coming together to pray, celebrate, and mourn — even when masked and distanced — while permitting and even joining public protests. And now they are coming for our children.
The latest attack comes from The New York Times. On Sept. 11, the Times published a report of its year-long “investigation” into the crown jewel of our community, our education system. Despite the report’s thin trappings of investigative journalism, the charge — plainly stated — was that Chassidic-Americans are too corrupt, abusive of children, and illiterate to be treated as equal members of society.
The Times fired another salvo on Sept. 16, arguing essentially for vesting extraordinary authority in state government and local school boards to “protect” our children from our “failing” schools and better prepare them for the future. Oy!
I fear they have a very different vision for my children’s future than my wife and I do.
[...] Rather than feature even one story of success within our system, the Times chose to push a dehumanizing narrative of ethnic stereotyping. Its 275 interviews over more than a year did not yield even one single voice among the tens of thousands of families touched by our yeshivas in profoundly positive ways.
It is relatively simple to dismantle the Times’ house-of-cards case against our yeshiva school system. First, it claims our schools provide a poor education. Test scores, graduate success, and the parents of roughly 100,000 students in more than 250 schools say differently. Unlike most public schools, where grade inflation runs rampant and roughly 25 percent of graduates are functionally illiterate, our system delivers a high rate of academic success, with most alumni committed to life-long learning.
While I'm aware there are plenty of communities who're providing their children with proper education for topics like mathematics and the accompanying science-based exams, I find it galling the guy won't acknowledge it's
insular tribes like Satmar who're guilty of dumbing down education while mooching socialist welfare, and a terrible shame people like him won't lament how
Neturei Karta taint their overall image to boot. I've noticed there's Haredi representatives who point to what they see as positives, but refuse to condemn the most insular tribes who give the lifestyle a bad name for any particular reason. Such a failure of vigilance and refusal to question whether the Haredi lifestyle as a whole isn't a good influence is exactly why they'll never manage to combat this image issue properly. Of course, it's no shock if the NYT won't make distinctions either, and that's just as bad.
But now, look where Silk really bungles the impact of his defense for Haredi schools in the USA, when at the end, he adds a certain religion's house of worship to the issue:
But I won’t hold my breath because this campaign isn’t about improving the education in Chassidic schools. It’s about promoting a narrative that casts people of faith as intolerant, ignorant, and uncivilized. In service of this anti-religion narrative, facts will be invented, statistics massaged, and enemies of the people conjured out of whole cloth. The Chassidic-American community is the target today, but expect these attacks to come soon to a church, mosque, synagogue, or meditation retreat near you.
And here's where the guy really screws up royally. Why does he think sources steeped in anti-semitism would actually have any issue with the Religion of Peace, which is built upon
koranic verses like 5:60, which describes Jews as apes and pigs. If Silk's really concerned about antisemitism, wouldn't he rather mosques not operate in the USA, based on
what they could teach about Jews, and doesn't he realize a lot of the recent antisemitic attacks in the New York region could've been
committed by Muslims too? How does Silk expect to combat antisemitism effectively if he won't acknowledge
Muslim antisemitism is a serious issue? Talk about dampening the whole subject.
I'm hugely disappointed with Silk for obscuring the serious danger of Muslim antisemitism anywhere in the world, which only suggests that, despite his effort to present himself as a well-learned man, he remains oblivious to the threat of
Islamic terrorism, and is failing to recognize that the
leftist system is lenient on Islamic bigotry. Worse, it suggests he's not willing to take up the cause of people like
Salman Rushdie, who paid terrible prices for speaking out agains the very belief system Silk downplayed in his article. If the leftist dominated systems haven't done what to defend against Islamofascism, why should we assume they'd actually put a stop to what's taught in mosques and madrassas? Silk's only suggested he's no different.
