Once a Knight is Enough

Here's all of Melanie Phillips posting today:

The new Jews are, er, the old Jews

An article in the Sunday Times by India Knight leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Complaining that it is now ‘open season’ on Islam (funny, that, I thought Islamists had declared open season, or to be more precise, war, upon us) she comes up with the following enlightened view:

My former husband and I once went to look at a house we were thinking of buying in a Jewish Orthodox bit of London. As it happened we were the only non-Orthodox people on that bit of pavement that morning. I noticed a group of Hassidim were walking around us in a peculiar way. ‘They’re avoiding our shadows,’ the estate agent said, ‘because we’re unclean.’ I didn’t think much of that, either. But we all need to coexist peaceably. The fact that I find the man in Camden market with bolts through his face, or the Orthodox woman dressed in a drab sack and wearing a bad wig, as ‘weird’ — weirder, actually — than a woman dressed in black with only her eyes showing is neither here nor there.

Well how frightfully tolerant – not. Ultra-orthodox Jews don’t walk ‘in a peculiar way’ round people’s shadows, nor do they think ‘they’ (who? Estate agents? Journalists?) are ‘unclean’. In order to make a false equivalence between Jews and Muslims (hey, they’re all equally weird, so criticism of the veil must be discrimination; the fact that the Hassidim don’t want to impose their beliefs or values on anybody else doesn’t occur to her as a rather significant difference) she misrepresents orthodox Jews as bigots while managing to disavow that, too, in order to make herself appear wholly unprejudiced, and so that she can conclude that

Muslims are the new Jews.

Well actually, Jews are the new Jews. As we can see from the mind of India Knight.

Well, two comments.

First, in my experience, most Orthodox women do not dress that drabily.

Secondly, Melanie missed one point regarding this sentence there:

My experience of Muslim life is not that it is the patriarchal nightmare of legend, but that women are powerful, vocal and iron-fisted beneath their velvet gloves.

My experience with Muslim women, especially suicide bombers, confirms that opinion of Ms. Knight.