The Halachic expression "dipping to purify while holding a sheretz" [an impure animal]" touches on a person who immerses himself in a mikveh in order to purify himself, while still holding onto the original impurity. The metaphor is directed at those who preach the lofty goals of a free society – principally tolerance, pluralism, freedom of expression and the rule of law – in order to forcibly enforce their radical and sectoral interpretations in every area of life.
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In a piece which was broadcast a number of days ago, about the wanton rioters known as the 'Hilltop Youth,' one of their activists responded to the policemen who was telling him to move away. Full of chutzpah, he argued against the policeman using the values which he and his friends trampled on roughly in their entirety on a daily basis. "There is a law in the State of Israel, I thought … they don't know that the law doesn't support them, and they are trying by using bullying and violence."
Those who are proud of their responsibility for 'Price Tag' hooliganism – harming innocent citizens as payback for attempts to enforce the law on them – are supposedly speaking in the name of the law. Those who sanctify hooliganism and violence are protesting with chutzpah about thuggery and violence which never took place.
In a discussion about the struggle against crime in Arab society, and the recent murder of the advisor to the Minister of Education, a leading Arab spokesperson touched on efforts by the police to recruit Arab policemen who live among and can talk to the residents.
From the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee, he was introduced as an advocate of this program to eradicate crime, explaining his position as follows: "Imagine to yourself that an Arab policeman receives an order to demolish a home in an Arab community," adding: "If he had values, he would resign the moment he received the order. More policemen won't help eradicate crime."
For Arab society, it's apparently not enough to deny its decisive responsibility for crime and violence, which characterizes important parts of its way of life, placing it instead on the shoulders of the state. When the state is ready and willing to assist, its senior spokespeople raise concern that this will harm the sacred right of Arab building violators to build wildly and illegally. They even find it difficult to imagine an Arab policeman with "values" in the traumatic situation that would force him, God forbid, to enforce the law.
Chutzpah is the right word here for the demands of someone who dips in the values of equality, while holding in his hand the sheretz of sectoral immunity in enforcing the law. One can, of course, struggle politically to change the law, but one shouldn't exempt the Arabs, or any other group, from its application or enforcement. Aside from the distortion of values, it also encourages discrimination: a policeman who is only permitted to carry out certain lawful duties is a second-class policeman. Making a claim like this about a Jewish policeman in London would rightly be understood as antisemitism.
The thugs of political correctness are more infected with this kind of moral abomination. They portray themselves and want desperately for others to see them, as the knights of pluralism and human freedom, while at the same time threatening the openness of public debate more than any other group in open and democratic societies. In authoritarian and totalitarian societies, the tools of enforcement are violent, and the sanctions for deviating from the norms are terrifying: imprisonment, exile, torture and even death. In democratic societies the tools are administrative and the punishment for deviating from the norms of the authorities who took control of the public discourse is far softer: exclusion, ridicule, shaming, and narrower possibilities of employment.
The main problem is self-censorship which is forced upon those who don't want to get into trouble for the things they say. This self-censorship uses the "correct" vocabulary and does not make "harmful" claims against those who received the permanent immunity of the "victim."
I will conclude with an amusing personal story. Last week I strongly criticized vaccine refusers. Among hundreds of people who responded, only a few took a matter-of-fact tone. The vast majority responded rudely, describing me as a Nazi, Hitler, fascist, mentally ill and corrupted. The amusing thing about the responses was the gap between the claim about allowing private individuals in society to act independently when the majority decides differently and the pitiable savagery of their response to an opinion that was unacceptable to them. They dip in the mikveh of pluralism with a destructive sheretz in their hands, insisting on their right to infect the public with a severe illness, while denying others the right to criticize their lawlessness.
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