Bad Behavior

Utterly appalling behavior over in Israel:

Five assailants believed to be Ultra-Orthodox Jews assaulted a woman and an Israel Defense Forces soldier Sunday for sitting next to each other on a bus bound for Beit Shemesh, near Jerusalem.

The incident began when the five men asked the religious woman to move to the back of the bus to prevent males and females from sitting together in public. When she refused, they beat her and the male soldier who sat next to her.

Police forces that arrived at the scene to arrest the men were attacked by dozens of ultra-Orthodox men who punctured the tires of their vehicles, allowing the assailants to escape.

I posted about a similar story last year, and I was equally outraged then. That incident, quite correctly, was blogged about and buzzed about all over the internet, with most who weighed in siding with the victim. There did, however, seem to be a running commentary at that time by some who felt that somehow the incident was mitigated by the possibility that the victim had "staged" the event, or was "raring for a fight", or had somehow brought the abuse upon herself by virtue of being an activist for the cause of keeping women at the front of the bus. Well, any suggestion that last year's incident was an isolated one, or that it was not an indication of a slide into zealotry by at least a subset of the Charedi community can now be put to rest.

And though the usual caveats apply about these renegades being only a small minority of their religious group, the fact that five perpetrators who happened to be riding the bus all stepped up so willingly to the task of abusing a woman who did nothing more than remain in her seat, and the fact that these five men were aided and abetted by "dozens" of their neighbors, all seems to point to the reality that this mindset is shared by more than a fringe group in the Charedi world. I'm sure I am not the only one who finds that thought distressing.