By arthur Weinreb
Friday, November 17, 2006
Earlier this week, the contents of an internal Montreal police department newsletter became public. The newsletters tells officers that members of the city's Hasidic community may sometimes have difficulty dealing with a female police officer and suggests that when this happens, the officer seek assistance from one of her male colleagues. This suggestion was based upon the premise that Hasidic Jews have religious and cultural reasons that prohibit "fraternization” with women.
The suggestion that was made in the newsletter was apparently one of many advising police officers how to deal with members of various religious and ethnic communities. No one should be surprised at this; police services all across Canada now see their main function not as being to keep the peace but to be "culturally sensitive” to everyone they come in contact with.
The police union, the Montreal Police Brotherhood, was angered by the comments made in the newsletter. The union's president, Yves Francoeur, was quoted as saying that the Montreal Police Service has denigrated women on the force and owes an apology to Montreal's 1200 female police officers. Francoeur also expressed outrage at the purported suggestion that female officers were somehow inferior to males and incapable of doing their jobs.
What is perhaps most significant is the fact that the Montreal Police Brotherhood and the city's Hasidic community both state that there have never been any complaints or problems regarding dealings between members of the Jewish community and female police officers. Meyer Feig, Director of the Montral's Jewish Orthodox Community Council issued a press release on Wednesday stating that no one in his community has ever indicated that there was any problem dealing with a female police officer in the "many decades” that he had lived there. It seems that this controversy was a mere invention of those to whom the highest duty in society is to be politically correct.
Had the problem been a real one, there is no doubt that the rights of women would have trumped the rights of Hasidic Jews or any other minority. Much like the so-called clash of civilizations, there are often times when two groups that are worthy of being awarded separate or special status in order to be politically correct come into conflict. The general rule seems to be when one of these groups is women they rank higher on the protected species list than ethnic, religious or other groups.
an example of this occurred after 9/11 when the detention facility was opened at Guantanamo Bay. Even though the United States was denying at that time that the Geneva Convention applied to the enemy combatants being detained there, the U.S. went out of its way to be religiously sensitive to those that they had captured. Prayer mats and Korans were provided to the inmates along with signs pointing out the direction of Mecca. Muslim dietary laws were respected. Now, any real self respecting Islamofascist jihadi wouldn't be caught dead being guarded by a woman, yet the decision was made that female members of the military would not be prevented from working at Gitmo. The rights of women were found to be of a higher order than any notion of political correctness regarding Muslim cultural sensitivities.
as there always is in life, rules do have their exceptions. We could call this the "George W. Bush rule”. The rights of women take a back seat to another group if putting this group first can be used to attack Bush and the United States. This is why Jack Layton, the NDP and others on the left who are always championing women's rights and women's perpetual status as victims in society, really don't care about how afghan women lived and might live again under the rule of the Taliban. When it comes to political correctness the rights of women are meaningless if it means having to agree that George W. Bush did something right.
There is something very wrong with society when a problem, denied by such divergent groups as the Montreal Police Brotherhood and the Jewish Orthodox Community Council is made up solely to pay homage to the gods of political correctness.
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