Occasionally, when time permits (and it rarely does), I indulge myself by reading something non-work-related, something wonderfully distant from the carnage in the Middle East or the police state at home. Maybe something about art, or sports, or science. For instance, today I read a piece at Salon.com about male circumcision, arguments for and against. I have no position on the issue – and I don’t care what yours is, so don’t send me any foreskin screeds – it was just a way to kill five free minutes without thinking of politics (an ancient idiocy we libertarians are supposed to be trying to eradicate – with great success, you might have noticed).
Anyway, at the end of the piece, Slate’s editors posted a few of the most insightful comments from readers. And at the conclusion of the third comment, in reference to an upcoming anti-circumcision conference in Seattle, one of Slate’s all-star commenters writes,
Symposia such as the one in Seattle have more than a whiff of hysteria about them. I wouldn’t dare to suggest that there might be a small hint of anti-semitism as well.
Which, stripped of sophomoric coyness, means, The anti-circumcision movement is driven by hatred of Jews.
Ah, anti-Semitism: the one topic no discussion in this country is ever allowed to omit. Posterity will have a field day with us.
Sophomoric is “right”. As circumsexuals need something to counter the common sense argument of leaving helpless infants intact, they fasten onto charges of anti-semitism.
As the number of Jews in the United States comprise but a small fraction of the total population, while nearly one million non-Jewish infants are routinely circumcised every year … it would make no sense for intactivists to waste limited resources fighting Jewish cultural traditions.
On the other hand, investigations into the two Jewish “covenants”, the original Genesis 15 and the much later Genesis 17, force one to come to startling conclusions about the curious origins of male genital mutilation in Jewish cultural history.