The Kirkuk Center for Torture Victims - Home
I'm working for this organisation. It's a NGO providing medical, social and psychological treatment to men, women and children who have become victims of torture, (domestic) violence, chemical attacks and other forms of human rights abuses. We are also promoting the rights of the women and the rights of the children, going into schools and juvenile prisons and teaching about these issues as well as offering our services. Centers are in North Iraq/Kurdistan.
My work is mainly administrative, coordinating things, doing promotions, looking for future support, teaching English and helping in setting up new projects. Besides, I'm using this as an opportunity to gain some valuable experience for myself, and to see some of this country.
Wow! Fantastic! Congratulations on obtaining the position. What an incredible opportunity, to get to know a (relatively) remote part of the world while being part of an effort like that at the same time. I hope both will prove as deeply rewarding for you as possible.
(ETA--Just saw the link you posted to your photos in LS...very nice. The dance video was interesting, reminds me very much of the Greek 'hasapiko' dance.)
Some countries have that problem, others not. I think it has to do with factors such as heterogeneity of society, the actual size of this fringe, but also how many parties you allow into parliament. E.g. Germany has a five percent hurdle, and Israel one of two percent. But ten percent, even though being a minority, is not even such a small number.
It should be noted that the majority of that 10% (i.e. haredim) don't at all support coercing people into compliance with their particular religious practices. Still, the history of Israeli governments coddling the haredim in order to secure their political support is a key factor enabling this kind of in-your-face entitlement mentality to take root and flourish. The increasingly reactionary nature of Israeli ultra-Orthodoxy over the past couple decades is clearly a factor, too--physical contact restrictions and headcoverings are nothing new (for either sex), but requiring women to walk on a separate secondary sidewalk for example (or move to the back of the bus), as certain neighborhoods have done, is unprecedented; it takes a set of practices that are meant to devolve equally on both sexes and explicitly shifts them towards institutionalized inferiority of women. There's even a phrase they're using now to describe it,
hadarat nashim ("exclusion of women"), as if it were some sort of rabbinic term--it isn't, it was only coined a couple years ago and has nothing to do with Jewish modesty doctrines.
That's a good point about heterogeneity; virtually all Israeli Jews are no more than a few generations removed, if that, from a longstanding diaspora community somewhere else, one with its own distinct customs and worldview in everything from language to family structure to political culture to methodologies for interpreting Jewish law and so on. While that doesn't necessarily make the sense of shared nationhood any less real or palpable, it does inevitably contribute to a fairly unique propensity towards fractious domestic politics, even without the pressures of territorial conflict and the normal variations in degrees of religiosity, etc. you might find in any number of countries.
and then they go and cry of being harassed and persecuted the same way Jews were by the Nazis. Unbelievable.
As AchtungBono alluded to earlier, those protesters came primarily from the Neturei Karta and Toldot Aharon Hasid sects, which are (among other things) anti-Zionist groups who teach that the Holocaust was divinely sanctioned punishment, observe Israeli Independence Day by burning Israeli flags, and have previously sent members to participate in Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial conferences. So above and beyond any of the aforementioned factors, these types already hold most of their compatriots in contempt anyway.
