The Charlie Hebdo affair gave extremist Islam a bad image, and it’s ironic that it also gave rise to something that also erodes the image (which is already pretty bad) of extremist Jews, i.e. the ultra-Orthodox believers. I’ve discussed recently the extreme misogyny of ultra-Orthodox Jews, which in that case took the ludicrous form of Jews on planes refusing to sit next to women lest they get polluted with female cooties. They even offered other passengers money to switch seats so they wouldn’t have to sit next to someone with one X chromosome more than they had. This nonsense, which has happened three times in the last six months, delayed the planes.
The latest episode, which makes no sense to me at all, involves an ultra-Orthodox Jewish newspaper, The Announcer, editing a photo of the Charlie Hebdo “Solidarity March” in Paris to remove two female participants! As Mediaite reports:
The image that ran on the front page of the Israeli newspaper The Announcer edited two female world leaders out of the image, originally provided by wire service GPO: German Chancellor Angela Merkel and EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini. A third woman in a blue scarf who we can’t identify was also photoshopped out. [The site has an update saying that the third “woman” might actually be Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris]
Here’s the original photo:
Below is version that ran in the paper sans females. As Mediaite notes, “Merkel and Mystery Woman are gone completely, while Mogherini was simply cropped out of the photo”:
The site gives details showing evidence of emendation, though it’s hardly needed in light of the above. And Swiss President Simonetta Sommaruga appears to have been cropped out, too.
Yes, I know these crazy religionists don’t want to touch or sit next to women, but what on earth is their excuse for removing women from a news photograph? Can it be that they’re so bull-goose crazy that they can’t even tolerate women next to men in a picture? I have no explanation, but it’s clear that the anti-female aspect of the faith is involved.
h/t: Several readers who sent me diverse links
At the very least, they *could* have Obama edited *in*, though!
For the win!
The hand of mystery woman is still there!
Which makes it look like the one man is holding the other’s arm, albeit with one glove off and one glove on. I wonder why they missed that?
See #5!
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Well, That’s a relief! Our angst about not sending a higher level observer is unnecessary since the Israeli lobby probably shopped them out in the final draft.
It’s even a crap job of Photoshopping. Look at the tree branches overhead in the cropped picture. They are suspended in mid-air!
Even worse: The first ledge on the building on the right has been cut in two, and the edges don’t line up! (Compare with original)
Just to the right of mystery woman’s hand: that man is now wearing her blue scarf.
And the buildings on the left have moved.
Miracles, I tells ya.
I would have put in a bunch of easter eggs. Like if you look really close, you see a squirrel in the line and if you look away slightly, you see shark.
Can you do that? Cool.
No, it’s just a fantasy. I can barely use Photoshop.
That’s hilarious!
If you look closely you can see that they also blurred out another woman in the second row on the right who is facing toward the center.
This is the craziest thing I’ve seen today. It’s a wonder they can find any women who will mate with them and produce more crazy men and invisible women to keep the whole sect going.
They don’t find women to mate with them. It is arranged for them.
The only explanation I can see is that extreme religion has fried their brains. So many years of studying nonsense instead of reality has brainwashed them.
Bull-goose crazy! Indeed.
There should be a book written on stupid religious rules.
aren’t those called, the Bible, the Torah and the Coran?
The third woman is indeed Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris.
During the memorial service in the Grand Synagogue, it was all men on the first floor and women in the balcony, typical of Orthodox services. However, a few women, probably journalists or aides, occasionally could be seen on the first floor walking around.
If they refuse to acknowledge the existence of Angela Merkel how on earth do they cover German politics? Do they pretend that Germany is led by a man? Andrew Merkel?
That raises an interesting point. Are they editing these images for men, or more insidiously, for women? In other words, are the edits so that men don’t have to get girl cooties, or are they trying to keep women in their communities from knowing that there are powerful women elsewhere in the world?
If they disguise the gender of Chancellor Merkel in their written reporting on Germany that would suggest their photoshopping is directed more toward women.
How did they cover Israeli politics under Golda Meyer?
Those publications don’t show any pictures on women, at all, ever. It doesn’t matter if they are standing next to men or not.
They do not change the names of politicians, but they do sometimes use only the last name of women in the news, and in that way “cover” the fact that they are women.
How do they cover Germany? I doubt that they do at all. Those are small, ultra-orthodox publications that focus mainly on their own community.
Apparently Orthodox Jewish males are to images of women as certain Islamist mullahs and imams are to images of Mohammed.
Haven’t we seen this before?
(Hillary Clinton in the Osama Bin Laden assault situation room)
I wonder if these women were edited out of the image because they are female elected officials with political power and not because they are women per se. Does this publication routinely print images of non-elected (“non-powerful”) women in close proximity to men?
The Ultra Orthodox insist that is not the case – they treat images of all women, high or low, with the same – er – respect.
Thanks – I thought I had a “logical” explanation there for a sec.
No women are shown in those papers ever. That includes ads, news, everything. It’s not about women of power, but about all women (does that make it better or worst? I wonder…)
Sans brains.. these people are just plain ultra loopy.
If it was one of their kind that did the photoshop edit he would have felt terribly icky having to handle these images which explains the crap job, he was in a hurry. His ultra-Orthodox believer mates probably shunned him for the day!
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Probably hire goyim…
Their photographics dept must have been busy during Golda Meir’s time in office.
And remember, no Photoshop back then. Only scissors and glue.
It would immediately be condemned as racist and phobic…. not to mention insensitive.
This was meant as a reply to ChrisKG’s suggestion that there be a book on stupid religious rules.
Regarding the airplane incident, upon being offered monetary compensation if I would cede my seat I would have loved to hear the rabid rabbi’s response to these questions:
If it is undesirable for you to sit next to a woman wouldn’t it also be bad for me?
If you think money would make a difference, would you sit next to a woman if I offered you twice what you are offering me?
I really wouldn’t ask this question, but it would be interesting to see the rabbi’s reaction: Might your aversion to sitting next to a woman be the consequence of homosexuality?
I’m not sure how I’d have reacted upon being offered money to exchange seats but I might have taken the money and given it to the woman next to the seat I agreed to occupy or I might have refused the money and moved or I might have refused the money and refused to move.
To the first question, a likely response is that, if you’re a Jew, then yes, you should not sit next to a woman other than your wife. If you are not a Jew, you can do whatever because you are not bound by the commandments.
The second question could well bring offense and not just due to the potential implication of the Jewish stereotype: the tradition is to follow the commandments even up to penalty of death, as such a violation – most especially in front of goyim – would bring shame upon the Jewish people. There is a story in the Talmud (I think it’s the Talmud, could be folklore) about rabbis who chose execution over being forced to eat ham in public.
Could the Orthodox on the plane be sure any one of them wasn’t sitting on a toilet seat a woman had sat on ten minutes earlier?
My guess as to why they do this is that they’ve trapped themselves in an ascending order of pointless rituals which pay homage to pointless beliefs until they’ve passed the point of No Return and entered the Land of Fetish. The reason is that it makes no reason! How holy is that! More holy than others, I bet.
The impression they leave however is that they are afraid that ultra-orthodox Jewish men are so hyper-sexed they will masturbate to the hotties in the coats. Especially that Jezebel with the blue scarf.
The president of France, you say? All the more reason then.
President of Switzerland.
It was the puffy coat for me. Always a turn on.
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Yeah my initial thought was the one several other posters had above, that they don’t want to show women in power. But I like your guess better: once upon a time one of their rabbis came up with some esoteric rule about some other picture that had women in it, and now they are just religiously trapped into following it ad absurdem.
Or maybe women are prophets? No?
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So Merkel is holly and Her Image should never be depicted? Now that’s a thought…
But no, the explanation is the tired and used one, just as Sastra said – in those communities any image of a women is thought to endanger the pure young men, as they might have impure thoughts. Yes, even middle-age women in heavy winter coats.
A Jewish theologian will tell you as much. The idea is to put a fence around a practice (ritual sacrifice by boiling a calf in its mother’s milk), and then put a fence around the fence (keeping milk and meat separate in dishes as well as prescribing wait times between consuming one or the other so the two do not commingle in one’s stomach).
Largely silly and primitive, certainly, but by and large it is not unconscious at all: a learned Jew is well aware of the extended meaning of the various rituals (or at least, knows the post-hoc explanation, which may or may not be historically accurate).
The ultra-orthodox edition of Playboy must be really boring then – all those blank pages… 😉
funny thing how everybody thinks about the poor (couple) of women airbrushed out. yet, with the original picture untouched, few notice the boys club atmosphere. only four women in such a crowd?
5, not that it makes any difference.
It’s because we’re used to it (men and women – I’m used to it too and I’m a woman). I maintain that women don’t occupy higher positions in corporations simply because people don’t see them in the role. It’s as simple as that.
How do you know that “few notice it?” Perhaps at least half of us do. 🙂
I noticed it.
And bananas. That is, sub.
They should take their abhorrence of women to its logical conclusion and disappear within a generation.
Seriously, what can we Jews do about this?
This is nicely done — someone has photoshopped all the male leaders out of that photo!
https://twitter.com/jem_chapman/status/555061968097525760/photo/1
That’s brilliant.
Funny! And apt! Touché!
Looks perfectly normal to me.
That’s wonderful and it’s particularly poignant because the poses they are in make them look befuddled, like they are saying, “where the hell is everybody?” which only heightens the effect of showing how few female leaders we have.
Thanks for posting that. 🙂
I guess, technically speaking, they took a photo of the empty street and photoshopped the female leaders in. Don’t know where they got the pic from – Streetview?
What would happen if the feminists started
chopping Jews out of photos? I’m sure the Jewish lobby would (and rightly) have some complaints.
Sometimes people can’t think about what if the shoe was on the other foot.
This is a brilliant idea! It doesn’t have to be feminists, just women* – then it is exactly the reciprocal of what The Announcer has done and no-one can complain.
*Are all feminists women, are all women feminsits? Discuss. (Too deep for me.)
Men can be feminists too.
And some women who call themselves feminists actually aren’t. And some who don’t actually are.
I hope this is clear.
Feminism arose in response to the status quo, Masculinism, to which a sufficient number of women became determined to no longer genuflect and acquiesce. That word, “Masculinism,” is never used, as humanity has been so inured and subordinated to the status quo.
🙂
One would no doubt get some bafflegab or doublespeak about how *they* are right (“by divine law, don’t you know!”) and the feminists are wrong. Rationalization is a terrible and all-too-human thing.
There is a practical problem, which is that there are lots of women around and they’re all clearly identifiable.
Most Jews aren’t so obvious, only the ultra-Orthodox who are comparatively rare. So there aren’t many opportunities to chop them and it’s possible nobody would notice – which would be embarrassing.
Nutso
Classic Merilee drive-by! 😉
Do these cootiephobics realize they wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for a woman? What do they think about their mothers? Are they so psychologically insecure with their manhood that they have to denigrate women? What about their wives? Why is it always MEN with these damn fool ideas?
It isn’t.
Good link.
Those girls have to be completely bananas. I could understand (in the early days) idealistic guys – and maybe girls – going off to fight against Assad. But now that ISIS has shown its true colours, why on earth would any girl want to go off and join a movement that will treat them like possessions?
The disconcerting thing is that the families appear to be moderate Muslims who absolutely do not want their kids going off to join ISIS (and usually have no idea they’re going to).
I always thought that Jews were big on genealogy and their mothers wielded considerable influence. So the obvious question is, do they even have family pictures of their mothers? Weird.
It might be a “in public” thing they are doing. Who knows … layers and layers of unfortunateness.
Cameron is also absent from this version and the woman who was next to him, Helle Thorning – Schmidt, Danish PM. BTW, Cameron seems to have a thing about her. At Mandela’s funeral service he muscled in on Obama’s selfie with her.
That’s what happens when you stand too close to women, you can just poof out of existence along with them. That’s our power – we feminize the men and make them one of us. 🙂
I think too Queen Noor of Jordan was in the original photo as published in the British Press.
Gosh, isn’t it nice to know that the artistic skills of Stalnist era, airbrushing non-people out of photos as the ideological breezes blow, has found modern practitioners whose dogmas can fill the gap.
Very Good, “Why is it always men with these Damn fool ideas.”
Who the hell do you think wrote the bible. Surely you know women fall in down there between the sheep and goats. And they are unclean. It’s just what you would expect – stone age men.
I’m worried for the soul of the man who had to work on the picture to make it acceptable viewing. I wonder what he had to do to cleanse himself afterwards, and is there any ritual complicated enough to remove the stain of looking at women in a photograph?
Those women had their hair uncovered too! Horror of horrors. I hope it didn’t send him into a libidinous frenzy, leaving him incapable of concentrating on his job. Or perhaps I’ve found the explanation of why he did such a bad one.
Sorry ultra-orthodox Jews, but you are truly pathetic. You are missing out on so much that is good in the world because of an ancient set of bizarre rules.
Could it have been done by a woman? A young one obviously, not yet rearing children.
Or maybe they have to outsource this sort of thing – pay some non-Jew to whom the rules don’t apply (like with paying goyish servants to work on the Sabbath).
What power these men give me. I could chase them all over the place threatening to stand next to them or something.
You people at WEIT – all you do is attack Muslims, you racists. Oh wait. 😛
My mother told me she used to abuse this power when she was young (in Israel). Going into a busy bus, she always tried to sit next to an ultra-orthodox guy, knowing he will get up and leave her with a lot of space 🙂
Ha!
😆
Tee hee.
I hope they understand they’re following Stalin in this, too. (See Political and Ethical Issues, here.
If you think this is a bad photoshop work, check out this:
http://www.jdn.co.il/news/437962
OMG, unbelievable!
You mean the second photo down, with a disembodied bearded face on the left and a headless man on the right? It’s really bad.
Since the page is all in Yiddish, I can’t tell if they’re publishing it or making fun of the picture.
(PS Google Translate actually worked with a copy-and-paste, it’s a serious report).
But there’s a woman wearing glasses in the background, second from right, they must have missed her. Does that invalidate the whole photoshop job? Suggests a new sport, photobombing ultra-orthodox photos.
It’s in Hebrew in fact, not in Yiddish.
And yea, this is an ultra-orthodox site, and a serious report.
The disembodied bearded face, BTW, belong to the Israeli minister of foreign affairs, who was at the march, but not anywhere near those people when the picture was taken… They just decided to use his face to cover the face of a women.
The comments to this article are hilarious. Someone berated them for photoshopping the women out, and others answered with phrases like “we choose not to defile our eyes and brains with the filth of other sites”.
‘It’s in Hebrew in fact, not in Yiddish.’
Sorry, I’m unfamiliar with those scripts, hence my wrong attribution. A quick Google suggests they look very similar, at least to an outsider. I did notice when highlighting a bit to drag it to Translate, that Chrome wanted to highlight it from right-to-left, obviously Chrome understands it even if I don’t.
Didn’t expect you to be familiar with it 🙂
The alphabet is actually the same, but the language itself is very different. Yiddish is very close to German (people who speak German can understand it quite well, while I cannot).
Ultra-Orthodox reporter’s photo of Mohammed addressing a harem:
♫♪ Je suis woman, hear me roar,
Heard, not seen, you choose to ignore ♫♪
(someone’s comment from another website)
It’s more ridiculous then you guys can imagine.
Ultraorthodox newspapers don’t report sex crime. Their parties send no woman to the knesset. In some shops they have separate lines for men an women and in their busses, women and men sit in different parts. They are generally obsessed with any public contact between the genders
Turnabout is fair play
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/static/Resizer.ashx/news/468/282/559737.jpg
Whoops. Mean to post a link, not embed. Sorry.
IIRC, only embedding videos is against Da Roolz.
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Reblogged this on Reasonable Rants and commented:
Ok, this is just sad…