Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

6 October 2012

THE MUTILATION OF BABIES

Germany plans shortly to pass a law legalising circumcision.

This follows a ruling by a court in Cologne in June 2012 that the religious practice, which is common among Jews and Muslims, amounts to bodily harm.

The ruling has sparked a sharp reaction, particularly from Jews living in Germany.

Welcoming the Government’s plans to override the Cologne court, Dieter Graumann, President of the Central Council of Jews, said : “It is a clear political signal that Jews and Muslims continue to be welcome in Germany. We are glad that Jewish laws, and with it Jewish life, will not be deemed illegal.”

According to the proposals, with the parents’ consent, a doctor or “someone skilled as a doctor” will be entitled to cut off the prepuce of boys up to six months old.

The story is carried in a dispatch from Berlin by Louise Osborne that is published today in the UK’s Guardian newspaper.

Antigone1984 comments:

The Government of Chancellor Angela Merkel is clearly trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Readers who have checked out our Mission Statement at the top of our Home Page will know that Antigone1984 “believes that the systematic slaughter of 6 million Jews by the Nazis in World War II was the greatest crime in the history of humanity.”

Germany will rightly harbour guilt about the Holocaust till the end of time.

This understandable guilt explains why the German Government is moving so swiftly to quash the Cologne court ruling.

However, readers of this blog will also know that, as far as Antigone1984 is concerned, two wrongs do not make a right.

Circumcision is a barbaric ritual involving the forcible mutilation of the natural body of a defenceless baby that is not of an age to give its assent to the aggression. The consent of the parents is irrelevant. It is the rights of the child that are at stake. The excision of a normal foreskin has no medical justification.

Circumcision as a religious rite is, therefore, in our view, unconditionally wrong.

The German Government is therefore inappellably at fault when it attempts to assuage German war guilt by infringing the human rights of the child. Every child born to woman is entitled to the preservation of its bodily integrity.

The German Government’s intervention reminds us of  Abraham sacrificing Isaac for a supposedly higher end.  Chapter 22 of Genesis makes it crystal-clear that for Abraham to have gone ahead with the sacrifice would have been an abomination.

Readers of our Mission Statement will also be aware that the prism through which Antigone1984 views contemporary politics can be summed up in the following principle, which is applicable at all times and in all circumstances without exception: the end does not justify the means.

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  You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

1. Why? or How? That is the question(3 Jan 2012)

2. Partitocracy v. Democracy (20 July 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices(2 Feb 2012)

4. Capitalism in practice  (4 July 2012)

5.Ladder  (21 June 2012)

 6. A tale of two cities (1)  (6 June 2012)

 7. A tale of two cities (2)  (7 June 2012)

 8. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat(31 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

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