New York City health officials are investigating the death of a baby boy who died of herpes after a circumcision by Rabbi Yitzhok Fischer. Fischer carries the herpes virus and is believed to have infected two other infants while serving as a mohel. Under the Orthodox practice followed by Fischer, he actually uses his mouth to suck the blood from the infant’s penis when he cuts the foreskin.
Infants are particularly susceptible to the virus given their reduced immunity systems. Within ten days of the circumcision, one of twin boys died from the virus and another was infected.
The Book of Genesis stipulates circumcision as a defining mark for the descendants of Abraham: “Throughout all generations, every male shall be circumcised when he is eight days old…This shall be my covenant in your flesh, an eternal covenant. The uncircumcised male whose foreskin has not been circumcised, shall have his soul cut off from his people; he has broken my Covenant.” (Genesis 17:1-14)
Metzitzah b’peh (“suction by mouth”) is rarely used outside of the Haredi and Hasidic communities. Under this practice, the mohel spits the blood into a receptacle provided. While most mohelim rinse their mouths out with alcohol to sanitize them, alcohol may not kill the herpes virus.
This will make for some novel criminal and tort litigation. It is difficult to see how this shocking practice can be allowed as a public health matter. As a matter of torts, the families can clearly sue this rabbi for negligence with punitive damage potential. Indeed, I believe that there could would be a strong case for battery. The question will be reckless homicide and other criminal charges. Presumably, this rabbi knew he was a carrier and yet proceeded to use his mouth rather than the more common suction device.
For the full story, click here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIZLna_uzLQ
IS:
“I have a right to cut my sons penis if I want. What next making people have appendectomies to save on health care costs. It is this type of nanny state soft tyranny that is so irritating and it usually leads to not so soft tyranny.”
—————-
With all respect due you’ve got it wrong, backwards in fact on both counts:
In 1931-32 my father (18 at the time) was one of the very lucky ones that had a job. After a couple of months on the job (which required a physical exam by the company’s doctor) my father was called into the boss’ office and told that no one that worked at the company could have tonsils, those employees took too much time off with colds so if he wanted the job (and economically he had no choice but to want the job) he would have to have them removed. Which he did, on a weekend, so as not to have to take time off from the job.
You know, the early 30’s during the depression, the era of rampant liberalism and crushing regulation on business and finance. Those 30’s in the bizarro universe.
“I have a right to cut my sons penis if I want” is exactly an aspect of what I contend is the “not so soft tyranny” of an unenlightened, religious driven philosophy that encourages and (through government deference) fosters the remnants of a patrimonial model for family relationships. You may have the right in law but that doesn’t make it the right model for the 21st century.
GWLawSchoolMom: Thank you for the results of your small non-random survey. Even they might be different if they had been asked in private by a non-family member. The pressure men are under NOT to complain about having being circumcised (especially if it was religious) is enormous.
2000 years? One can think of many customs that have been carried on for a very long time, then abandoned without loss, and we would now consider abhorrent. (Metzitzah b’peh is a good example.)
You say “done for them” but from here it looks more like “done to them”. We have no reason to suppose that the pain of circumcision is any less than that of hatifat dam berit , and every reason to suppose it is more – especially since a baby can’t see it coming. But pain is only one issue. The big issue is the individual’s right to decide for himself what parts of his own body he may keep.
So Indentured Servant: shouldn’t libertarians be standing up for the freedom of the individual (not his parents) to decide that? Freedom to cut parts off one’s sons’ bodies (but, significantly, not one’s daughters’) can hardly have been what the writers of the Consitutition and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had in mind when they wrote of the right to be secure in one’s person, and free of unlawful seizures. It may take that freedom away from the parent, but it gives it back to the person it should more obviously belong to.
This past April, Vancouver resident Dr. Paul Tinari became the first Canadian man to have a heath-care-funded foreskin restoration. When he was eight years old, doctors at his school performed an operation without his consent. After years of painful erections, and frequent infections, Dr. Tinari — with the support of his doctor and psychiatrist — successfully sued, and as a result, the B.C. Ministry of Health paid for 90 per cent of the $12,000 operation. Dr. Tinari says he hopes that it will set a precedent for legal action that will eventually end the practice of infant circumcision all together.
…Dr. Tinari estimates that between the surgery and the foreskin’s resale value, each foreskin is worth approximately $100,000. His intention is to launch a legal battle, which he will call “The Head Tax” in which he aims to restore at least 10 per cent of that figure to the portion of the 10 million men in Canada who had the procedure non-consensually. But while Tinari says the issue is a moral one, he aims to fight it on the financial front. “When the cost of lawsuits exceeds the money that they are making from the surgery, that is when it’s going to end. It won’t end before that. Some people will join the class action lawsuit for the money, and although I would hope they did for moral reasons…. I don’t care why they join.”
http://thetyee.ca/News/2006/07/25/Circumcision/
Hey boys, if you want to know where the full and complete enjoyment of your sexuality went, it’s over there in that jar of collagen face cream!
Hmph. Well, those remarks are repugnant.
Mind you, it is also repugnant when people insinuate that I hold similar viewpoints just because I disagree with them.
This repugnant too:
Since the 1980’s many hospitals have been providing infant foreskins to a number of bio-research laboratories, pharmaceutical companies, and of course cosmetic companies. In Mothering Magazine in the Winter of 1997 issue Paul M. Fleiss, MD stated that “the marketing of purloined baby foreskins is a multimillion-dollar-a-year industry.”
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/146761/human_foreskins_are_big_business_for_pg2.html?cat=58
If you readers want to know about the talmud’s evil, go to http://www.come-and-hear.com and http://www.revisionisthistory.org.
After reading this Spindell guy’s replies all he does is call people hateful.
I am sure that jews make critical comments about blacks. Just try to tell these jews that they are anti-black, they’ll explode with denial. But they always you to agree with their charges against you. Jews can never refute what people say about them. All they have is name calling. The world is no longer falling for this bogus antisemitism chage. These people are Khazars, not israelites. A writer named Sand in Israel just wrote a book, The Invention of the Jewish People. Sand claims that Palestinians are the original Israelites.
The talmud invented the Hamitic Myth. Have you folks heard of that?
Jews were heavily involved in the transatlantic African slave trade. But they want you to believe that only white gentiles were involved.
Jews run:
Porn
Homo industry
NAMBLA
ACLU
ACLJ
SPLC
just to name a few. All anti-White groups.
“I have the right to cut my sons penis if I want.”
Not for long.
Domino:
“I know that it hurts you, but I do it out of kindness and for your own sake. Soon — when circumcision has become illegal, you will have difficulty reconciling with the fact that you have participated in, defended, and celebrated ritualized acts of child abuse.”
this is exactly what upsets me about most liberals, they want to take our freedoms away for any reason. If someone wants to cut some skin from around their sons glans then what is it to you? I have a right to cut my sons penis if I want. What next making people have appendectomies to save on health care costs. It is this type of nanny state soft tyranny that is so irritating and it usually leads to not so soft tyranny.
Sic Semper Penis
As a baby boy, your first experience with your penis is to have it mutilated and then (If you are orthadox) Have a man put his mouth on it?????????
Seems a bit off here folks…
Hugh writes : This is simply not true. The complication rate of circumcision is not negligible, and complications range up to death. The inquestion on a Jewish baby is about to open in the UK. As the general Intactivism movement grows (it only began about 1970), a number of Jews – especially those who don’t take the scriptures literally – are questioning circumcision.
my husband, my father, my uncles, brothers-in-law… every man in my life has been circumcised and not a single one thinks anything about it. This topic came up once before, someplace else, and it gave me the opportunity to pose this query to the men in my life. None were embarrassed and all reported that they just didn’t ever think about it. let any parent who wants to skip this procedure skip it. I have no problem with it if they are squeamish about it, but 2000 years of jewish ritual circumcision have still not produced enough accidents or worrisome side effects to cause us to reconsider this.
Hugh: The proposition that babies must be circumcised because if you asked intact adults they would refuse (perhaps with violence) just underlines the human rights issues the custom raises. Imagine applying the same logic to the removal of any other comparable body part.
me: my husband is a convert to Judaism. he was circumcised as an infant. when he converted, the rabbi gave him the option of having a pin prick to draw just a few drops of blood to make his conversion kosher and orthodox. he still covers his crotch when he thinks of this. men don’t like the idea of pain “down there” they just don’t. I can’t think of a single man who would opt as an adult to something that was done for them as an infant. anyway the discussion isn;t really about this…
is it?
it’s about a mohel who has an infectious disease who knowingly passed it on to infants who then got sick and died during a phase of the ritual that is mot widely practiced. this is outside the norm of jewish ritual circumcision.
“none of them were damaged by this ritual”
This is simply not true. The complication rate of circumcision is not negligible, and complications range up to death. The inquestion on a Jewish baby is about to open in the UK. As the general Intactivism movement grows (it only began about 1970), a number of Jews – especially those who don’t take the scriptures literally – are questioning circumcision.
The proposition that babies must be circumcised because if you asked intact adults they would refuse (perhaps with violence) just underlines the human rights issues the custom raises. Imagine applying the same logic to the removal of any other comparable body part.
If men like being circumcised, that’s good, but it’s also just lucky. Many don’t. Surveys have shown that many more men are happy to be intact than are happy to be cut.
Mike S. suggested earlier that the existence of foreskin restoration made the question moot, but foreskin restoration can never be complete (it can’t bring back the ~20,000 nerve endings) and is no more a solution than prosthetics are to amputation. The existence of some tens of thousands of men who go to the trouble of restoration just shows how problematic it is becoming.
Jehovah’s Witnesses is a restorationist,millenarian,Christian denomination.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehovah's_Witnesses
*Laughs.
“It has become more than obvious, in this thread and others that I arouse the castration anxieties of some of you here.”
Domino,
I’m married to and have always been with strong women. Castration anxiety is one of Freud’s stupider concepts and was very revealing in showing the sexist that Freud was. Castration anxiety is such a strange term coming from you who likens circumcision to castration
“I am somewhat sympathetic, because I have admittedly hacked away at many of your preconceived notions, sliced through your rationalizations, and sawed away at your complacency.”
You continue your strange turns of phrase also using language bespeaking castration.
“I know that it hurts you, but I do it out of kindness and
for your own sake.”
Are you a dominatrix perhaps? I say this because your phraseology would fit quite well in that kind of scenario and would also fit with your castration fixation and crusade. Do you like smacking those little bad boys and then telling them its for their own good? That type of scene would crack me up, but not in a good or stimulating way, more for its’ inane silliness.
“Soon — when circumcision has become illegal, you will have difficulty reconciling with the fact that you have participated in, defended, and celebrated ritualized acts of child abuse.”
Unfortunately, I was a court recognized expert in child abuse, whereas you are just an obsessive unable to write well, who relies on quotes from dubious sources to back up your ridiculous arguments.
“But your attempts to steal the attention from the injured bodies of children so as to bring pity yourselves as victims of racism was a laughingstock.”
Ah now, here we get to possibly the nub of the matter. Who said a word about either racism, or religious bigotry, or accused you of it? Not I.
“I don’t care what your belief is — Jew, Jehovah, Mormon, Scientologist, Muslim,”
Interesting, if limited choice of religions. Somehow the bizarre rituals of Christianity are not mentioned, even in passing. Could Domino the Dominatrix be a Christian and could her ranting and false documentation be the ravings of a Christian Fundamentalist, looking at a back door way to attack people who don’t share her beliefs. I honestly don’t know the answer to that but your own words, spewed in anger and frustration at your lack of success in mounting a decent argument, truly reveal an underlying ugly nature of some sort.
“…so as to bring pity ON yourselves…”
Pardon me.
*Note:
The second paragraph of my post should have been identified as an “aside” addressing the readers. My direction returns to the antagonist/s in paragraph 3.
It has become more than obvious, in this thread and others that I arouse the castration anxieties of some of you here.
This is why they consistently ridicule me as being some kind of sexually threatening or ambiguous entity — when, in fact, many of them are aware that I am a very feminine and beautiful woman. (Visits to my blog from this one are recorded in my statistics. Hi.)
I am somewhat sympathetic, because I have admittedly hacked away at many of your preconceived notions, sliced through your rationalizations, and sawed away at your complacency.
I know that it hurts you, but I do it out of kindness and for your own sake. Soon — when circumcision has become illegal, you will have difficulty reconciling with the fact that you have participated in, defended, and celebrated ritualized acts of child abuse.
I knew that you had nothing to defend yourselves with. Circumcision is indefensible. But your attempts to steal the attention from the injured bodies of children so as to bring pity yourselves as victims of racism was a laughingstock.
I don’t care what your belief is — Jew, Jehovah, Mormon, Scientologist, Muslim, etc. — your rights to practice those beliefs ends where other autonomous beings begin. Children are not property, and their bodies are not yours to sacrifice.
That’s my position. Now, go on embarrassing yourselves with your juvenile insults.