A ban on male circumcision would be antisemitic. How could it not be?

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Created on Saturday, 26 October 2013 00:00

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A ban on male circumcision would be antisemitic. How could it not be?

The Council of Europe's recent decree on children's rights contained some good, kind ideals – and some revolting comparisons of male circumcision with female genital mutilation

Tanya Gold

Jews are wary of identifying antisemitism; it upsets people so much, as if the Holocaust was an intellectual trope invented to win arguments with members of the Socialist Workers party. And where some see hatred, others find a blank wall; for instance, I found no antisemitism in the Daily Mail's characterisation of Ralph Miliband as a rootless cosmopolitan two weeks ago. He was a rootless cosmopolitan; or rather, those roots were burned, and so he came to north London. The Mail attacked Miliband because he was a Marxist, and the father of a man they fear will be prime minister; not because he was a Jew. His Jewishness was, as Hannibal Lecter, another rootless cosmopolitan, would say, "incidental".

Richer meat for the seeker of genuine antisemitism was found in a resolution passed by the Council of Europe, the "continent's leading human rights organisation", last week. It was called Children's Right to Physical Integrity, and based on a report by the former Social Democratic MP Marlene Rupprecht of Germany. The Parliamentary Assembly, the resolution read, "is particularly worried about a category of violation of the physical integrity of children, which supporters of the procedures tend to present as beneficial to the children themselves despite clear evidence to the contrary. This includes, amongst others, female genital mutilation, the circumcision of young boys for religious reasons, early childhood medical interventions in the case of intersexual children and the submission to or coercion of children into piercings, tattoos or plastic surgery."

In that kindly seeming paragraph, full of excellent legislative warmth and kind ideals, was the Jew bomb; the revolting (if you are minded to be revolted, but does the secular v religious debate really need another very angry person?) juxtaposition of female genital mutilation, which is always torture, and often murder, with ritual male circumcision, which is neither, and, incidentally, is practised by most Muslims, and all Jews. A poor edit? A shaky hand? Who knows?

The resolution called for members of the Council of Europe to work to "clearly define the medical, sanitary and other conditions to be ensured for practices that are today widely carried out in certain religious communities, such as the non-medically justified circumcision of young boys". This part is uncontroversial; it should be embraced. Tales of baby boys falling from tables and fracturing their skulls, or dying when amateur surgeons cut them with filthy scissors are repulsive; tales of mohels (ritual circumcisers) sucking a baby's penis to remove the blood and giving them herpes are repellent. No circumcision should be performed without medical qualification; those who disagree, including Jews, should think again.

For Jews, circumcision, which is performed at eight days (if the child is healthy), is the covenant with God, and the single most significant ritual in Judaism: "My covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant. And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people." It is almost the only ritual that both progressive and ultra-Orthodox Jews, so often at each others' throats as to who is the most righteous kind of Jew, agree on; even progressives who embrace marriage to non-Jews, gay marriage and female elevation to the rabbinate insist on it. But Rupprecht would like the Jews to find another ritual to express their covenant with God and their communion with their ancestors. The Jews, she implies, will have to think again – perhaps a ribbon? Or a stamp?

Even the leadership of the Council of Europe seemed to think the resolution was antisemitic, or at least worth repudiating. The president of Israel, Shimon Peres, wrote to the president of the Council, Thorbjorn Jagland: "The Jewish communities across Europe would be greatly afflicted to see their cultural and religious freedom impeded upon by the Council of Europe, an institution devoted to the protection of these very rights." Jagland swiftly distanced himself from the resolution; "the parliamentary assembly is a consultative body which does not represent the position of the Council of Europe as a whole," he replied, which I hope did not come as too great a shock to its members. Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and the ritual circumcision of boys (no acronym, I fear) are not, he added, "on equal footing". It was utterly obvious, though kind of him to say so; even so, the resolution stands, carried by 77 votes to 19.

Other Jewish groups were more outspoken than Peres, although I thought the activist who wondered whether "Jewish men would have to drop their pants at Heathrow to gain entry into Britain" was over-reacting slightly. Put succinctly, they freaked out. They called it antisemitism, which is a fair assessment if you define circumcision as essential to Judaism, and you care that Judaism endures; if you think that to be a Jew, to use the resolution's wording, can be "beneficial to the [Jewish] children themselves". I do not expect all secularists to agree.

Rupprecht eventually caved, which disappointed me. I think she should have stood by her prejudice; how can you debate with an enemy made of water? "The resolution adopted … in no way compares the circumcision of boys to female genital mutilation," she said, which makes me wonder if she read her own writing. Because it did compare them; they were separated by a mere comma. A legislator, of all people – even an ex-legislator, who, as her enemies at the Council of Europe pointed out to me, lost her parliamentary seat in the German election three weeks ago – should mind her grammar. "The text adopted by the parliamentarians … does not intend to stigmatise any religious community or its practices," she added. But to call a ritual a violation of human rights (especially children's rights) does stigmatise it, or at least it should. Badly worded, as I said. A shaky hand. Or cowardice. Or perhaps she does not understand what she is advocating? "It is the Council of Europe's mandate to promote the respect for human rights … on an equal footing with the fight against … antisemitism and xenophobia," she ploughed on. How a woman who seeks the eradication of Jewish ritual can then insist that she defends the Jews from antisemitism I know not, but she managed it.

Read deeper and it is clear that Rupprecht seeks an end to ritual circumcision entirely; she has written elsewhere that it is "clearly is a human rights violation against children". This is a trend – and so of course the next stage is prohibition. Attempts were made to criminalise circumcision in Germany last year and in Sweden last month, where there is a dark marriage between human-rights agitators and racists; criminalisation has also been attempted in San Francisco, the Netherlands and Norway, where in May the newspaper Dagbladet published a cartoon of grinning Jews (they always grin) mutilating a bloody child (there is always blood) on a circumcision table. A spokesman for the Simon Wiesenthal Center saw it and remarked: "Hitler and Himmler would be weeping tears of joy."

Is this an attempt to achieve with paper what other methods could not – the removal of Jews from Europe? Will Jews leave if a ban comes in? Some will, certainly; some Jews are always packed in their minds.

• This article was amended on 11 October 2013. We originally spelled Hannibal Lecter's surname as Lector. This has now been corrected

Source: The Guardian.com, Friday 11 October 2013