I know this is really going to upset the Israeli Minister of Education.

But the New York Times reported Sept. 20, 07 that there are people in Egypt opposed to female “circumcision,” meaning female genital mutilation.

For centuries Egyptian girls, usually between the ages of 7 and 13, have been taken to have the procedure done, sometimes by a doctor, sometimes by a barber or whoever else in the village would do it. As recently as 2005, a government health survey showed that 96 percent of the thousands of married, divorced or widowed women interviewed said they had undergone the procedure — a figure that astounds even many Egyptians. In the language of the survey, “The practice of female circumcision is virtually universal among women of reproductive age in Egypt.

In Egypt the procedure is done under filthy conditions and sometimes results in the death of young girls (it is done to them when they are 13 years old). The Times reports:

A nationwide campaign to stop the practice has become one of the most powerful social movements in Egypt in decades, uniting an unlikely alliance of government forces, official religious leaders and street-level activists. Though Egypt’s Health Ministry ordered an end to the practice in 1996, it allowed exceptions in cases of emergency, a loophole critics describe as so wide that it effectively rendered the ban meaningless. But now the government is trying to force a comprehensive ban.

The NY Times article gets more graphic from there, but I will spare you the details.

Now why will this news upset Israel’s Minister of Education, Yuli Tamir, better known for introducing school programs in Arab schools that teach that Israel’s very existence is a “Naqba” or catastrophe?

Well, as reported on the Arutz7 blog a while back, Madame Tamir is a great fan of the “Clitoridectomy.” That word means what you think it means. Eleven years ago she published an article endorsing and defending the practice, and denouncing those narrow-minded Western racists who express disgust at it. The problem is not the “Clitoridectomy,” insists Tamir in that article, but the intolerable denunciations of it by patriarchal bigoted women-hating Westerners who fail to respect the cultural practices of The Other. Below are selected quotes from the Tamir rant.

“In discussions about multiculturalism, clitoridectomy is now the trump card, taking over the role once played by cannibalism, slavery, lynchings, or the Indian tradition of Sati: ‘Is this the kind of tradition you would like to protect?’ liberals ask embarrassed multiculturalists, who immediately qualify their cultural pluralism. Clitoridectomy defines the boundary between us and them, between cultures we can tolerate and those we must condemn…”

“Furthermore, it seems clear that Western conceptions of female beauty encourage women to undergo a wide range of painful, medically unnecessary, and potentially damaging processes — extreme diets, depilation, face lifts, fat pumping, silicone implants. Of course, adult women do these things to their own bodies, and, it is said, their decisions are freely made. But would our gut reaction to female circumcision be very different if it were performed on consenting adults? It is not unlikely that girls at the age of 13 or 14, who are considered in traditional societies as adults mature enough to wed and bear children, would “consent” to the mutilation of their bodies if they were convinced that marriage and children were contingent on so doing. Many women who followed the tradition of Sati seemed to do it as a matter of choice…”

“But our own culture fosters false beliefs of a similar kind. According to Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, some 75 percent of women aged 18-35 believe that they are fat, whereas only 25 percent are medically overweight. Still more heartbreaking is the fact that the majority of the 30,000 women who responded to a Glamour questionnaire preferred losing 10-15 pounds to success in work or in love. So the fostering of such beliefs cannot differentiate their culture from our own and explain our hostility to it … A fulfilling sex life is certainly one good, but there are others…”

“My purpose, however, is not to justify clitoridectomy, but to expose the roots of the deep hostility to it — to reveal the smug, unjustified self-satisfaction lurking behind the current condemnation of clitoridectomy. Referring to clitoridectomy, and emphasizing the distance of the practice from our own conventions, allows us to condemn them for what they do to their women, support the struggle of their women against their primitive, inhuman culture, and remain silent on the status of women in our society.”

You realize what this means? While Israel’s relations with Egypt are not very good, once Tamir starts denouncing the Egyptians who criticize and oppose female genital mutilation, this will enrage Egypt and could even trigger a new all-out Middle East war!! True, Egypt got very angry, diplomatically-speaking, when Israeli comedian Eli Yatzpen made fun of President Mubarak on TV, but that is nothing! Egypt might attack Israel with missiles to force Tamir’s removal if Israelis do not fire the educational airhead themselves!