Some twists have stirred up this thread over the weekend. I just want to say that I’m glad to see that this forum is administered by two brilliant and independent thinkers who deeply respect each other even in disagreements, and I’m thankful to both for the good things they said about me.
I’ll try and live up to their esteem, although I certainly can’t compare to them, and to many others here, as a researcher, both because I admit to being not very experienced yet, and because I tend to form my opinions starting more from intuition than from meticulous research.
In fact, this thread arose from an intuitive feeling, but I’m trying to back it up with some findings that I consider revealing or at least interesting. And of course, being this forum a collaborative effort, I’m also counting on the help of everybody here who’s interested in exploring the subject.
As a start, I’ve already mentioned a couple of times (here and on the Miles Mathis thread) the violent, traumatic and dangerous nature of a ritual CIRCUMCISION, in which an eight days old male baby has his foreskin cut without a medical anesthetic by a circumciser (Mohel) with bare, ungloved (and who knows if really clean or disinfected) hands, who then proceeds to suck some blood from the desperately screaming baby’s intimate parts.
On Wikipedia -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brit_milah - they call it Metzitzah (orMetzizah B’peh).
So far I’ve found only an explicit (and pretty graphic) video of a ritual circumcision in the Judaic tradition. Unfortunately it doesn’t stand by itself, but it’s contained - from minute 18,50 to minute 25 - in this controversial and very long (almost 4 hours) video, which you can’t even access in some parts of the world (including Italy):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHfUUage4eQ
I’m not endorsing the whole video here, although I think it contains several interesting parts. I’m just suggesting that you watch the circumcision scene, which is also accompanied, for the most part, by the pretty angry comments of a famous chess player, the late Bobby Fisher, a former world champion who, maybe partly Jewish (there, I said it, at last!
) himself, ended up being considered anti-semitic and had to seek asylum in Iceland.
Since I’ve just used another charged word, allow me a brief digression here. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary online, the word “Semitism” means “policy or predisposition favorable to Jews”. In this sense, the word anti-semitism should indicate just the position of somebody who doesn’t think that people from a certain ethnic group should be favored at the expense of others. It doesn’t mean that they should be disfavored either; it denotes only a neutral attitude that considers them neither more nor less important than other races or religions. So it should be a perfectly legitimate and even favorable attribute, instead of being used as one of the worst stigmas in contemporary society. And it’s also interesting to note that in Italian we don’t even have the positive word “semitismo” in the most famous dictionaries. We’re allowed to know only its negative counterpart “antisemitismo”. So we can't even know what the word exactly means!
Back to the main subject of this post, of course there are examples of ritual circumcision also in other cultures and religions (like the Islamic faith, for example) in Africa, in Asia, in the Middle East and even in aboriginal Australia. But in all these cases it tends to be practiced more during puberty, if not in adulthood.
And in any case, genital mutilation at an early age is considered a violation of the human rights of children in the West. UNICEF, for example, strongly condemns it when it’s done to girls with practices like infibulations, but adopts a totally different standard when dealing with the circumcision of males, saying that
“While strongly opposing female circumcision, called genital mutilation in this case, UNICEF advocates medical male circumcision as beneficial for the prevention of HIV. Circumcising infant boys is a relatively straightforward procedure and if properly carried out, complications are very rare. However, infant circumcision on reducing the HIV risk will only pay off when the boy has grown up and starts to become sexually active. However, given the enormous challenges of HIV prevention and the uncertainty that better prevention measures, such as a vaccine, will be available some time in foreseeable future, public health experts consider that the introduction of widespread medical male circumcision for infants would be a good investment in African countries with high HIV-prevalence”.
So it doesn’t represent a “good investment” in modern, industrial societies! Not for UNICEF, and so even much less for those who, like us, suspect AIDS being at least partly a hoax. And anyway, only “medical male circumcision” is mentioned here.
Nevertheless, Jacqueline Smith, writing for the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights, reported that male circumcision is an obvious violation of the human rights of the child, equivalent to female circumcision (Male Circumcision and the Rights of the Child. In: Mielle Bulterman, Aart Hendriks and Jacqueline Smith (Eds.), To Baehr in Our Minds: Essays in Human Rights from the Heart of the Netherlands (SIM Special No. 21). Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM), University of Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands, 1998: pp. 465–498.
http://www.cirp.org/library/legal/smith/ ).
Therefore it can be said that although ritual, religious circumcision is not approved in our western society, it is not openly criticized when it comes to its Jewish version. And I wonder why, since it seems to me definitely a barbaric practice (or better a form of infant torture) that is either "just" traumatizing for the child if everything goes well, or even very dangerous in case something goes wrong. Although I couldn’t find exact and dependable statistics on this, many cases are reported of genital herpes, sepsis and other forms of infection, and there are even cases in which the child remains badly mutilated (in fact, there’s even the appalling case of David Reimer who, having had his penis accidentally destroyed in a “botched circumcision” as an infant, underwent a sex-reassignment operation and eventually committed suicide in adulthood).
So I wonder why there’s so much reluctance in speaking about against this particular practice, and also a tendency to mix it with its medical, cleaner version, whose beneficial qualities I even suspect being exaggerated to further confuse the issue.