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Tue, Sept 27, 2011 | By Abigail R. Esman

anti-Circumcision protesters in San Fransisco

Ban on Circumcision: Trampling Religious Rights of non-Christians in the Netherlands

First came the proposal — backed by more than sixty percent of the general public — to mandate sterilization or contraceptive injections for certain segments of the population, however productive and law-abiding. Then followed the ban on ritual slaughter, making kosher meats unavailable to the Jews. And finally, the country’s doctors’ association called for a government ban on circumcision, describing it as “a violation of human rights.”

No, this is not Germany in the early decades of the 20th century; it is Holland, the country most think of as the land of tolerance and freedom, in the first decades of the 21st. But increasingly, it is becoming hard to see the difference.

The first initiative, broached first in 2005 and again in 2010, revolves around not the Jews but the mentally handicapped, and a motion to require low-IQ couples to undergo sterilization or submit to regular, hormonal birth-control injections. (The fact that there can be powerful physical — and emotional — side-effects from such medications especially for smokers and women with a family history of breast cancer has not entered the debate.) Such couples are deemed officially “unqualified” for parenthood; and, in the view of 77 percent of the Dutch public, any children that they do have (despite any legal restrictions) should be taken from them at birth to guard against the inevitable emotional suffering the Dutch insist (sans an iota of viable evidence) such children endure as a result of their parents’ limitations. By contrast, matters like the (known) emotional damage created by being raised in orphanages, as wards of the state, or in foster homes — never mind the anguish to the parents who have had their children forcibly taken away from them — have not entered the equation — or if so, they have clearly been waived aside as unimportant. More crucial, evidently, is the pursuit of a kind of genetic manipulation, ostensibly aimed at protecting children — this despite the fact that the vast majority of child abusers in the world are of average and above-average IQ.

Then came the push, earlier this year, for a ban on ritual slaughter — both kosher and halal. (Nuances in the halal code, however, make it possible for religious Muslims to consume meat from animals who are drugged or stunned prior to being killed — ritual slaughter is performed without such measures — but kosher Jews may not.) According to ritual slaughter opponents, ritual methods cause the animals to suffer, while animals who are stunned first are spared. (How anyone can argue about “humane” slaughter at all is a mystery to me, but that’s another matter.)

But in fact, while some organizations worldwide have pressed (with accompanying propaganda) for similar bans, much research has shown that animals who are stunned before slaughter in fact frequently suffer significantly more pain than those who are not, as stunning methods can fail, and the beheading of most animals often takes place while they are still conscious. The shochet, or kosher slaughterer, on the other hand, is carefully trained over the course of many years to cut the animals’ carotid artery in a single, deft stroke, minimizing trauma. At the very least, anyway, our knowledge of the actual effects on animals of either form of slaughter is ambiguous and inconclusive.

Yet these facts notwithstanding, a modified ban was instituted this past spring, re-establishing the supremacy of Christian traditions and customs in the Netherlands at the cost of the religious rights of non-Christians, even when the practical exercise of those rights in no way conflicts with Dutch culture (or, for that matter, Christianity).

Now Holland’s association of doctors, KNMG. has arrived at the third measure: a law banning the circumcision of boys — a motion so virulently directed at the country’s non-Christian population that it would make it impossible for most of them to live there. And again, the reasoning couldn’t be more flawed. Not only does the KNMG paint circumcision as a “violation of human rights”(!), but it maintains, too, that the procedure creates emotional and mental anguish and, further, poses a health hazard — this despite mountains of studies that repeatedly prove the contrary: that circumcised men enjoy a significantly lower risk of various diseases, including AIDS and some cancers. (As for the “mental anguish,” charge, I can’t help but be reminded, as one person suggested when I informed him of the proposal, of similar 19th-century assertions about the dangers of masturbation.)

Moreover, new studies recently published in the Lancet and cited by the Centers for Disease Control show conclusively that women who have sex with circumcised men run a lower risk of various diseases themselves, including cervical cancer. Consequently, while no organization mandates it, circumcision is generally recommended by the American Medical Association, the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, and other major international health groups, many of which are currently revising their policies on this issue in direct opposition to the Dutch proposal: that is, increasingly, the world’s top medical researchers are convinced that circumcision, whatever its risks, should be a routine procedure for all male infants. Many of these will caution — rightly — that the decision to circumcise a child should be left to the parents and their physicians — but only those who seek political ends above medical ones would be — and are — irresponsible enough to recommend against it.

But the KNMG, or Dutch Royal Society of Medicine, ignores all this. Worse, they go so far in their politicization of medicine as to mislead the public deliberately by broadcasting not only their arguments, but their inaccurate, politicized, and manufactured so-called “evidence” on newspaper opinion pages and talk shows on TV.

True, such anti-circumcision movements are growing globally, modified bans have even been implemented in countries like Australia and South Africa, where circumcision is practiced largely by the black populations — populations that are and long have been the victims of racism and racist government policies. It is therefore difficult to take seriously the so-called “studies” that presumably support the decision to enact circumcision bans in these countries, particularly when they so blatantly contradict other, more established scientific evidence to the contrary. Yet this is what the Dutch medical leaders are now asking the Dutch to do. And for a national association of medical professionals to so blatantly place politics above science is, in a word, scandalous.

And politics, it surely is. Underlying the two bans — and an additional proposal for a law to outlaw the burqa, similar to the ones already in place in France and Belgium — is what the Dutch (and most of Western Europe) perceive as a dangerous infiltration of Islamic laws and values on the Judeo-Christian, secular culture of the West. Much of that concern is indeed well-founded, as radical Islam grows in influence in Western countries, and many Muslims resist adapting to Western norms. That resistance has, in fact, led to crises in the treatment of women, who are frequently abused in Dutch (and other European) Muslim homes; growing street crime against homosexuals and Jews; and — as we all know — threats of violence that have, on occasion, led to mass murder. And all of these are dangers that we can and must defend against with all the might — social, political, legal, and military — at our disposal.

Accordingly, France’s face-covering ban, for instance, reflects security concerns and ongoing efforts to Westernize European Muslims, especially in regard to women’s rights (and yes, the niqab is oppressive — ask anyone who has ever tried to navigate urban, modern life in one). But circumcision? Anti-Western? Anti-democracy? Americans have been regularly circumcising boys for generations as a matter of medical preference, reflecting the (heavily documented) health advantages of the practice. (Or is America not a Western, democratic country?)

To the contrary, unlike burqas and efforts to eradicate certain Christmas-time festivals and even office Christmas parties (which Muslim groups have petitioned, often successfully, to do), circumcision (like kosher slaughter) does not endanger the culture of the Dutch. Indeed, it has been part of that culture since the arrival of the Portuguese Jews in the 17th century, making it as Dutch as Rembrandt and Vermeer. (And since it only is practiced among the Jewish and Muslim communities, the continued practice would not affect Christian Dutch anyway.)

Couple this, then, with the ban on ritual slaughter, and the air above the Netherlands thickens, reeking of a fetid will to empty the country’s streets of anyone but the smiling blond Hanses and Jannekes of yore. But even more sinister is what these latter two initiatives suggest in combination with the prior call for forced sterilization: a subtle, perhaps even unconscious, undercurrent of sentiment in the Netherlands that brings it dangerously and hideously close to the climate of the Nazi era. No, there are no death camps; we’ve become far too sophisticated now for this. But the message in itself is clear: Strong, healthy, white-skinned Christians only.

And let’s face it: that indeed is what stands to be the inevitable result of all these moves: If circumcision is ruled as a form of child abuse, and “potentially unfit” parents are to be sterilized (or drugged) involuntarily to prevent them from procreating, then Jews and Muslims will be subjected, too, to such “medical intervention” methods now being forced on the mentally disabled. Most people call it “eugenics” — the purification of race through genetic manipulation and control, the first program Adolf Hitler instituted on coming into power in Germany. He and Josef Mengele called it “racial hygiene.” We know the rest.

Some will accuse me of hyperbole or paranoia. I suspect none of them has experienced life as a Jew in the Netherlands of late — a country where Jews are becoming increasingly invisible and ignored. At a time when (mostly Muslim) anti-Semites regularly attack physically-recognizable Jews (Orthodox Jews, or men wearing yarmulkes, for instance) on the streets, most Jews have stopped wearing identifiable garments, and removed mezuzahs from their doorways. When the government forced a company to change the name of a popular cookie, “Negerzoenen” — “nigger kisses” — citing racial insensitivity, no one said a word about the name of “Jodenkoeken” — “Jew cookies” — despite the memories and associations that it conjures of Jews and heat and ovens. In 2010, when a Jewish man, assaulted by Muslim anti-Semites in Amsterdam, visited a police station to report the attack, the officer on duty told him to come back another time. Calendars frequently include the dates of Ramadan and Eid, and even Chinese New Year, but never holidays like Chanukah or Pesach or Yom Kippur; and indeed, I’ve yet to meet a non-Jewish Dutch person who has the slightest idea what these holidays represent. (Yes, some of Holland’s most prominent politicians are Jews; but the nature of Judaism, both as a religion and a culture, is known in the Netherlands largely through a prism of history and hate.)

And this is precisely what makes it all so easy. The Muslims are the bad guys, the Jews don’t really matter, and the mentally disabled, with no children to bring to school or to help them navigate the public world, remain mostly invisible in their homes, ghettoized, a population of non-people.

Soon enough, the only ones left for the Dutch to hate will be themselves.

Abigail R. Esman is an award-winning journalist based in New York and the Netherlands. The author of “Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy In the West” (Praeger, 2010), she pens a weekly column for Forbes.com. Her work has also appeared in The New Republic, Salon.com, Foreign Policy, The Nation, the Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications internationally. Her personal website is at AbigailEsman.com.