I know it seems like I am picking on SHAS, but it is only because of their campaign incessantly raising the banner of ethnic discrimination.
SHAS, via Aryeh Deri, continues to talk discrimination, to say they are going to fight it, to say only they can deal with it.
Surely discrimination still exists. One would be a fool to say otherwise. The question is how dominant it is in society. While it still exists, like in the news report today in which it was discovered that a haredi girls school in Ramot set in its school takanon, regulations, a clause, one that is illegal, that girls must only daven with ashkenazi pronunciation. As well, percentages in academia aren't equal, with less Sephardim represented than ashkenazim, and in plenty of other areas as well.
But why is SHAS the answer to that? For the past 30 years or so, since its inception, SHAS has only been a part of the problem. SHAS has been in every government (I think except for one, if my memory serves me correctly) since its inception. If they have not been able to solve the problem until now, why is this now their issue to solve?
The other day Arial Attias, the Minister of Housing, was on the radio talking about the housing crisis and how the government is responsible and hasnt done enough to solve the problem, to bring prices down. He was talking as if he has been in the opposition the past four years, fighting against the government, and is now looking to take over and solve the problem. he ignored the fact, and perhaps he hopes many listeners will as well, that he himself has been responsible for both the Housing Ministry and the Lands Authority for the past 4 years, giving himself unprecedented power to make changes in the housing and construction system. Sure, he has done a lot, he has released many new projects and moved things along that have been stagnant for a long time. But what's the deal with accusing the government, one that he was part of, of blaming them for all the ills of the issue?
That is exactly what SHAS is doing now with the discrimination against sephardim issue as well. They are talking about Netanyahu and Lieberman and discrimination in society as if they have not been a part of making all the government decisions for the past 30 years. SHAS is equally responsible as anybody else for any lack of dealing with the issue, and possibly even for making it worse.
Every election season they raise the banner of discrimination, but then they do nothing to solve it. They send their own kids to elite ashkenazi schools, that they can use their own political influence and protexia to get accepted in to, but they abandon the sephardi masses to wallow nsatisfactorily in their own sephardi schools Instead of working to change the system to one where anybody can go to any school they want, or divided up by areas with sephardi-ashkenazi background not being even an issue taken into consideration, or where there isnt even a difference between schools that one would be called sephardi and one would be called ashkenazi, instead of working to improve the image of the sephardi schools so they would be attractive to the sephardim, and maybe even to ashkenazim, the SHAS leadership continues to send their kids to the elite schools and abandon the masses to the discrimination that they allow to continue.
I hope people tell SHAS that they are tired of that issue and that they do not give their confidence to SHAS to be responsible for it.
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