A German court has banned the circumcision of boys for religious reasons:
The regional court in Cologne, western Germany, ruled that the “fundamental right of the child to bodily integrity outweighed the fundamental rights of the parents”, a judgement that is expected to set a legal precedent.
“The religious freedom of the parents and their right to educate their child would not be unacceptably compromised, if they were obliged to wait until the child could himself decide to be circumcised,” the court added.
Walter Russell Mead sees this as the criminalization of Judaism:
Jews believe that the circumcision of infants is a necessary act; the command to circumcise male children at the age of eight days is the first command that God gives Abraham to mark their covenant; for thousands of years this has been a foundation of Jewish life. To ban infant circumcision is essentially to make the practice of Judaism illegal in Germany; it is now once again a crime to be a Jew in the Reich…
Perhaps those convicted of wrongful circumcision could be required to wear a yellow star?
Mr Mead has a point, but there are very few Jews left in Germany and, as “legal expert” Holm Putzke sneers, Germans are less inclined than ever to be “scared off by charges of anti-Semitism” – or, as the mordant crack re Holocaust guilt goes, Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.
But the boy who prompted the case was a Muslim. Muslims are the fastest-growing population in Germany, in contrast to the natives, who are in steep demographic decline. Islam is the principal generator of population growth in every major German city, and will be a majority in many of them within a generation. Analogy-wise, this is more like the Fuhrer going after the penises of every blond, blue-eyed Aryan youth singing “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” in the beer garden. Telling young Muslim males the contents of their trousers have to assimilate when very little else has would seem to be an unlikely recipe for social tranquility.