Think Israel is secular? they have their own form of taliban

[RedJeepXJ]

Israel's Ultra-Orthodox Problem - The Daily Beast

A LOT of similarities between Haredim and the Taliban, yes there are some major differences but it shows Israel is not as free thinking modern society as some people seem to think..... and given enough time they could turn more extremist like Iran did. My point is we should NOT support any religious based/favoring government

also they have a VERY low unemployment rate right now.... and we are sending them billions..... while we have significantly more people out of work we are paying for them to support religious Torah scholars...... yeah that is money WE need to be spending since we ARE a secular government.

Rachel Weinstein calls it her Rosa Parks moment. On a recent morning, the 38-year-old Israeli boarded a bus to a local shopping center in her town. It was the same line she takes regularly, but on this day an ultra-Orthodox passenger directed her to the back of the bus where, she noticed, the women were sitting separately. “He was actually addressing my husband, who boarded with me,” she recounted to Newsweek. “He wouldn’t even talk to me.”.

it also has a fast-growing community that shuns modernity and views the world through the narrow prism of biblical warrant. Once a tiny minority, ultra-Orthodox Jews—also known as Haredim—now make up more than 10 percent of Israel’s population and 21 percent of all primary-school students. With the community’s fertility rate hovering at more than three times that of other Israeli Jews, demographers project that by 2034, about one in five Israelis will be ultra-Orthodox.

(Secular Israelis joke bitterly that one third of the country serves in the military, one third participates in the workforce, and one third pays taxes—but that it’s all the same third).

But Haredim are so cloistered, it’s hard to see how they could ever catch up. Kroizer says no one at Modiin Illit owns a television and few residents have computers. This past summer an entrepreneur persuaded rabbis in the city to allow him to open a cybercenter—three computers in a small room above a dingy shopping strip—where customers can access the Internet for about $5 an hour. The computers are reasonably new, but the Internet is filtered through a server that blocks access to all but a few dozen websites—mostly on religious instruction and family services. A search for news sites yielded just one hit—Haredi Jewish Daily News. Wikipedia and Yahoo came up as dead links. “It’s kosher Internet,” the woman behind the counter told me apologetically. “It’s very limited.”