JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

Iowa A.G. files child labor charges against Agriprocessors

By Ami Eden · September 9, 2008

News brief below.

Links to the AG's criminal complaint and affidavit here.

(JTA) – Following the filing of criminal charges against owners of the kosher meat producer Agriprocessors, the Orthodox Union says it will withdraw its kosher certification of the company within two weeks unelss new management is hired.

"Within the coming days, or lets say a week or two, we will suspend our supervision unless there's new management in place," said Rabbi Menachem Genack, the O.U.'s head of kosher supervision.

Genack's comments came just hours after Iowa's attorney general filed criminal charges against Agriprocessors and its owner, Aaron Rubashkin, for child-labor violations.

On Tuesday, the attorney general's office charged Rubashkin, his son Sholom, and three human resources employees with more than 9,000 violations of Iowa's Child Labor law, according to a statement from the attorney general's office.

Former workers had alleged child labor violations at Agriprocessors almost immediately after a massive immigration raid at the plant in Postville, Iowa, the country's largest kosher meatpacking plant. The company has denied having knowingly hired underage workers.

"All of the named individual defendants possessed shared knowledge that Agriprocessors employed undocumented aliens," said the affidavit filed Tuesday in Allamakee County District Court. "It was likewise shared knowledge among the defendants that many of those workers were minors. The company's hiring practices encouraged job applicants to submit identification documents which were forgeries, and known to contain false information as to resident alien status, age and identity."

The alleged violations, which date back to September 2007, are each punishable by up to 30 days in jail and a fine of between $65 and $625, the attorney general's office said. An initial court appearance is scheduled for Sept. 17.

Agriprocessors has been under the gun since a raid on May 12 resulted in the arrest of nearly 400 employees on illegal immigration charges. Following the raid, employees alleged they were shorted on pay, forced to work long hours and were the targets of sustained sexual harassment.

In May, the company announced that the Postville plant's manager, Sholom Rubashkin, would be replaced. Months later, Rubashkin is still a regular presence at the plant and no replacement has been named.

The attorney general's complaint represents the first criminal charges to be brought against the company's owner and senior management.

2 Comments | Share This | Agriprocessors, Kashrut |

The writing on the wall

By Uriel Heilman · September 9, 2008

Is Israel headed toward a religiously extremist future?

The latest report about growing religious extremism (having nothing to do with nationalism or politics) in Israel comes from, of all places, Abu Dhabi's The National newspaper:

Faced with what they see as the threat of modern culture, sections of the Haredim are demanding a more rigorous enforcement of Jewish religious laws, or halakha. Under the label of "modesty patrols", groups of ultra-Orthodox men are turning into vigilantes, targeting in particular Haredi women whose behaviour they disapprove of.

Reports of women being attacked on the street or in their homes have been steadily rising in the local media.

In one widely publicised incident over the summer, a 14-year-old girl from Upper Beitar, a large ultra-Orthodox settlement in the West Bank south of Jerusalem, had acid poured on her face and body in what is believed to have been the work of a modesty patrol.

The girl told a paramedic treating her that she had been repeatedly threatened before the attack. According to local media, the girl was wearing loose-fitting trousers at the time of the attack.

Several rabbis have denounced women as immodest for wearing trousers. One of the most prominent, Rabbi Shlomi Aviner, ruled last month: "In general, a woman must always wear modest clothes even when she is alone and in the dark."

Last week an ultra-Orthodox man, Elhanan Buzaglo, was indicted on suspicion of breaking into the home of a woman in an ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood of Jerusalem along with six accomplices, armed with a bat and tear gas. The woman, divorced from a Haredi man, was beaten and told that she would be killed if she did not leave the area.

5 Comments | Share This | haredim, Israel, Religion |

9/11 conspiracy

By Uriel Heilman · September 9, 2008

Western media – and many Western governments – largely have ignored the pernicious smears that have proliferated in the last eight years in the Arab world about 9/11 (calling them "conspiracy theories" gives them more credence than they deserve). Prime among them are that the Jews and Israelis knew about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in advance, did not show up to their jobs that day at the World Trade Center, and even perpetrated or orchestrated the attacks.

So it was interesting to see The New York Times take up the subject in a piece Tuesday by Michael Slackman about what in Cairo has become "conventional wisdom" about the attacks. After briefly reviewing the lies, Slackman writes:

It is easy for Americans to dismiss such thinking as bizarre. But that would miss a point that people in this part of the world think Western leaders, especially in Washington, need to understand: That such ideas persist represents the first failure in the fight against terrorism — the inability to convince people here that the United States is, indeed, waging a campaign against terrorism, not a crusade against Muslims.

It goes beyond that, however. Smears and conspiracy theories about the West long preceded the 9/11 attacks, and they have followed on unrelated and more recent subjects. Arabs commonly believe Israel infected Egyptian children with AIDS, that the two bars on the Israeli flag represent the goal of Jewish dominion over all the land between the Nile and Euphrates rivers, and that Jewish interest in the genocide in Darfur is part of a plan to occupy Sudan and, eventually, the entire Arab world.

It's important not to let such attitudes go unheeded, because they are a sign of how disconnected from reality much of the Arab world is and how much needs to be done in order to lay the groundwork for peace, particular between the Arab world and Israel. Pretending such attitudes do not exist only set the peacemakers up for failure, partly by ignoring the factors that drive so many Arabs to embrace the radical and rejectionist ideologies of Hamas, Hezbollah and others.

On a semi-related note, here's what Jeffrey Goldberg is thinking about 9/11: The next mega-attack in America will be a dirty bomb, and Barack Obama and John McCain had better focus much more attention on deterring this nuclear attack.

The next president must do one thing, and one thing only, if he is to be judged a success: He must prevent Al Qaeda, or a Qaeda imitator, from gaining control of a nuclear device and detonating it in America. Everything else — Fannie Mae, health care reform, energy independence, the budget shortfall in Wasilla, Alaska — is commentary.

5 Comments | Share This | Arab world, Arab-Israeli Conflict, Israel |