The latest anti-Semitic cry: ban circumcision

There are lots of weird campaign groups around today, but none so weird as a band of unmerry men called ‘the intactivists’. If you’ve never heard of the intactivists and you’re a bit squeamish, or you are reading this while lunching on a sausage roll, then you might want to turn the page now. Intactivists are men who were circumcised at birth and who, as their name suggests, long to become ‘intact’ again. In a nutshell, they want to recover their foreskins. And they’ll do almost anything to achieve this, including undergoing skin grafts and even attaching weights to the little bits of foreskin that their possibly careless circumciser might have left behind. Hey, look, I told you to turn the page. Originating, like most mad campaign groups, on the west coast of America, intactivism is fuelled by some of the most regressive political trends of our era. Its adherents have that annoying Oprah-ite habit of blaming a long-gone childhood incident — in this case the simple, harmless, millennia-old snipping of the foreskin — for every trouble that befalls them in adulthood. They seriously claim that their inability to have good sex or to hold down a relationship is down to the fact that their foreskin was removed when they were a few days old. Which raises the question of how generation after generation of Jewish men, alongside all the non-Jewish blokes who got the chop, managed to please the ladies and procreate.

Jewish circumcision must take place when a boy is eight days old, as stipulated in Genesis Photo: Getty

Intactivists also do that grating thing of turning every issue into a question of human rights. ‘Intact genitals are a human right!’ their T-shirts declare. The bonkers transformation of even foreskin possession into a human right captures very well how the lingo of human rights is often used to undermine real rights that people have enjoyed for aeons — in this case the age-old religious right to remove newborn babies’ foreskins, which is cleaved to by Jewish communities in particular, and also by Muslims.