Christopher Hitchens takes on male circumcision

Christopher Hitchens, in his new column, is mad as hell at Mayor Bloomberg for his stance on an incident involving male circumsicion gone horribly wrong. You see, what happend is.. ehh... it's quite disgusting... ehh.. just read: A circumcision ritual practiced by some Orthodox Jews has alarmed city health officials, who say it may have led to three cases of herpes—one of them fatal—in infants. … The practice is known as oral suction, or in Hebrew, metzitzah b'peh: after removing the foreskin of the penis, the practitioner, or mohel, sucks the blood from the wound to clean it. EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW This, Hitchens reports, isn't a new or an isolated incident: The continuing scandal of this practice, which most Jews abandoned many years ago, is newly illustrated by the death of one little boy from type-1 herpes, and the infection of two others, in Staten Island and Brooklyn, after they had been subjected to this ritual by the same mohel. Let's be clear what's involved here. The Times refers to an article published last year in the journal Pediatrics that argued that metzitzah b'peh carries a serious health risk and is, for that reason alone, a violation of Jewish law. ("We suspect … that this entity is underreported for cultural reasons and that the studies described here are only the "tip of the iceberg" of the true incidence of the disease," the authors note). So what does Bloomberg have to do with it? Ehh, well, here is his reaction to the infants who contracted herpes from the practitioner: We're going to do a study, and make sure that everyone is safe and at the same time, it is not the government's business to tell people how to practice their religion. A study. On how having someone suck the blood off an infant's penis after circumsizing them maybe not very healthy or sanitary. Right. Cause you need that. Hitchens feels the same way I do apparently... Study? What study? Can't the fool get through an article by a Jewish authority in Pediatrics? For the Times reporter to add that Mayor Bloomberg's comment appeared to be designed not to "upset a group that can be a formidable voting bloc" was, in the circumstances, worse than superfluous. Ok, if you want to circumsize your boy, do it in the hospital people. Let the doctor do it as well: If you should let anyone go near your son with a satchel or a cutting tool, it should be the medically certified dude. That's what we do in Egypt. WTF are the jewish people in New York doing? Bloomberg, get a spine: If you are gonna ban cigerette smoking in bars, you may as well ban non-medically supervised circumsicion, because, you know, they have a different name for that. It's called genital mutilation, and I have a feeling that that's not legal.