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Last update - 00:00 15/12/2006
Like the Taliban
By Daphna Berman

Miriam Shear insists that she is not out to get the ultra-Orthodox community, but only the more extreme and violent elements among them.

"I feel like by going public, we can prevent this. We can expose it and clean it up. These people were like the Taliban and I make this comparison without hesitation. They are violent and intimidate people ... using religion to justify their fanaticism. I have no problem with mehadrin buses, but that doesn't mean that these people can trample on the rights, safety and dignity of other people.

"I want there to be shame and shock among the leaders of the Haredi community," she added. "They painstakingly teach about laws of kashrut and family purity, but I want them, with the same passion and intensity, to sit with these people and explain that this is not the way to behave."
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Supporters, meanwhile, are hailing her as the Rosa Parks of the Haredi community. Parks, the African-American civil rights activist, was arrested in 1955 after she refused to give her seat to a white passenger, an act of civil disobedience that triggered the Montgomery bus boycott and is considered a watershed moment in the struggle against racial segregation. But Shear discourages such comparisons.
Although she did not seek medical attention following the attack, Shear says that her face swelled soon after and that there was an outline of her attacker's shoe on her right cheek. "At the time of the kick, I felt no pain - only rage," she wrote in the widely distributed e-mail
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