Circumcisor Philip L. Sherman has been placed on the “Known Genital Mutilators” directory at neonatalcutting.org.
From Mr. Sherman’s website emoil.com:
“Biography – Cantor Philip L. Sherman, Certified Mohel
Cantor Philip L. Sherman was trained by Rabbi Yosef Halperin in 1977 in Jerusalem, Israel and is certified by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and the Brith Milah Board of New York. He is familiar with both Ashkenazic and Sephardic customs and traditions.
Cantor Sherman has been invited to Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong to perform brisses and he is available throughout the tri-state area including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Westchester, Rockland and Long Island. Cantor Sherman is a member of the Cantorial Council of America and the Screen Actor’s Guild.”
Yes, Mr. Sherman is a Cantor, a title which means: “an official who sings liturgical music and leads prayer in a synagogue,” and which also has nothing to do with surgical abilities or knowledge. As such I will not promote religious titles or designations, as I afford everyone the respect they deserve by actions, not titles.
Mr. Sherman was asked under “Faqs:”
Do you have to be rabbi to be a Mohel?
No. I happen to be a cantor and there are many rabbis who are also mohels. One doesn’t have to be a rabbi or a cantor to be a mohel.
Wow, anyone can be a mohel!
But what does it take to be a mohel? Some amount of training to get “certified,” neither of which the law seems eager to regulate or enforce.
So, for non-doctors to perform circumcisions they just have to be a Jewish (or Muslim) man or woman with two good arms – enough to cut with!
And I bet you thought it illegal to practice medicine without a license.
It is.
But does it really matter? Would Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) be any better if done by doctors in hospitals instead of behind closed doors? No, it’s the principle of the thing. Then why, you may ask, do I bring it up?
Let’s ask some questions:
- Does the law seek out people who perform medicine without a license? Yes, all the time.
- Does the law check the credentials of circumcisors? No, there is no one who checks if non-doctors have the skills or training to perform surgery on infants.
- Can anyone perform infant circumcisions? Appallingly, yes. Though technically illegal (as if human rights were a technicality) anyone with (or without!) a religious affiliation, training, or title are cutting infant boys.
- Can anyone perform FGM? No one, not even doctors.
- Can anyone perform any other surgery on infants? No, only licensed doctors are allowed to perform medically necessary surgery on infants.
What can we conclude? That there is no patriarchy, and that this gynocentric society singularly ignores the sexual abuse and genital mutilation (circumcision) done to infant boys by anyone who wants to do it!
Intactivists and MHRAs are actively fighting this, as opposed to feminists, who, as their name implies and despite their claims, care nothing about equality or stopping routine circumcision of baby boys.
Dr. Money’s Epic Failure
Before I continue with Mr. Sherman’s KGM listing, I’d like to briefly share the tragic story of David Reimer, one of twin brothers who accidentally lost his penis during a circumcision and was then raised as a girl. Always doubting his sex was female, at age 14 he reclaimed his maleness and changed his name to David. His case famously disproved the theory that gender is a social construct, the same theory that feminists still hold on to. His doctor, Dr. Money, pioneered the use of surgery to ‘fix’ intersexed babies (making them M or F, then raising them accordingly), then concluded that any baby can be raised boy or girl. He was the first to use the term “gender identity.” David had a troubled life and sadly committed suicide at the age of 38.
Here are some excerpt’s from the book (highly recommended) “As Nature Made Him – The Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl” by John Colapinto:
…shortly after the twins were seven months old, Janet noticed that they seemed to be in distress when they urinated. At first she thought it was just the wet diapers that made them cry; then she noticed that even after a diaper change they would scream and complain. She examined their penises and noticed that their foreskins seemed to be sealing up at the tip and making it difficult for the boys to pass water. She took the babies to see her pediatrician, who explained that they were suffering from a condition called phimosis. It was not rare, he said, and was easily remedied by circumcision. After talking about it with Ron, Janet agreed to have the children circumcised at St. Boniface Hospital.
…Ordinarily, pediatricians experienced in circumcisions performed the procedure at St. Boniface Hospital, but on the morning of April 27, 1966 the usual attending physician, for reasons lost to history, was not available when the Reimer twins were scheduled for their operation. The duty fell to Dr. Jean-Marie Huot, a forty-six-year-old general practitioner.
…Regardless of which clamp was used, it is not in doubt that Dr. Huot elected to use not a scalpel to cut away Bruce’s foreskin, but a Bovie cautery machine. This device employs a generator to deliver an electric current to a sharp, needlelike cutting instrument, which burns the edges of an incision as it is made, sealing the blood vessels to prevent bleeding – a quite superfluous consideration if Huot had indeed used a Gomco clamp, and a dangerous one, since it would bring perilously close to the penis a current that could be conducted by the metal bell encasing the organ. If, at the same time, the current to the needle were to be turned up almost to the maximum, the results could be cataclysmic.
According to the later testimony of operating room personnel, the electrocautery machine was turned on, and the hemostat dial, which controlled the amount of heat in the needle, was set at the minimum. Dr. Huot lowered the needle and touched it to Bruce’s foreskin. Subsequent testing of the machine revealed it was in proper working order. Whether through temporary mechanical malfunction, user error, or some combination if the two the needle failed to sever the flesh on the first pass. The hemostat control was turned up. Once again the instrument was applied to the foreskin; again it failed to cut. The cautery machine’s current was increased. The needle was once again brought into contact with the foreskin.
I heard a sound,” recalls Dr. Cham, “just like steak being seared.”
A wisp of smoke curled up from the baby’s groin. An aroma as of cooking meat filled the air.
A urologist was quickly summoned. On duty that morning was Dr. Earl K. Vann. He cleared the instruments and inspected the organ. It appeared oddly blanched in color. He felt the penis with his gloved hand and noticed that it had an unusual firmness. Vann took a probe and attempted to pass it through the urinary meatus – the hole at the end of the penis. The probe would not pass through. Vann told the operating room personnel that he would have to perform an emergency suprapubic cystotomy to place a catheter and thus enable the baby to pass urine. He made an incision below Bruce’s belly button, then threaded a length of tubing into the incision, through the muscle wall, and into the bladder. This was sewn into place. A bag to catch the child’s urine was affixed to the free end of the catheter. The baby was then wheeled out to the burn ward.
It was decided not to attempt to circumcise his twin brother.
…In a businesslike voice he told the Reimers that there had been an accident while circumcising baby Bruce.
“What do you mean, an accident?” Janet said.
Dr. Huot said that Bruce’s penis had been burned.
“I sort of froze,” Janet recalls. “I didn’t cry. It was just like I turned to stone.” When she finally gathered her wits enough to speak, Janet found herself asking if they had also burned her other child.
“No,” Dr. Huot replied. “We didn’t touch Brian.”
Ron and Janet asked to see their injured baby right away. The doctor said that Bruce was recovering from a surgical procedure to install a catheter. The Reimers were told not to worry, that they could see the child tomorrow. They collected their uninjured son, Brian, and drove home through the steadily falling snowl
The next day Ron and Janet returned to the hospital. Dr. Vann took them to see the baby. Janet’s first glimpse of her son is a memory that even three decades later causes her face to drain of blood. Standing over Bruce’s bassinet in the burn unit, she looked at his penis – or what was left of it.
“It was blackened, and it was sort of like a little string. And it was right up to the base, up to his body.” To Ron the penis looked “like a piece of charcoal. I knew it wasn’t going to come back to life after that.”
Nevertheless, Janet asked the urologist, “Will it still grow, and he’ll just have a little penis?”
The doctor shook his head. “I don’t think so. That’s not the way it works.”
Over the next few days, baby Bruce’s penis dried and broke away in pieces. It was not very long before all vestiges of the organ were gone completely.
…It only added to the young couple’s misery that Brian’s phimosis had long since cleared up by itself, his healthy penis a constant reminder that the disastrous circumcision on Bruce had been utterly unnecessary in the first place.
Textbooks in medicine and the social sciences were rewritten to include the case, and a precedent for infant sex reassignment as standard treatment in cases of newborns with injured or irregular genitals was established. The case also became a touchstone for the feminist movement in the 1970s. when it was widely cited as proof that the gender gap was purely a result of cultural conditioning , not biology. For Dr. John Money, the medical psychologist who was the architect of the experiment, the so-called “twins case” became the most publicly celebrated triumph of a forty-year career that in 1997 earned him the accolade ” one of the greatest sex researchers of the century.”
But…the experiment was a failure – a fact not publicly revealed until that spring [of 1997], in the medical journal Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. There, authors Dr. Milton Diamond and Dr. Keith Sigmundson had documented how David had struggled against his imposed girlhood from the start and how, at age fourteen, he had reverted to the sex written in his genes and chromosomes. The paper had set off shock waves in medical circles around the wold, generating furious debate about the ongoing practice of infant sex reassignment ( a procedure mere common than a layperson might think). The paper also raised troubling questions about the way the case had been reported in the first place, why it had taken almost twenty years for a follow-up to reveal the actual outcome, and why that follow-up was conducted not by Dr. Money or Johns Hopkins, but by outside researchers. The answers to these questions, fascinating for what they suggest about the mysteries of sexual identity, also brought to light a thirty-year rivalry between eminent sex researchers, a rivalry whose very bitterness not only dictated how this most unsettling of medical tragedies was exposed, but also may have been the impetus behind experiment in the first place.
This could happen to your son.
What have we learned from the above?
- Don’t circumcise your infants
- Feminists were wrong
Click here for more information about phimosis and the care of the foreskin.
Mr. Sherman links to some articles, including one thought-provoking piece from “The Atlantic” that profiles him and touches on some important legal and medical issues discussed above. He gets criticized for cutting non-Jewish (funny, right?) infants, and reveals he has a website for non-Jews that’s actually called – get this – “Holistic Circumcision,” sort of like ‘military intelligence.’
From that website:
A comparison between Holistic and Hospital Circumcisions:
Hospital/Doctor Circumcision:
1. Ten to forty minutes
2. Baby strapped down
3. Injection/topical creams
4. See one, do one, teach one
5. Clinical and cold
6. In the hospitalHolistic Circumcision:
1. 20 -30 seconds
2. Baby held by warm, loving hands
3. No drugs, injections or creams.
4. Almost 30 years; more than 17,000
5. Spiritual and meaningful
6. At home
Boy, I’m sold. Gentle and loving genital mutilation. And quick!
Under “Stories” we read:
The Head Nurse
The Head Nurse of a major New Jersey hospital called me. A friend of hers had attended a bris and relayed to her that the baby hardly cried at all during the procedure. The nurse was writing a paper to present to the doctors about pain relief during circumcision. She asked what I used on the infant to minimize the pain. I told her that I hadn’t used anything. She thought I was kidding, but I told her I thought she needed to ask different questions. The questions she should be asking are: who is performing the circumcision, how much experience do they have and what technique are they using. If it is a doctor with very limited experience using a technique that takes twenty to forty minutes with the baby strapped down to a molded, plastic body board, then they will have a baby in great pain and distress. I explained that as a mohel, I have performed thousands of circumcisions and my technique takes twenty to thirty seconds while the baby rests comfortably on a pillow held by the warm, loving hands of the grandfather. I told her that if a new operating technique were discovered that took one-tenth the time and the recovery was minutes instead of hours or days, there would be seminars and symposia held all over the country touting this new technique and every hospital would have a mohel (read: holistic circumciser) on their staff.
The point is not how efficient, or gentle, or quick we can cut a child, it’s that we are doing it at all. Routine amputation of a nonconsenting infant’s body part is unethical and illegal. Watch this disgraceful Channel Thirteen profile video of Mr. Sherman talking about his career cutting infants’ penises as a mohel. Think about it – would we admire someone who mutilates little girls’ vaginas?
Then we read “AIDS and Circumcision:”
If there was ever a more persuasive reason to circumcise, it is the recent discovery that circumcision is a simple and possibly potent weapon against new AIDS infections. Circumcision protects women and reduces the spread of AIDS. The article (“Circumcision Studied in Africa as AIDS Preventive”) appeared in the New York Times on Friday, April 28, 2006. An excerpt:
“Perhaps the most compelling evidence came last year from a study financed by the French government of 3,274 men outside Johannesburg. Half of them underwent circumcision; the others were uncircumcised.
After 17 months, 49 of the uncircumcised men became infected with H.I.V., while only 20 of the circumcised men caught the virus. The study was called to halt in March 2005 when a review board decided that it would be unethical to withhold circumcision from the control group. Researchers estimated that the procedure reduced the risk of contracting H.I.V. by roughly two-thirds.”
This AIDS argument has been debunked and really makes no practical or moral sense. Are they telling men to forgo condoms in favor of mass circumcisions? Won’t they think they’re then immune to AIDS? If they wear a condom, what does it matter? What does this have to do with violating the rights of children who may never be at risk of AIDS?
Under “FAQs:”
How do I explain to my three-year-old what a circumcision is?
I don’t think very young children need to have the surgical aspects of a circumcision explained. In general, I also recommend that children under the age of ten or twelve not be permitted to watch the circumcision.
I agree that we should explain certain things such as this at an appropriate age, but however and whenever you do explain it, it’s still the horrific thing that any three year old would see as wrong. Apparently this barbaric ritual is profitable and promoted by some in the medical establishment, allowing grown-ups to deny what is obvious to any three-year-old.
Here Mr. Sherman reveals his “foreskin count” and his record for one days cutting (11).
Since Mr. Sherman has incomplete information about the risks of circumcision, you can read that here at neonatalcutting.org.
Intactivism Update: I received the following email regarding a paper by the Attorneys for the Rights of the Child that was part of a debate with the AAP, called the CDC guidelines into question, and finally published in a major medial journal.
“In July 2016, the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics finally published the paper by ARC Executive Director Steven Svoboda, ARC Legal Advisor Peter Adler, and Bob Van Howe from the Twentieth Annual Thomas A. Pitts Lectureship in Medical Ethics, held at the Medical University of South Carolina in October 2013 pursuant to a conference titled, “Ethical and Legal Issues in Pediatrics.” This is the longest and most comprehensive general article Steven has ever published and we are very happy to finally see it in print.
Steven was the only non-physician invited, and debated the American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP’s) Dr. Michael Brady in a talk entitled, “Newborn Male Circumcision–Is It Ethical; Is It Legal?” Steven also appeared in a “Seminar on Pediatric Controversies” opposite Brady and Douglas Diekema, also an AAP Circumcision Task Force member. Peter participated in the audience discussions and preparation of our talks. As Bob Van Howe predicted, we proved we know the science far better than the Task Force and Brady found himself unable after hearing Steven’s five-minute presentation in the seminar to rebut a single one of our arguments. As they both personally told Steven, two (!) of the five physician presenters who are not AAP Task Force members were completely convinced by our arguments and went from being pretty strongly pro-circumcision prior to the event to coming to oppose the procedure based on our arguments. This was a true team victory, with Peter, Aubrey Taylor, and Angel Alonso Terron providing awesome support and asking some hard questions the AAP Task Force members simply could not answer.”
Click here to read that compelling and comprehensive paper, “Circumcision Is Unethical and Unlawful.”
Mr. Sherman’s contact information follows:
Cantor Philip L. Sherman
Mohel
Phone: 212.595.0132
Fax: 212.579.3220
Voicemail: 917.448.BRIS (2747)
E-mail: cantorsherman@gmail.com
Mail: PO Box 52, White Plains, NY 10602.
Philip L. Sherman of NY, “Known Genital Mutilator,” + Dr. Money’s Epic Failure https://t.co/HKsKSzYfw5 @andreaHardie pic.twitter.com/0FbofGPvzF
— gary costanza (@jerrytheother) August 9, 2016
