By The Numbers - The Untold Story of Muslim Opinions & Demographics --- Clarion Project - Challenging Extremism....

Egyptians Hilarious Reaction To Obama’s Speech At A Military Base Declaring “Climate Change” As The Greatest Threat To National Security  

 

Even the Muslim world believes Obama is a fool…

Vaccinations save lives.” "Get your advice from a doctor, not from some quack who's opposed to vaccination based on dodgy science..."

Surprise: School That Is Tolerant of Anti-Vaxxers Suffers Massive Chickenpox Outbreak    

Tolerance of racial and cultural diversity is good. Tolerance of those who endanger the community by refusing to vaccinate their kids is not. An Australian primary school just learned that the hard way: A bout of chickenpox has swept Brunswick North West Primary School in Melbourne, infecting at least 80 of the school’s 320 students within the past two weeks, reports The Age.

Well, what did they expect? In a recent newsletter to parents, the school’s pincipal Trevor Bowen* directly tells parents that they should tolerate the vaccine dodgers among them. And there are a lot of them to tolerate: Just 73.2 percent of students at the school had been immunized, compared to 92 percent within that postcode district and 90.4 percent in all of Victoria, Bowen reported in May.

From the Principal’s Message:

We expect all community members to act respectfully and with tolerance when interacting with other parents and carers who may have a differing opinion to their own. This includes an opposing understanding about child immunisation.

People from both sides of the discussion have expressed their thoughts in terms of the wellbeing and ongoing health of the children they care so much for. This is most admirable. I ask all community members to interact respectfully at all times and with a sense of tolerance and acceptance of diversity.

Those words may sound “respectful” and “admirable”—until 25 percent of your school is rendered itching, scratching, and out of commission. Health officials in Australia are rightly concerned about the possibility of this happening elsewhere as vaccination rates plateau. As Health Minister Jill Hennessy put it: "The science on this issue is really clear. Vaccinations save lives.” "Get your advice from a doctor, not from some quack who's opposed to vaccination based on dodgy science," she added to The Age.

In January, Australia’s “No Jab, No Play” policy is set to take effect, which will prevent unvaccinated pre-schoolers from attending child care or kindergarten. It's part of the country's $19 million effort to boost immunization rates, which has included making it mandatory for parents to vaccinate their children in order to get childcare tax benefits and rebates. The new policy, however, does not apply to primary or high schools. In schools like Brunswick, parents have to report their kids’ immunization status, but no kid can be barred from enrolling for not having been immunized.

“While vaccination rates in Australia have increased ... vaccine objection rates for children under the age of seven have also increased steadily, especially under the conscientious objector category,” wrote former Prime Minister Tony Abbott* in a statement in the Sunday Telegraph introducing the effort earlier this year. “More than 39,000 children aged under seven are not vaccinated because their parents are vaccine objectors. This is an increase of more than 24,000 children over 10 years.”

So how are parents reacting to the Brunswick outbreak? At least some appear to be unperturbed: “Given that he was only out of school for a week, it’s just one of these things that happens,” one parent tells 7 News Australia with a shrug.

The problem is, that isn’t true. Out-of-control epidemics of chickenpox that tear through schools aren’t just an inevitable occurrence, like the annual coming of winter or Donald Trump saying something awful on national television. They’re preventable through the simple act of vaccination. When you extend an attitude of “tolerance” to parents who are against vaccinating their kids, you endanger the whole community.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/12/10/chickenpox_outbreak_at_anti_vaxxer_tolerant_melbourne_school.html

For decades, diversity-obsessed college administrators have tried to conceal information on admissions and student outcomes broken down by race, but the data that have become public is devastating ...

Scalia Was Right About Race Preferences

The debate about these college-admissions policies is too focused on their legality, not their efficacy.

Jason L. Riley

132 COMMENTS 

 

With the regularity of Old Faithful, honest remarks on racial matters these days are followed by geysers of liberal indignation and outrage. That is what greeted Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s suggestion last week that less-qualified black students might be better off at less-selective colleges.

During oral arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, a case concerning race-conscious college admission policies, Justice Scalia cited research that shows how racial preferences can handicap some black students by placing them in elite schools where they don’t have the same credentials of the average student and struggle academically.

“There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school—a slower-track school where they do well,” said Justice Scalia. “I don’t think it stands to reason that it’s a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible.”

Liberal public figures and media types promptly denounced the remarks. Democratic leader Harry Reid, ever the statesman, stood on the Senate floor Thursday and accused Justice Scalia of endorsing “racist theories.”

We live in a political environment where the intent of a policy aimed at helping minorities is all that matters; questioning the policy’s actual effectiveness is tantamount to racism. Our national debates about racial preferences tend to focus on their legality, not whether they work as intended. Yet both are important, and Justice Scalia is right to question the assumption that racial favoritism in college admissions has been a boon for blacks.

A 2012 book, “Mismatch,” by UCLA law professor Richard Sander and legal journalist Stuart Taylor Jr., illustrates why Justice Scalia’s concerns are warranted, and the book has helped revitalize the discussion over affirmative action’s efficacy. But it is worth noting that such concerns have been voiced by conservative and liberal scholars alike and are as old as the policies themselves, which date to the late 1960s.

Nearly 50 years ago, Clyde Summers, a professor at Yale Law School and longtime critic of labor-union discrimination against blacks, explained how preferential admissions policies at elite law schools like his own damaged the educational prospects for black students not only at Yale but also at less-selective schools. When a top-tier school like Duke lowered the admissions criteria for a minority student who met the normal admissions standards for a second-tier school like North Carolina, he noted, the latter institution was left with a smaller pool of qualified applicants and forced to begin admitting students who would be a better fit for a third-tier school, and so on.

“In sum,” wrote Summers (who died in 2010), “the policy of preferential admission has a pervasive shifting effect, causing large numbers of minority students to attend law schools whose normal admission standards they do not meet, instead of attending other law schools whose normal standards they do meet.”

For decades, diversity-obsessed college administrators have tried to conceal information on admissions and student outcomes broken down by race, but the data that have become public is devastating. An analysis of black students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the mid-1980s found that they had scored in the top 10% nationally on the math portion of the SAT but in the bottom 10% among their classmates at MIT. As a result, black students were dropping out at much higher rates, and those who didn’t leave typically received lower grades than their white and Asian classmates. Affirmative action had turned some of the smartest kids in the country into failures, in a misguided effort to obtain some predetermined racial mix on the quad.

After racial preferences were banned in the University of California system in 1996, black enrollment at higher-ranked UCLA and Berkeley fell, but black academic outcomes improved. Mr. Sander and Mr. Taylor have demonstrated empirically that as more minority students attended schools where they weren’t at a preparation disadvantage relative to their classmates, grades rose along with graduation rates. That isn’t surprising. Historically black colleges and universities, which are less selective than the top-tier schools, produce about 40% of blacks with undergraduate degrees in math and science, despite accounting for only around 20% of black enrollment.

Racial preferences almost certainly result in fewer black professionals than likely would exist in the absence of such policies, which is bad enough. But they also have a long track record of poisoning the academic environment. The racial unrest on campus today is a byproduct of college admissions schemes that place race above ability. It is also nothing new. 

Thomas Sowell, a longtime critic of racial double standards, predicted in his 1990 book, “Preferential Policies,” that they would be “educationally disastrous” for blacks and increase racial tensions and resentment on college campuses. Reviewing the book in the New York Times, liberal scholar Andrew Hacker of Queens College sounded a lot like Justice Scalia. “I agree,” he wrote, “that some of the minority students being recruited by high-powered colleges would be better served at schools like my own, where they could proceed at a pace more in tune with their preparation.”

Mr. Riley, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Journal contributor, is the author of “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed” (Encounter Books, 2014).

http://www.wsj.com/articles/scalia-was-right-about-race-preferences-1450046813

“It’s my belief that childhood sexual abuse will never stop. I’d like to see more people learn how to provide help and support to the child victim as soon as possible,” said Mitchell in the video, adding that he never got help for the years of abuse he suffered starting at age 11 or 12....

Beyond silence: Confronting child sexual abuse in Jewish community  

 A few years ago, Congregation Beth Jacob faced a situation without precedent in the Redwood City synagogue: a teenage student working as an aide in a religious school classroom was accused of inappropriately touching two young girls.

“My community was rocked,” said Rabbi Nathaniel Ezray. “I’m sometimes amazed about how we’re ill-prepared for things we need to be prepared for.”

The experience provided a quick education for the congregation, which reported the situation to authorities and consulted with an outside expert for guidance in handling it. The synagogue now has explicit guidelines for those who work with children. Still, several years later, the pain hasn’t gone away.

“I think that trauma takes a long time to resolve,” Ezray said. “I think people think it was dealt with thoughtfully.”
Handling the delicate, troubling and painful issue of child sexual abuse is challenging for any synagogue, where staff members typically are not experts on such matters. Clergy and administrators may suddenly find themselves in the unexpected position of making reports to legal authorities, counseling the families of victims, protecting the rights and privacy of the accused and rethinking safety and hiring policies.

“I know when I called around to tell people what happened in our school, many people confided that they don’t have policies in place,” Ezray said.

The Jewish community operates a range of programs for children, including preschools, synagogue Hebrew schools, day schools, summer camps and youth programs. Yet across the Bay Area, those institutions have a wide variety of policies, from robust to minimal, when it comes to preventing, reporting and responding to allegations of child sexual abuse.

“We heard from people that [they’re] seeing complex situations but don’t know how to handle it,” said Naomi Tucker, longtime executive director of Shalom Bayit, a Bay Area Jewish organization dedicated to combating domestic violence in Jewish homes.

Concerned that the topic is insufficiently addressed within the Jewish community, a coalition of local Jewish organizations, including Shalom Bayit, the Board of Rabbis of Northern California, Jewish LearningWorks and the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center, organized a conference last month at Peninsula Temple Sholom. The Nov. 18 gathering in Burlingame, called “Beyond Silence,” brought together more than 150 Bay Area rabbis, cantors, temple administrators, educators and Jewish agency executives for a day of educational workshops about how to recognize and prevent childhood sexual abuse.

“Every one of you here are agents for change and light,” Ezray told the group during the opening plenary session. “Every one of you here has courage and strength to be the difference.”

Underlining the importance of the dialogue, Santa Clara District Attorney Jeff Rosen and San Mateo Police Chief Susan Manheimer, both Jewish, attended and spoke at the conference.

“We read in Deuteronomy, ‘Justice, justice shall you pursue,’” said Rosen, who spent five years exclusively prosecuting child sexual abuse and rape cases as an assistant DA. “Child sexual abuse doesn’t get taken care of unless it’s pursued by a community.”

The conference was the first time the local Jewish community had come together to talk openly about child sexual abuse, said Tucker, who sees parallels to attitudes she encountered when she began organizing around the topic of domestic abuse in the Jewish community 23 years ago. One of her major obstacles then was convincing people that domestic violence was a Jewish problem.

“Congregations and clergy said, ‘Abuse? That doesn’t happen here,’ ” Tucker said. Now, the Jewish community is undergoing a similar evolution in its understanding of child sexual abuse, she said. “I’m so thrilled to see this tremendous leadership move in our community today.”

In the United States, about one in every three to four girls and one in every six to eight boys will be sexually abused before they turn 18, the majority of them — 90 percent — by someone their family knows and trusts, according to Miriam Wolf, a licensed clinical social worker and director of forensic interviewing for San Mateo County, who gave the day’s keynote address. The rates are similar in the Jewish community, experts agree.

Rabbi Nathaniel Ezray

The Beyond Silence coalition came together two years ago following a cover story in J. that revealed a terrible secret about a much-loved figure in the Bay Area Jewish community (“Former Bay Area Jewish leader accused of molesting boys in ’60s and ’70s,” Oct. 24, 2013).

As detailed in the article, Sheldon Mitchell, who died in 1980, was the founder of Camp Arazim, a Northern California Conservative summer camp (now closed). He also co-founded the regional arm of the United Synagogue Youth program. In 2013, his son, Tom Mitchell, posted on a Facebook page for Camp Arazim alumni that the elder Mitchell had molested him and other boys repeatedly over the years, using his position as a trusted youth leader to gain access into their lives. Several other victims came forward and confirmed the allegations anonymously to J.

Tom Mitchell, now 57, addressed last month’s conference by video, saying, “No kids or adults spoke out” about the abuse. He claims that camp officials learned of the abuse at the time, which led to his father abruptly leaving his position as administrative director in the summer of 1976. But they didn’t report it to authorities or to the children’s parents, according to Mitchell.

“I assume that the adults who knew didn’t know what to say or who to tell and that they swept it under the rug,” he told J. shortly after the conference.

It’s that culture of silence that Mitchell hoped to change by telling his story. He told J. that he believes the most important ways adults in the Jewish community can help fight child sexual abuse are by reporting it immediately when they learn of the abuse and focusing on bringing help to the victims. 

“It’s my belief that childhood sexual abuse will never stop. I’d like to see more people learn how to provide help and support to the child victim as soon as possible,” said Mitchell in the video, adding that he never got help for the years of abuse he suffered starting at age 11 or 12. That contributed to ongoing problems in his life, he said, including using drugs, dropping out of school, developing an eating disorder and falling into bankruptcy.

“I was objectified and dehumanized. I didn’t receive the support or tools needed. I learned to disassociate and lost my identity,” he said.

The Beyond Silence campaign initiated by Mitchell’s story was an attempt to respond to the incident and bring the attention of the Jewish community and Jewish leaders to the issue of childhood sexual abuse. It started with an ad campaign in J. meant to convey that the Jewish community was paying attention to and cared about the issue.

Santa Clara DA Jeff Rosen

Ezray, who knew the Mitchell family when he was growing up in Sacramento, was shocked by the disclosure and felt firmly that a strong response was necessary from the clergy. He took a leading role in organizing the Beyond Silence conference and wrote a February 2014  op-ed in J. to accompany the first Beyond Silence ad, signed by 130 local rabbis.

“I think that [clergy] are the voices of Jewish values, especially when it comes to issues where people are afraid to talk,” Ezray said. “When I read of Tom’s story, when I heard of his pain and had that terrible awareness that I probably know many who suffered at the hands of his pedophile father, I knew I had to do whatever I could do.”

To the Jewish professionals who convened at the November conference, the message was clear. Because they interact frequently with children, they have the opportunity to play a crucial role in combating child sexual abuse at every level: by preventing it within their institutions, by recognizing it and reporting it when they see warning signs, and by helping children, families and communities to heal when it has occurred. Yet, due in part to a lack of communication about the issue, consistent protections are not in place across Jewish institutions, and at some the existing policies are insufficient, according to Tucker.

No comprehensive survey has been done about how Bay Area Jewish institutions handle child sexual abuse, and it’s rare to find a Jewish leader who would admit their community’s policies don’t measure up.

Still, said Tucker, “you have many, many synagogues that are connected to children’s programs, religious schools and preschools that don’t have a clear protocol in place.”

Most Jewish organizations do a good job with one aspect of the issue, which is reporting signs of child sexual abuse to child welfare officials. People who work professionally with children, such as teachers and day care providers, are legally required to report abuse when they suspect it, and generally, Bay Area Jewish organizations that serve children and families train their staff well on that point, Tucker said.

Tom Mitchell addresses the conference via video. photo/courtesy tom Mitchell

But for some organizations, that’s as far as it goes. And it’s not enough, Tucker said. A good child sexual abuse policy “has to flow through every aspect of the organization.”

On the prevention side, that means careful screening during the hiring process and having guidelines in place regarding appropriate interactions between staff and children. Those guidelines should be thoughtful and tailored to the mission of the organization, according to Jenny Pearlman, the San Francisco Child Abuse Prevention Center’s senior program manager for community education.

For instance, Pearlman doesn’t recommend that organizations implement blanket “no-touch” policies between staff and children. “If you’re a mentoring organization, a Boys & Girls Club, that doesn’t work,” Pearlman said in a Beyond Silence workshop about prevention. “That was the old policy.”

Instead, Pearlman recommends defining appropriate and inappropriate touch: nurturing touch or touching while playing sports is appropriate; punishing or sexual touch is not.

Some Jewish camps and schools engage children in dialogue about staying safe and establishing healthy relationships. Because their work is focused directly on children, they have often given more thought to these issues than synagogues, which serve many different populations, experts say.

Conference participants gather in a closing circle after a day of workshops.

Camp Tawonga, a Jewish summer camp near Yosemite National Park, has robust abuse protection policies in place meant to help staff understand how to interact with campers in a healthy way and to raise red flags when something doesn’t seem right. Jamie Simon-Harris, Tawonga’s camp director, said at the Beyond Silence conference that the camp’s hiring process is meant to carefully screen applicants through the interview and training process. Campers are taught the mantra, “If you see something, say something.” Every year, Simon-Harris said, she receives multiple reports of familial abuse from campers who have heard something from a friend.

“It’s kind of the anti-narc,” she said.

Though it may not be possible to end child sexual abuse, it is possible to help children by intervening quickly and helping them heal emotionally, said Wolf. Research shows that the kind of response children get when they tell trusted adults that they have been abused affects how they understand the abuse, as well as how quickly and effectively they can overcome its effects.

When they feel believed and are made to understand the abuse was not their fault, children show more positive outcomes, even when they have endured terrible trauma. In this way, Jewish traditions and teachings and the support of trusted mentors and relatives can offer a framework for helping abused children, according to Tucker
.

Beyond Silence attendees work at an art table.

“When a leader of your synagogue or your school acknowledges to a survivor or to their family that they believe you, that carries a lot of weight,” Tucker said.

“It’s a Jewish responsibility to provide a safe and nurturing space for kids. We also have millennia of spiritual tools to help people recover from trauma,” said Rabbi Mike Rothbaum, director of education for Berkeley’s Congregation Beth El, who attended the conference with four other staff members. “[This conference] encouraged me to talk to my other colleagues at Beth El and make sure we had a clear and consistent set of policies about this.”

In this way, synagogues arguably have a unique role to play in helping victims and, more controversially, helping perpetrators of abuse to heal. Many participants at the Beyond Silence conference spoke of teshuvah, or repentance.

“At the end of the day, what this community may understand, more than others that I speak to, is that the issue of child sexual abuse is one in which hurt people hurt people,” said Manheimer, the San Mateo police chief, referring to the fact that many abusers were victims themselves as children.

“This is an area where clergy can also be of huge impact dealing with perpetrators and really talking about concepts of teshuvah and accountability and knowing what it takes to change behavior, knowing that that’s a really hard thing to do,” Ezray said.

Last month’s conference was just the beginning, organizers said. Participants suggested a number of further ideas, including creating a central resource to help Bay Area Jewish agencies share their policies with others and formulating best practices for different types of institutions. Tucker said the Beyond Silence coalition will meet again within the next two months to discuss next steps.

“What is clear is there’s already more awareness than there was” before the conference, Tucker said. “We also know it’s happening, and staffers are talking about it and they’re hungry for information.”

For information, see http://www.norcalrabbis.org/beyond-silence.

And so if you welcome them into your country, and give them good jobs and educations, and you throw them baby showers, and allow their foreign born fiancées K-1 visas to enter the country, they will add to their anger their contempt because you are weak and foolish and don’t understand that they are at war with you and want you dead....

You Can Never Be “Nice” Enough to the Muslims

For years, Israel has been demonized, held responsible for every terrorist atrocity from blowing up Holocaust survivors at a Passover Seder to the mutilation and murder of her Olympic athletes. It was all Israel’s fault, because she had mistreated the poor Palestinians.

The French welcomed thousands of Muslims to France. They made them citizens, gave them access to everything the Western world has to offer. The French sided openly with the Palestinians, and had a hands-off policy towards Muslims, making their neighborhoods no-go zones for the police.

Their reward? Mass killings in supermarkets, magazine offices, restaurants, a sports arena, and a concert hall by Muslims. But why? After all, the French were so “nice?”

After the most recent French atrocity, ISIS, claiming responsibility, posted the following on its website: “Hundreds of apostates were attending an adulterous party.”

That’s right. That’s what France is to them. Immoral. According to their standards. And so, they deserve to die. So now, what is France planning to do? To pass a law recognizing a Palestinian State.

Huh! What?! To recognize the supporters and accomplices of the people who blew them up? Because that’s what the Palestinians are: radical Muslim terrorists. Our Prime Minister Mr. Netanyahu is flabbergasted, furious. But I’m not. The French want to be “nice,” to spare themselves further terror attacks.

They won’t succeed. Just the opposite. This is a fact. Israel tried that. We gave them the entire Gaza Strip. We uprooted thousands of Jews. Handed over their multi-million dollar hot-house businesses. Gave them our synagogues. We even dug Jewish corpses out of the graves of Gaza cemeteries, many of them put there by Muslim terrorists, and took them out of Gaza before handing it over. We also thought we could be “nice,” make them happy, make them not hate us so much.

And what happened? They thought we were idiots. Worse, they thought we were weak.

If terror got us to do that, a lot of terror would get us to give them even more. From the site of Jewish settlements and destroyed synagogues, they set up their rocket launchers sending tens of thousands of rockets into Israel, making life unbearable for every Jew within shooting range. They dug hundreds of terror tunnels under the borders, planning a mass, murderous invasion, until the IDF had to finally go in there. And it’s still not over and won’t be until we kick every, single one of them out of Gaza, and re-take it.

That’s the truth for anyone willing to hear it.

Last week, Syed Rizwan Farook and his new Pakistani bride, parents of a six month-old baby, who were living the American dream, killed fourteen people, his co-workers, and injured dozens of others. And he was only just getting started on his “jihad.” Police found thousands of rounds of ammunition, pipe bombs, you name it.

Oh, he had big plans, little Syed and his blushing Pakistani jihadi bride. He did this, even though Americans had saved his immigrant parents from that disgusting shit-hole called Pakistan, and provided him with the means to obtain higher education and a high paying job. Even though his workmates had never had any arguments with him, and had indeed, even thrown him and his new wife a baby shower!

“They were radicalized,” the President of the United States, that ISIS-lover (that’s what the Egyptians are calling him now) has said. Not the same thing as saying they were terrorists. It means, they were good, peace-loving people but YOU made them terrorists, because … you weren’t nice enough to them.

Listen to Muslim Brotherhood mouthpiece CAIR: “When we support coup leaders in Egypt or other places, when we support dictatorship, oppressive regimes around the world that push people over on the edge, then they become extremists, then they become terrorists.”

Loretta Lynch, U.S. Attorney General has addressed Muslim murderers killing Americans by saying she will prosecute anyone engaging in “hate speech” towards Muslims, while CNN’s Anderson Cooper tried to get the wife of a victim – a co-worker who was a Christian who loved Israel – to admit that her husband probably wasn’t “nice” enough to Syed and therefore he had it coming.

Yes, my friends, whatever you do, you can never be “nice” enough to today’s Muslims.

Listen to what I’m going to tell you now. And trust me, as an American-born Israeli who has lived with Muslim terror for fifty years, it’s the truth: They hate you not because of how you treat them, but because you exist and you don’t believe in their religion, or their wondrous prophet. Because you treat women and homosexuals as human beings. Because you won’t admit that they should take over your country and your lives, and submit to their rules.

So when you die, they will tell you it’s all your fault. Because you made them mad. You made them really, really mad, so whatever horrors they are at this very moment busily planning to inflict on you (because that’s the only thing they are good at; the only thing they believe in), you deserve them. It is inevitable and you should have seen it coming.

And so if you welcome them into your country, and give them good jobs and educations, and you throw them baby showers, and allow their foreign born fiancées K-1 visas to enter the country, they will add to their anger their contempt because you are weak and foolish and don’t understand that they are at war with you and want you dead.

And your politicians, who are still getting advice from CAIR, will outlaw guns to make it easier for them, because they don’t need licenses for guns, believe me. But you will.

And the states who had the guts to stand up to Obama’s flooding the U.S. with “refugees” will all back down, the way Texas has. After all, why would you want to fight against a nice Syrian family – two lovely parents, two lovely grandparents, two little kids? And why wouldn’t you give a visa for the lovely fiancée of the environmental health specialist from San Bernardino with their lovely, dimpled six month-old baby? Why?

So you will. And in return you are going to get San Bernardinos all over the U.S.A. Then you will need to live like we live in Israel, except maybe not as safely because the people in charge of your safety have to do what your President, who is such good friends with CAIR, tells them to do, while we are protected by fellow Jews, who have wised up over the years from our own Leftist crazies who got hundreds of us blown up in buses and coffee houses while they were “giving peace a chance,” and giving the Palestinians “good-will gestures” like not frisking them at check-points for weapons, or arming their “police.”

Now, we let our moron Leftists talk. But we don’t elect them or give them power, like you did, do, and are planning to do (Hillary is the last nail in your coffin.) Even Mr. Trump, who has said so much that is true, is a moron when it comes to Islam. He’s going to get Israel to “give concessions” to “make peace in six months.”

I feel sorry for you America, France, Great Britain, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain. So many more of you are going to die trying to be “nice” to the Muslims. Trying to make life good for them, until you realize they hate you and want you dead no matter what you do for them. You and your wife and your kids. Dead or sold into slavery, or raped or educated to be killers. Dead or willing to be part of their new world order, the great Caliphate.

And without a radical change in thinking by the West, they are going to succeed. There is a slim window of opportunity to defeat them. But it would take extreme guts, and extreme measures, which, frankly, I don’t know if you’re capable of.

But here it goes: Take back your country by taking away the power from your ISIS-loving presidents and prime ministers and the people and media who put them in power.

SEAL YOUR BORDERS.

Close down the mosques and Muslim Cultural Centers (Islamic Center of North America, CAIR etc. All THE ISLAMIC CENTERS AND MOSQUES ARE CONNECTED WITH TERRORISM, especially in America, according to John Guandolo, AN FBI EXPERT.

It’s not about gun control. Yes, America has a gun problem, and is filled with crazies. But terrorists are not crazy. They are warriors. They will obtain guns to make war, legal or not, and they will use them to kill people and further their agenda. Tightening gun control just at this moment when jihad has come to America isn’t a good idea, because it might mean the victims won’t be able to protect themselves.

Besides, guns in themselves are not the problem. Israel has guns all over the place! People use them to kill terrorists, and to keep guns out of their hands. There has never been a mass shooting of women and children in Israel that wasn’t connected to a radical Muslim terrorist. Never!

Deport illegal aliens. Get a means of self-protection.

WAKE UP!

THEY ARE COMING FOR YOU AND YOURS!

http://www.naomiragen.com/israel/4089/

It is time that New York State residents and lawmakers gave millions of adult survivors a fighting chance to reclaim some dignity and gain justice in the remaining years of what are, for many, already shattered lives....

What Sex Abuse Cases at Horace Mann and Y.U. Should Teach Us

As a former student at Horace Mann School in the Bronx’s Riverdale neighborhood, I was instrumental in breaking the silence around the prestigious prep school’s decades-long history of child sexual abuse.

Although I myself am not an abuse survivor, I saw many of my fellow alumni’s stories come to light when The New York Times Magazine published my article, “Prep School Predators,” in June 2012. The article caused a firestorm, and the tale of its aftermath — which includes scores more alumni coming forward and ultimately naming 22 predators — is recounted in my new book, “Great Is the Truth: Secrecy, Scandal, and the Quest for Justice at the Horace Mann School,” co-written by Sean Elder.

Though the two cases are different, I believe that it is worth drawing out the similarities between how Horace Mann handled its scandal and how another institution — Yeshiva University High School for Boys — dealt with its sexual abuse controversy. Both of these cases should spur New York to overhaul its abysmal statute of limitations laws as they relate to child sex abuse.

In the cases of both Horace Mann and Y.U. high school some students came forward to speak of their abuse. But New York’s current statute of limitations law prevents a victim of child sexual abuse from filing suit after he or she turns 23. In essence, the law makes it possible for schools and other institutions to escape legal accountability simply by remaining silent long enough.

Contrary to popular belief, most victims do not come forward to sue but rather to have the abuse acknowledged and to have someone from the institution where the abuse occurred say “Sorry.” In both the Horace Mann and Y.U. high school cases, the schools begrudgingly acknowledged their former students’ suffering but took little if any responsibility.

And when opposing sides, survivors and administrators finally did come to the table to discuss compensation, attorneys from both institutions approached the negotiations as if they were facing a hostile takeover rather than engaging in an opportunity to right an old wrong. “They made me feel like I was asking for a handout,” one Horace Mann abuse survivor told me of the mediation process. After telling their stories in excruciating detail, some survivors were offered as little as $5,000 for their suffering. Horace Mann paid $2.6 million to its own attorneys the same fiscal year.

“We’ll take care of you,” Horace Mann’s headmaster, Tom Kelly, repeatedly told survivors during the mediation process. Similar language was used in the Y.U. high school case when, in January 2013, that school’s counsel promised to engage in a settlement dialogue with the survivors. Kevin Mulhearn, representing the 34 Y.U. victims (he also represented six Horace Mann survivors) took Y.U.’s good-faith offer at face value and refrained from filing suit for six months to see if the matter could be settled amicably. “Y.U.’s counsel had told us for months that the school wanted to do the right thing by my clients,” Mulhearn said. Instead, according to Mulhearn, Y.U. attorneys used the time to line up their legal arguments, and when they finally came to the table, the counteroffer was zero. Not one thin dime.

When Mulhearn conveyed the school’s non-offer to his clients, they were devastated. Many felt as if they had been violated again, this time by the institution where the original abuse had taken place. This bait-and-switch tactic seemed even more callous in light of the fact that one of Y.U. high school’s insurance carriers told Mulhearn it was willing to make contributions toward settlement payments. Like Horace Mann, Y.U. high school made a conscious choice to pay millions to its attorneys — not to mention to the international law firm that the university hired to conduct an independent investigation — and nothing to its alumni, who alleged they had been grievously wounded as children.

Both Horace Mann and Y.U. high school trade on their reputations to entice parents to pay large tuitions. It seems the past is convenient only when it can be marshaled to highlight a glorious tradition in the service of fundraising.

Many Catholic diocese and administrators at private schools like Horace Mann and Y.U. high school have used the current statute of limitations laws (which vary from state to state) as an excuse to shirk responsibility. The laws enable institutions to protect their brand while placing children at risk.

By using the narrow constraints of the law, they avoid not only legal consequences, but also any kind of moral reckoning. It’s not just that these institutions are effectively evading legal and financial consequences; they are creating more victims by allowing abusers who could have been stopped years ago to continue their abusive behavior.

What’s more, survivors and their families are left to bear the high cost of abuse as manifested in addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder and the need for therapy, while predators, institutions and their insurers remain untouched. No monetary award could undo the damage, but being told by predators, institutions and states alike that there is no legal recourse only deepens and prolongs the suffering.

Across the nation, adult victims of childhood sexual abuse are gaining increasing access to justice with major strides in many states, but not all. New York has one of the worst child sex abuse statute of limitations laws in the country. It shares this distinction with Alabama, Mississippi and Michigan.

The Child Victims Act (aka the Markey Bill, after state assemblywoman Margaret Markey) was first introduced in the 2006-2007 legislative session and has been passed four times by the New York State Assembly. But, met with intense opposition from Catholic and ultra-Orthodox  Jewish groups, it has never made it to the floor of the state Senate. The Markey Bill is an attempt to change the law to allow victims of abuse (occurring from the present day onwards) five extra years, till the age of 28, to come forward. It also offers a one-year window for survivors to make a retroactive claim against their abuser (for abuse that occurred in the past).

It is time that New York State residents and lawmakers gave millions of adult survivors a fighting chance to reclaim some dignity and gain justice in the remaining years of what are, for many, already shattered lives.

"Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity"... Horace Mann

http://forward.com/opinion/326032/what-ny-should-learn-from-sex-abuse-cases-at-horace-mann-and-yu/#ixzz3tlLUgX00

These Jewish leaders have betrayed the Jews of America..... AGAIN!

American Jews Betrayed by Their Leaders. Again!

On December 2, a letter signed by one thousand rabbis was delivered to  Congress calling on “our elected officials to uphold the great legacy of a country that welcomes refugees.” The leadership of virtually all of the Jewish defense organizations, from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)  to the American Jewish Committee (AJC), have echoed these demands to admit thousands of Syrian refugees.

These Jewish leaders have  betrayed the Jews of America. They prefer burnishing their liberal credentials and parroting  the views of a Democratic president to their duty to sound the alarm about the harm to American Jews from bringing to the US Syrian Muslims, who have been raised in a culture of virulent anti-Semitism. Seeing the destruction of Jewish life in Europe with the influx of Muslim immigrants from Arab countries, it would not take much imagination for these so-called Jewish leaders to see what mass immigration of Arab Muslims will  mean for the safety of Americans and for American Jews in particular.

According to data published by the Department of Homeland Security, the US has issued 680,000 green cards to migrants from Muslim-majority countries in the five years from FY2009 to FY2013. Migration from the Middle East is one of the fastest growing categories of migrants, with 1.5 million Muslims having entered since 9/11. This does not include the hundreds of thousands of Muslim students given student visas since 9/11. This influx may well explain the anti-Semitism now rife on many US campuses. The President’s refugee plan would substantially boost the annual number of migrants admitted from this region. These in turn would be able to petition for their relatives to migrate to the US in the future.

Rather than raising concerns that an Arab poll of Syrian refugees found that one in eight were supportive of ISIS, these false representatives of the Jewish people opine that it is their role to raise the Jews ” beyond their narrow partisan views.” Since when is concern for one’s life ” a narrow partisan view”?

The Jewish Establishment has been guilt-tripped by a dishonest HIAS and J Street power play that has grotesquely conflated the Syrian Muslims with the Jews fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930’s. HIAS tugs on the heartstrings of the largely immigrant Jewish community, pretending that it is the same organization supported by Jewish philanthropy which helped Jewish immigrants in the 20th century. But it is not. HIAS is now virtually an arm of the US government, which as an NGO government contractor stands to reap $100 million in its budget if it can get the US to admit the 100,000 Syrian Muslims that it is petitioning the government to admit.  Follow the money. As Daniel Greenfield wrote in Front Page Magazine, “HIAS is now just a factory for importing hundreds of thousands of anti-Semites to America.”

J Street has supported every initiative that weakens US support for Israel. But there is more than one way to skin a cat. Increasing the electorate with violently anti-Semitic Muslims, thus skewing some Congressional districts, is another way to accomplish its goals. It, too, is demanding that the US admit 100,000 Syrian Muslims. And it is fund-raising for HIAS. How interesting.

If either of these groups, or any of the breast-beating Jewish Establishment, cared one bit for the Syrians, they would be fighting for safe havens in Syria and no fly zones rather than making a show of their crocodile tears for an infinitesimal percent of the 4 million Syrian refugees they want to admit to the US.  They would be petitioning for humanitarian aid to the Syrians in the camps in Muslim countries where they are now safely living rather than fighting for money for HIAS’s own coffers.

But like the President, they do not care about the Syrians. If the President had cared about the Syrian people, he would have enforced his famous red line when Assad was gassing and bombing his people. He would have established no fly zones and safe havens. He would have vastly increased US humanitarian aid to the millions of refugees now living in refugee camps in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon so that there would not be this mass invasion of Europe. But Obama said that he wanted to fundamentally change America and this is just one more crisis he is not letting go to waste in his campaign to reshape the West while vindicating the oppressed peoples who were subject to its colonial, imperialist past.

It is Christians in Syria and Iraq who are subject to genocide, not Muslims. But very few Christians are included among the refugees because Obama allows the Islamic-dominated UN refugee system determine who will get into America. Have you heard any of the Jewish leaders raising this issue about the real victims of genocide? No, because they have fallen for the false charge that a religious test in anti-American when In fact it is one of the criteria in American law determining who is eligible for refugee status.

Obama knows that 80% of the 1.5 million Muslims who have come to the US legally since 9/11, vote Democratic.  They are a reliable constituency. This is the same reason Obama and the Democratic Party have championed legalizing the status of illegal Hispanic migrants. This is a power play, not humanism.

The  displaced persons camps in neighboring Arab countries give the lie to the comparison to German Jews fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930’s. When the US barred their entry, the Jews had no place to go since the British, under Arab pressure, had closed Mandate Palestine in 1939 to Jewish immigration. Unlike the German Jews, there are several Arab nations, with cultures similar to theirs, bordering on their homeland, who have taken them in. The Syrian migration is not about running from persecution. They have safe havens available. It is about running to economic opportunity. The Syrian civil war is three years old.  The mass flood of “refugees” started when Prime Minister Merkel said that Germany would take one million displaced Syrians. Then the so-called refugee invasion started.

The Jewish leadership should have recoiled from the comparison of fleeing German Jews with the Syrian Muslims swarming Europe. As Ian Tuttle notes in the National Review:

“There was no international conspiracy of German Jews in the 1930’s attempting to carry out daily attacks on civilians on several continents. No self-identifying Jews in the early 20th century were randomly massacring European citizens in magazine offices and concert halls, and there was no Jewish State establishing sovereignty over tens of thousands of square miles of territory and publicly slaughtering anyone who opposed its advance…A non-trivial minority of refugees who support a murderous, metastatic caliphate is a reason for serious concern. No 13% of Jews looked favorably upon the Nazi Party.”

If security is such a minor issue, why has the FBI director James Comey expressed concern about the difficulty of vetting the Syrian refugees? Why are our Jewish leaders ignoring ISIS’s instructions to terrorists to hide among the refugees, something that has already taken place with the Paris terrorists and may well have taken place in California through our visa program?

The FBI reports that there are one thousand ISIS related investigations going on right now in every US state, and growing at a rate that exceeds our monitoring resources. Why do we cringe at charges that we are afraid of “women and children” when there were women among the terrorists in Paris, California and Israel and the Boston bombers came here as children? Why do our Jewish leaders refuse to face the truth that we are at war with a group that wants to destroy the American way of life and would massacre Jews, like they do to Christians, if they could.

In the 1930’s and 1940’s, the Jewish Establishment was largely silent in the face of the Holocaust because they did not want to be seen as raising “their narrow partisan concerns” in the face of the war effort. They have compounded their error by once again refusing to stand up for the survival of the American Jewish community. The Jewish community has often compared America to the golden age in Spain and wondered if this golden medina would end too. If it does, we will have the Jewish Establishment leadership to thank.

http://www.israpundit.org/archives/63611351

“If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.”

“Spotlight”: It’s not just a Catholic problem

Last week, I had the privilege of finally seeing the much-anticipated “Spotlight”. This powerful film focuses on the true story of an amazing group of journalists from the Boston Globe who worked alongside brave and tireless abuse survivors and a relentless plaintiff’s attorney to expose the untold horrors of child sexual abuse and cover up in the Boston archdiocese in 2002. What finally surfaced was hundreds of offending clergy and over 1000 victims in Boston alone.

Though I think everyone should watch this film, I especially think that my fellow Protestants can learn much from seeing it. However, learning will require a humility that enables us to be slow in pointing the finger at others, and quick to the difficult and sobering task of self-examination.

Some may be tempted to watch this film with disgust for the Catholic Church and a sigh of relief for Protestant churches. Such relief would be unfounded and misplaced. A number of years ago, the three companies that insure most Protestant churches reported that receiving approximately 260 reports a year of minors being sexually abused by church leaders and members. This is compared to the approximately 228 “credible accusations” a year of child sexual abuse reported by the Catholic Church. (Both numbers are much higher due to underreporting and the manner in which such information is collected and determined – that is another blog for another day.) In reality, the likelihood is that more children are sexually abused in Protestant churches than in Catholic churches.

Regardless, the abuse of one child is one child too many. Instead of pointing fingers, we should be learning from each other and working together to bring an end to this epidemic that permeates all religions.

In order to do this, Protestants are going to have to accept the fact that we have many more similarities than differences with our Catholic brothers and sisters when it comes to how we have failed to protect and serve God’s children. Here are just three that surfaced in “Spotlight”:
Clergy who abuse: “When you’re a poor kid from a poor family and when a priest pays attention to you, it’s a big deal. How do you say ‘no’ to God?”

These were the gut-wrenching words of Phil Saviano, a clergy abuse survivor (and member of SNAP) who was attempting to describe the dark dynamics of how his nightmare began. In a later scene, another survivor explains, “He offered to get me ice cream. It’s a priest. I’m a kid. So I go.”

The evil perpetrated by those who use their religious cover to access and abuse children is alive and well in Protestantism. My friend Christa Brown, who was sexually abused by her Baptist youth pastor, writes, “Eddie [pastor] always said that God had chosen me for something special. I guess I really wanted to believe that. Doesn’t every kid want to think they’re special? Besides, who was I to question a man of God? It wasn’t my place.” The sinister reality is that sex offenders who hold positions of authority while carrying Bibles and quoting scripture are treacherous, regardless of whether they are called priest, pastor, or reverend. It’s not just a Catholic problem.

Protecting Reputations: Much of “Spotlight” focuses on the inordinate and distorted efforts taken by the Boston Archdiocese to protect its own reputation from the horrors being perpetrated by its priests.  In most cases, the Church accomplished this by moving offending priests and silencing victims. Abusing priests were either transferred to new parishes or temporarily removed under the guise of “sick leave” and sent to live with other offending priests in homes located throughout Boston (many located in neighborhoods with unsuspecting children). Prior to the exposure of these crimes and cover-ups, victims were systematically coerced into silence by false assurances, small sums of cash, confidentiality agreements, and lots of guilt and shame.

As I watched this all unfold on the screen, I couldn’t help but recall the countless cases I have encountered in Protestant circles where offending pastors, missionaries, and other leaders have been reassigned or allowed to quietly resign all in an effort to insulate the institution. The youth pastor who rapes a child and is transferred to a new church and given a going away party; the pedophile missionary physician who is quietly sent home from the mission field; the church volunteer who admits to sexually abusing a child and is simply directed by the church leadership to move quietly to another state. The list could go on and on. It’s not just a Catholic problem.

In addition to quietly moving or reassigning offenders, many Protestant/Jewish institutions are no less savvy than the Boston Archdiocese in using money, shame, and guilt to influence survivors and their families to remain silent.

The missionary child who is made to sign a “confession” for her responsibility in being repeatedly sexually abused by an adult missionary; the pastor who spends his days attempting to shame and threaten a sexual abuse survivor who speaks up about how the church failed to properly respond to her abuse disclosure; the ministry that exploits the poverty of victims by giving them a pittance of money in exchange for waivers and confidentiality agreements. The list could go on and on. It’s not just a Catholic problem.

Silent Bystanders: Another disturbing truth that surfaced in “Spotlight” was the deafening silence that surrounded the sexual abuse of children that had permeated inside the Church in epidemic proportions. A silence usually fueled by wanting to protect friendships and reputations. For example, a friend of Archbishop Bernard Law admonished one of the reporters to remember all the “good” the Archbishop had done when considering whether to expose his complicity in protecting pedophile priests. Sometimes the silence seemed fueled by deliberate ignorance. A powerful scene in the film was when one of the reporters attended a Catholic charity event shortly after an emotional interview with a victim. He finds himself amongst Catholics who are celebrating the good deeds of the Church and seem oblivious to the countless numbers of lives that had been silently eviscerated by that same Church. The gala was a picture of a modern day gathering of Priests and Levites celebrating their great “religious” accomplishments, all the while stepping over those dying in their midst. Too many  chose to simply look the other way.

That same deadly silence permeates inside many Protestant (Jewish) institutions.

For example, many Protestant leaders who aren’t shy about speaking out on a wide variety of spiritual and cultural issues will often refuse to speak out against specific cases of child sexual abuse. They defend such silence by claiming something like, “We don’t know all the facts and don’t want to tarnish the reputation of someone who has done so much good.” Tragically, what often seems to be the real reason behind such silence is a fear of losing friendships, speaking engagements, book contracts, and other types of “influence”. It’s not just a Catholic problem.

Silence is not just limited to leaders. Just like in the Catholic Church, too many within Protestant congregations prefer to remain ignorant on the prevalence of child abuse within our churches, organizations, and mission fields. We consume ourselves with evangelism programs, pro-life activities, and other good causes, all the while ignoring the blatant reality that children and adult survivors are suffering in our midst. We convince ourselves that being ignorant gives us the excuse to be silent. Such toxic silence makes us complicit in this wickedness by placing children at risk, re-traumatizing survivors, and emboldening offenders. It’s not just a Catholic problem.

On a positive note, I am encountering more and more Protestants who are opening their eyes to the realities of child sexual abuse within our churches and beginning to acknowledge the urgent need to something about it. My hope is that films like “Spotlight” will help enable us to move beyond vague platitudes and empty actions. Perhaps, we can start by acknowledging our failures and begin seeking ways to live out real repentance to the many precious lives lying beaten and wounded in our midst.

http://boz.religionnews.com/2015/12/07/spotlight-its-not-just-a-catholic-problem/

Leading rabbi: Higher education for women more damaging than the Holocaust ...

A senior haredi rabbi has suggested at a conference for high school principals held in Bnei Brak that higher education for women constitutes a more severe blow to the haredi world than the Holocaust.

“The furnaces of this generation are burning more than the furnaces of Auschwitz, more than the cellars of the inquisition with all their tortures, these are spiritual furnaces,” Rabbi Aviezer Peletz was quoted by the Kikar Hashabbat news website as having said at the conference held on Wednesday.

The remarks were reported amid a growing furor in the haredi world over Education Ministry efforts to prevent discrimination against teenage girls in high schools.

Haredi activists close to the United Torah Judaism party are pressing to cancel a unit set up by a previous minister to try and stop a quota system used to limit admissions of Sephardic young women to haredi secondary schools.

Anti-discrimination activists have for many years accused these schools of setting a quota of 25 to 35 percent for the number of these young women these haredi schools will accept each year.

In the last two years, the ministry, led by the director of the Haredi Department, Meir Shimoni, won several significant battles on the issue, in Jerusalem and Elad, by threatening to cease funding for schools that rejected local government requests to accept Sephardi girls as pupils.

The activists are now concerned that an unsuitable UTJ loyalist will be hired to replace Shimoni, following heavy pressure by the Association of Seminars and principals on the rabbinic leadership to preserve the high schools’ independence regarding student admissions.

Councils of Sages

Last week, the Councils of Torah Sages for both Ashkenazi haredi political movements, Degel Hatorah and Agudat Yisrael, said they would cease cooperating with the Education Ministry until it stopped what they called its “interference” in the operation of the haredi high schools for girls.

In a statement the councils said that cooperation with ministry inspectors should be stopped, and ministry instructions ignored. “Male and female pupils who are not appropriate to the terms and regulations of the institution in spiritual terms should not be accepted and the interference of the authorities on this issue should not be allowed in any way,” the Councils’ statement said.

Earlier this week Shas MK and chairman of the Knesset Education Committee Yaakov Margi praised Shimoni and called for his tenure to be extended by two years.

Margi expressed concern that if a UTJ insider was brought in to replace Shimoni it would harm the cause of preventing discrimination.

On Thursday, anti-discrimination activist Yoav Laloum who founded the Noar K’halacha lobby group, strongly criticized Shas chairman and Periphery Minister Aryeh Deri as well as Education Minister Naftali Bennett for their handling of the issue.

“It is an absolute disgrace that people who were elected on a ticket of preventing discrimination are knowingly cooperating with it,” Laloum told The Jerusalem Post.

“Deri is busy making hollow statements and forgets that promises need to be kept.

Bennett has abandoned haredi education to the hands of his deputy [minister MK Meir Porush], the leader of racism, in my eyes.”

He thought that Margi was the only “bright light, and it’s a shame that he’s alone.”

Requests for comment from Bennett, Deri and Porush were declined.

Against this background, a series of senior rabbinic figures in the haredi world fiercely criticized the increasing numbers of haredi women entering higher education.

Rabbi Aharon Leib Shteinman, the most senior haredi rabbi in the Ashkenazi non-hassidic haredi world, was quoted by a close associate as saying that a man had asked him if he should let his daughter go to university.

Shteinman replied that to do so would be worse than stealing money since material goods may be recovered but the “spiritual damage” of permitting the young woman to achieve higher education could not be undone.

The associate, Rabbi Natan Zochovsky, objected to academic studies for women or to women earning high salaries.

Zochovsky thought a woman needs to earn an income, but that if she were to “bring high and exaggerated salaries because of the college she learned in and because of other studies, this is dangerous, this is a danger to the entire framework of the home.”

Dr. Efraim Zuroff, Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office and a Holocaust historian, denounced Peletz’s claim that the damage done could be seen as parallel to the Holocaust.

“The comparison of higher education for women with the horrors of the Holocaust and the Inquisition are an insult to our intelligence and an embarrassment for these prominent ultra-Orthodox rabbis,” Zuroff said.

“At a time when increasing numbers of haredi men and women are involved in getting an academic education, one can only wonder what prompted such a strange and obtuse comment.

“This is an inversion of the Holocaust. It is an insult to the victims of the Holocaust and the Inquisition and only proves the ignorance of those who made it,” Zuroff said.

http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Leading-rabbi-Higher-education-for-women-more-damaging-than-the-Holocaust-436420

Devout used to mean piety. It does not mean that anymore. Nothing is the same anymore....

It won’t end in San Bernardino

Nothing is the same anymore.  The devout have arrived.

Sometimes an event comes along that makes us tremble for what might be coming next.

The event, this time, was San Bernardino, California – 14 dead, all shot during a Christmas party. The killers were husband and wife, both identified as “devout Muslims,” which should not lead us to identify all Muslims as crazed radicals, but instantly gives new meaning to the word “devout.”

Devout used to mean piety. It does not mean that anymore. Nothing is the same anymore.

America, home of the brave, is not so brave at the moment. We live in fear, and for good reason. We don’t know who’s on our side.

That is fear of the worst kind. The Israelis know it elaborately but here in the US it is becoming a habit as well.

We fear the devout, there’s that, and we fear speaking our minds. That’s just as bad or may be worse.

We are not allowed to be angry. Privately, perhaps; but even the walls have ears.

We have been told that if we see something we’d better shut up about it or else we will be taken away for hate crimes. Our attorney general says so.

Our speech is being monitored. In Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s own words when she explained to Muslim leaders how she has their back: “We must make it clear that actions predicated on violent [anti-Islamic] talk are not American…They will be prosecuted.” [Goodbye First Amendment]

Scared yet?

This is not the first time that we were a nation plunged in fear. But previously we knew the government was on our side. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, then too we did not know what’s coming next. Later when JFK was assassinated we thought our enemies were coming for all of us.


On September 11, 2001, 9/11, we were awakened to a world war that may well last a century. The devout had arrived.

But through all those crises we knew that the government was on our side. Not so this time.

Not so when we are warned that we’d better watch our language when it comes to the devout and in fact, the people next door to the San Bernardino killers – they suspected strangeness but were afraid to alert the authorities for fear of being reported as bigots…guilty of “violent talk,” as per our attorney general.

Anything that makes the devout feel uncomfortable will not be tolerated.

So 14 innocents died from an act of mindless bloodshed. Because Americans were afraid to speak.

In the UK, thousands of English girls and women have been raped, but have kept silent to protect themselves against charges of bigotry since most of the assailants are the devout from Pakistan and Afghanistan. The epidemic continues and parents who complain to the police are often arrested by the police for complaining.

But that’s England. This is America.

Is it?

At the University of Michigan a Jewish student, Jesse Arm, is in trouble for speaking. He expressed himself against pro-Palestinian demonstrators on campus. What did he say? “You’re not serious with these [anti-Israel] signs here,” he said and was immediately flagged for “verbal abuse.”

Therefore chalk up a victory for free speech, but only if you belong to certain groups, like BDS and others who read from the same book.

Jews get no such edge.

Students at Iowa colleges (and elsewhere) are demanding “safe space” to pray five times a day.

The devout may not be inconvenienced and when they are they can count on being supported and comforted. When talk gets heated, as it has been about importing thousands of Syrian migrants, Democrats, like Rep. Don Beyer of Va., rush to the nearest mosque to express unity, solidarity, fellowship.

They go to assure worshippers that there are no hard feelings, come whatever, most likely even San Bernardino.

But when American student Ezra Schwartz was murdered in Israel at the hands of Devout Palestinian Arabs, it was different.

The record shows no such fellowship for Jews in mourning and in pain. There is no evidence of a single Democrat visiting a single synagogue.

Tolerance and free speech for some but not for others, this is the America we’ve inherited with our votes. There is hope. We do get one more chance to get it right but if we get it wrong, again, it may be our last chance and our grandchildren will pay the price for generations to come.


New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes a regular column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the international classic “Indecent Proposal” now followed by the prophetic thriller “The Bathsheba Deadline.” Engelhard is the recipient of the Ben Hecht Award for Literary Excellence. Website: www.jackengelhard.com

Farook had always been one of the most agreeable, the quietest, and also among the best at his job, Adair said. He was a college graduate with five years of experience in environmental health. He had helped train his co-workers on a new computer program and won gift certificates to TGI Fridays as an interoffice reward for good performance. ...

‘Where’s Syed?’ How the San Bernardino shooting unfolded

REUTERS/Alex Gallardo Survivors of the Inland Regional Center where gunmen shot and killed 14 people and injured another 14, are escorted off buses to meet relatives at the Rudy Hernandez Community Center in San Bernardino, December…

SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. — Another morning stuck in a conference room, another requisite all-staff meeting, and Patrick Baccari arrived to find his co-worker Syed Farook sitting at a table by himself. He was wearing a button-down shirt and a long beard. Baccari walked over to join him.

“Ready to be bored?” Baccari asked, because that was always their joke. San Bernardino County required its health inspectors to gather at least twice each year for a day of speeches and continuing education. “I’m ready,” he would remember Farook telling him and smiling back.

They sat together near the back of the room as it filled with 75 people, and soon their table was full, too. There was Chris Nwadike, a government worker for the last 25 years. There were Isaac Amanios, a 60-year-old father of three, and Denise Peraza, 27 and newly married.

A technician wheeled out a podium. A supervisor stood up to welcome them. At some point after the first hour, Farook got up and left his papers on the table and his jacket on the back of his chair.

“Where’s Syed?” Baccari remembered someone at the table asking, and then a little while later Farook was back, this time with his wife, two assault rifles, two handguns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

What happened next took less than four minutes. Fourteen people were killed. Twenty-one people were injured. And so many in the San Bernardino County Department of Health were left doubting how much they knew about not only their co-worker but also about their government office and the country it represented. One health department supervisor sometimes referred to her team of inspectors as a “Little United Nations,” because they had come to San Bernardino from everywhere: Eritrea, Colombia, India, Mexico and Central America – the most diverse office in San Bernardino County. “No talking politics. No interoffice drama,” was how their supervisor, Amanda Adair, described the office rules.

Farook had always been one of the most agreeable, the quietest, and also among the best at his job, Adair said. He was a college graduate with five years of experience in environmental health. He had helped train his co-workers on a new computer program and won gift certificates to TGI Fridays as an interoffice reward for good performance. He had taken a long vacation from work once to travel to Saudi Arabia and see the woman who would become his wife. Early in the year, he had set up a baby registry at Target for his newborn son, and his office mates had thrown him a baby shower. They had asked to meet his new wife, and teased him lightly when he demurred.

“We all thought he was doing great, having a family, but still the same guy — peaceful and quiet,” Baccari said.

“He got along with everybody,” Nwadike said.

So it was more than just the black mask and tactical gear that rendered Farook unrecognizable to so many of his co-workers when he returned to the meeting around 11 a.m. The division chief had just finished a talk about statistics. The county supervisor had announced more hiring for next year and then given everyone a five-minute bathroom break.

That’s when investigators say Farook and his wife drove up to the beige, three-building complex of the Inland Regional Center on a quiet street in San Bernardino, driving a rental car with Utah plates. They approached the patio with unlocked doors that led directly into the conference room, investigators said, and that’s where Amanios happened to be sitting outside on his break. Amanios was shot and killed, and then the shooters entered the conference room, where bagels and pastries were still sitting on a buffet table and some employees had begun posing for staff pictures.

Baccari and Nwadike had just left for the bathroom on their break when they heard a blast followed by a series of gunshots. Baccari was reaching for a towel to dry his hands when a bullet ripped through the dispenser and sent shrapnel spraying across the room. “Get down, get down, get down!”

Baccari yelled, even though he had no idea what was happening. They dove for cover on the floor. Nwadike hid in a stall. Parts of the ceiling fell down on them and they pushed the bathroom door closed with their legs. Nwadike thought he could smell gunpowder. Baccari thought he could hear muffled screaming coming in between the blasts in conference room, about 20 feet down the hall. “It was like the world was ending in there,” he said. “We had no idea what it was.”

It was 65 to 75 rounds fired over the course of about a minute, coming from a Smith & Wesson and two AR-15s, investigators would later determine. One bullet hit the sprinkler system. Water rained down from the ceiling. Gunfire pockmarked the walls, tipped over tables and ripped through the podium. Dozens of people were shot, at least one as many as five times. The gunfire stopped, and then there were new sounds coming from the conference room.

“Oh my God. Oh my God. She’s bleeding,” said one woman, speaking into a cellphone as she sat next to Hanan Megalla and called Megalla’s husband to say that his wife had been injured.
“A lot of people are dead. Somehow I’m alive,” said Denise Peraza, 27, making a call to her sister from the conference room, where she had been shot in the back.

“Love you guys,” wrote Julie Paez, sending a text message to her family from the floor of the room at 11:20 a.m., according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. She took a picture of her face as she lay on the floor and sent it to them. She had been hit in the arm and in the stomach. Her pelvis was shattered. “Was shot,” she wrote.

Four minutes after the shooting had started, more people in tactical gear came rushing into the room with their guns drawn. “Police!” one said, and the officers moved through the conference room and then into the bathroom, where Baccari and Nwadike were still cowering. “Don’t take anything!

Everyone get your hands up,” Nwadike remembered an officer saying, and they hurried the survivors through a hallway and out of the building, past the conference room where their morning had begun. They gathered outside, waiting to be checked at a triage tent and then interviewed by investigators. By noon, at least one of those co-workers had told investigators he believed one of the shooters could be Farook.

“That didn’t make sense to me,” Baccari said.

“He was doing fine. No problem at all,” Nwadike said.

“It’s all so confusing and disorienting,” Baccari said, because so much that was familiar had become unrecognizable, and behind him in the conference room the fire alarm was blaring, water was pouring down, and 35 of his colleagues were either wounded or dead.

McCrummen reported from Washington. Abby Phillip and William Wan in Washington contributed to this story.