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.

“I mean, I say this every time we’ve got one of these mass shootings; this just doesn’t happen in other countries.”

     

President Obama once again called for better background checks and new restrictions on access to guns for people who might pose a danger. -- Law enforcement sources have identified Syed Farook as one of the suspects in Wednesday's shooting at the the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California, according to several outlets, including CBS Los Angeles, the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times.

“We should come together in a bipartisan basis at every level of government to make these rare as opposed to normal,” he said in a previously scheduled interview with CBS News. He added, “The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world, and there’s some steps we could take, not to eliminate every one of these mass shootings, but to improve the odds that they don’t happen as frequently.”

Father of San Bernardino shooting suspect says shooter is “very religious” Muslim

December 2, 2015 10:31 pm  --- By Robert Spencer 45 Comments

“He was very religious. He would go to work, come back, go to pray, come back. He’s Muslim.” Not that this has anything to do with...

Obama in Paris: 'Mass Shootings Don't Happen in Other Countries'

                         

        

What, me worry?

Obama in Paris: 'Mass Shootings Don't Happen In Other Countries'

      

Yes, he just said that:

While giving a press conference in Paris, President Barack Obama told reporters that the mass shootings that plague the United States just never happen in other countries.

“With respect to Planned Parenthood, obviously, my heart goes out to the families of those impacted,” Obama said in response to a reporter’s question. “I mean, I say this every time we’ve got one of these mass shootings; this just doesn’t happen in other countries.”

For those living under a rock, the city of Paris itself was just hit with a series of simultaneous terrorist attacks. The majority of 130 deaths were in mass shooting attacks, where the ISIS-affiliated terrorists attacked public places with automatic rifles. Nearly one hundred people alone were killed in just one mass shooting at the Bataclan theater.

Earlier this year, Paris was also the victim of a terrorist attack targeting the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists wielded assault rifles, killing 11 innocent people.

Some video at the link, if you can stomach it as Obama, speaking just before he jetted off to France to save the world, salutes the people of Paris for showing the world "how to stay strong in the face of terrorism." It's the brave-Democrat mantra of sheltering in place, rather than fighting your enemies, because fighting back would be rude. Savor as well his fracturing of the French language ("la Plaz de la Repooblic").

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail has the video of a listless, unengaged, phoning-it-in president offering his usual platitudes and bromides, unleashing the howler that mass shootings don't happen in other countries, and then going into his canned pitch for "gun control." The man never misses a chance to bash his own country, does he?

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2015/12/1/obama-in-paris-mass-shootings-dont-happen-in-other-countries

“Five years ago, you couldn’t say the words ‘sexual abuse.’ Now you can.”

Orthodox Jews From Around the World Gather to Tackle Domestic and Sex Abuse

Posted on December 1, 2015

Haaretz Reports

More than 1,000 ultra-Orthodox and Orthodox Jews from around the world gathered in Jerusalem this week to tackle some of their communities’ darkest taboos: sexual abuse and domestic violence.

The three-day event they are attending, which began Monday, is the second annual conference on the subject spearheaded by the Israeli nonprofit Tahel, the Crisis Center for Religious Women and Children. Headlined “Shedding Light on the Darkness of Abuse,” the gathering offers five hands-on training tracks, including one specially tailored to rabbis and people who work at yeshivas.

That track – “Building Safe Synagogues and Yeshivas” – features sessions about high-profile abuse cases, defining offenders, abuse in marriage and other key subjects.

Tahel has organized pilot programs on these subjects in ultra-Orthodox and other institutions in Israel, Johannesburg, Sydney, Melbourne and London, director Debbie Gross told Haaretz. The idea is for this week’s trainees to implement what they learn back home, too.

Other training tracks in the conference are geared to individuals who monitor sexual harassment in educational institutions, lawyers and therapists. Organizers will be launching an international network that will enable lawyers to help agunot – Orthodox women who are refused a Jewish divorce by their husbands.

Some 1,100 people registered for the conference this year – an estimated 30 percent of them women – with participants coming from Israel, the United States, Britain, Canada, South Africa, Australia and European countries.

Chief Rabbi Lau addressing participants at the conference. Rabbis and teachers should not “cross the line” into inappropriate behavior, he said.Lior Mizrahi

 Israel’s Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau addressed the opening session, emphasizing the important role rabbis have as “an address” for people who are victims of abuse. He said rabbis and teachers “need to know the line and not cross it” into inappropriate behavior, and added that he feels that awareness in the religious community of the issues raised by the conference “has grown and is growing.”

High-profile cases, such as those involving alleged child sex abuse at yeshivas in Sydney and Melbourne – which prompted public hearings on the handling by Jewish communal leaders of the suspected acts – have put a spotlight on this phenomenon in religious communities. The topic of the growing openness within these communities, which have traditionally hunkered down and kept abuse cases secret, came up frequently at the conference on Monday.

“Fifteen years ago in the United States, you couldn’t say the word cancer, and we would say hamakhala (“the illness,” in Hebrew),” said Zvi Gluck, head of the U.S. nonprofit Amudim. “Five years ago, you couldn’t say the words ‘sexual abuse.’ Now you can.”

Still, many rabbis are not equipped to deal with sensitive subjects. “Yeshiva didn’t prepare us for this."

Monday gave a taste of what was to come in sessions aimed at training rabbis in the following two days. In one candid session, Chief Rabbi of Safed Shmuel Eliyahu discussed his experiences in dealing with abuse cases.

Earlier this year, Safed was faced with a highly publicized sexual assault scandal involving Rabbi Ezra Sheinberg, the head of the city’s Orot Ha’ari Yeshiva. In July, Sheinberg was arrested at Ben-Gurion International Airport while trying to flee the country, and was indicted for raping, sodomizing or sexually assaulting 12 women, most of whom were young religious women married to his students. His attorney has called the indictment “inflated” and “partly baseless.”

Eliyahu alluded to tensions between secular and rabbinical authorities when dealing with abuse in the religious community, and also discussed when and how to work with police.

Veteran American ultra-Orthodox social worker gave the audience a rundown on advising parents as to how to talk to their children about abuse, another key skill for rabbis.

Many spoke among other things about how to deal with religious persons who have suffered abuse and are convinced that God is punishing them, told Haaretz that he gained expertise in the subject after many years of working with health-care professionals.

“The vast majority of rabbis are deeply caring and deeply touched by the plight of individuals who have seen abuse in any form,” he said. “But many rabbis have not had the experience to know how this takes place, and they have not always responded in the most effective way.”

One thing rabbis need help with is in realizing where their job ends, said Rabbi David Fine, head of the Barkai Center for Practical Rabbinics in Israel, which trains ordained religious Zionist rabbis in community-related skills. “He has to know when he has to refer to professionals.”

One of Fine’s rabbis-in-training, Eli Schonfeld from Givat Ze’ev, outside of Jerusalem, agreed that this is key: “I need to know how to respond the first time someone approaches me, and then how to help. I am very against rabbis being psychologists, therapists – and clowns. We are a little of everything, but we can’t do everything.”

Little children have imaginary friends. Modern liberalism has imaginary enemies.

Liberalism’s Imaginary Enemies

In Paris, it’s easier to battle a climate crisis than confront jihadists on the streets.

Little children have imaginary friends. Modern liberalism has imaginary enemies.

Hunger in America is an imaginary enemy.

Liberal advocacy groups routinely claim that one in seven Americans is hungry—in a country where the poorest counties have the highest rates of obesity. The statistic is a preposterous extrapolation from a dubious Agriculture Department measure of “food insecurity.” But the line gives those advocacy groups a reason to exist while feeding the liberal narrative of America as a savage society of haves and have nots.

The campus-rape epidemic—in which one in five female college students is said to be the victim of sexual assault—is an imaginary enemy. Never mind the debunked rape scandals at Duke and the University of Virginia, or the soon-to-be-debunked case at the heart of “The Hunting Ground,” a documentary about an alleged sexual assault at Harvard Law School. The real question is: If modern campuses were really zones of mass predation—Congo on the quad—why would intelligent young women even think of attending a coeducational school? They do because there is no epidemic. But the campus-rape narrative sustains liberal fictions of a never-ending war on women.

Opinion Journal Video

Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot on what to expect as global leaders meet to talk climate change. Photo credit: Getty Images.

Institutionalized racism is an imaginary enemy. Somehow we’re supposed to believe that the same college administrators who have made a religion of diversity are really the second coming of Strom Thurmond. Somehow we’re supposed to believe that twice electing a black president is evidence of our racial incorrigibility. We’re supposed to believe this anyway because the future of liberal racialism—from affirmative action to diversity quotas to slavery reparations—requires periodic sightings of the ghosts of a racist past.

I mention these examples by way of preface to the climate-change summit that began this week in Paris. But first notice a pattern.

Dramatic crises—for which evidence tends to be anecdotal, subjective, invisible, tendentious and sometimes fabricated—are trumpeted on the basis of incompetently designed studies, poorly understood statistics, or semantic legerdemain. Food insecurity is not remotely the same as hunger. An abusive cop does not equal a bigoted police department. An unwanted kiss or touch is not the same as sexual assault, at least if the word assault is to mean anything.

Yet bogus studies and statistics survive because the cottage industries of compassion need them to be believed, and because mindless repetition has a way of making things nearly true, and because dramatic crises require drastic and all-encompassing solutions. Besides, the thinking goes, falsehood and exaggeration can serve a purpose if it induces virtuous behavior. The more afraid we are of the shadow of racism, the more conscious we might become of our own unsuspected biases.

And so to Paris.

I’m not the first to notice the incongruity of this huge gathering of world leaders meeting to combat a notional enemy in the same place where a real enemy just inflicted so much mortal damage.

Then again, it’s also appropriate, since reality-substitution is how modern liberalism conducts political business. What is the central liberal project of the 21st century, if not to persuade people that climate change represents an infinitely greater threat to human civilization than the barbarians—sorry, violent extremists—of Mosul and Molenbeek? Why overreact to a few hundred deaths today when hundreds of thousands will be dead in a century or two if we fail to act now?

Here again the same dishonest pattern is at work. The semantic trick in the phrase “climate change”—allowing every climate anomaly to serve as further proof of the overall theory. The hysteria generated by an imperceptible temperature rise of 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880—as if the trend is bound to continue forever, or is not a product of natural variation, or cannot be mitigated except by drastic policy interventions. The hyping of flimsy studies—melting Himalayan glaciers; vanishing polar ice—to press the political point. The job security and air of self-importance this provides the tens of thousands of people—EPA bureaucrats, wind-turbine manufacturers, litigious climate scientists, NGO gnomes—whose livelihoods depend on a climate crisis. The belief that even if the crisis isn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be, it does us all good to be more mindful about the environment.

And, of course, the chance to switch the subject. If your enemy is global jihad, then to defeat it you need military wherewithal, martial talents and political will. If your enemy is the structure of an energy-intensive global economy, then you need a compelling justification to change it. Climate dystopia can work wonders, provided the jihadists don’t interrupt too often.

Here’s a climate prediction for the year 2115: Liberals will still be organizing campaigns against yet another mooted social or environmental crisis. Temperatures will be about the same.

Write bstephens@wsj.com.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/liberalisms-imaginary-enemies-1448929043