The Child Sex Abuse Crisis Leftists Don't Want You To Know About

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The Child Sex Abuse Crisis Leftists Don't Want You to Know About

Wrong Victims. Wrong Perpetrators. Wrong Skin Color. Wrong Ideological Facilitators.

Karl Marx is the superstar lead in the blockbuster movie of anti-Western productions. Marxists focus their critique on economics. They insist that capitalism is both cruel and doomed by ineluctable historical forces. Marx has many supporting players, many totally unaware that they are extras in the anti-Western project. Many of these supporting players wear gauzy fabrics in pastel hues, shop at stores lulled by piped-in windchime music, and smell like patchouli. They believe themselves to be apolitical, peace-and-love flower children. They insist that their ideology, unlike that of the big, bad West, has never hurt anyone. In fact political convictions as impervious to fact, as destructive and as rigidly intolerant as that of any extremist undergird their flowing tie-dye.

One of the most powerful anti-Western myths runs like this. Rape, war, and environmental degradation are Western, Judeo-Christian monopolies. Before the Jews, those reliable villains of so many lurid and hate-fueled fabrications, humanity worshipped a nurturing mother goddess. Men and women were equal. It was the Jews and their disastrously influential offspring, the Christians, who introduced inequality, domestic violence, and competition. Western man, steeped in the Bible, was single-handedly responsible for the rape of the planet. Go to any New Age bookstore, read any Facebook post by someone who identifies as "spiritual-but-not-religious," chat with anyone wearing an ankh, greeting you with "Namaste," or self-identifying as a Wiccan, and you will encounter some version of this ideology.

My Facebook friend Bea is an anti-Brexit, open-borders leftist. Bea denounces Trump supporters as a threat to world peace. She's the type of person who, if she overheard a Salvation Army band playing "Onward Christian Soldiers," would petition the UN to send in peacekeeping troops to her street corner.

Bea posted a YouTube video of a haka she especially liked. Haka are the war chants of Maori, indigenous people of New Zealand. I noted the disconnect between Bea's peace-love-coexistence Facebook persona and her endorsement of war chants. I posted a very brief message. "Haka are traditional Maori war chants. They were designed to pump warriors up for battle, and to intimidate opponents."

Bea's one-world friends attacked. How dare I label haka "war chants?" Haka are a lovely art form of traditional people!

I responded with a notorious passage from Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond described Maori warriors invading the territory of their neighbors, the Moriori, and committing a genocide.

Maori warriors, no doubt fueled from chanting haka, "killed hundreds of Moriori, cooked and ate many of the bodies, and enslaved all the others … A Moriori survivor recalled 'The Maori commenced to kill us like sheep … We were terrified, fled to the bush, concealed ourselves in holes underground, and in any place to escape our enemies. It was of no avail; we were discovered and killed – men, women, and children, indiscriminately.' A Maori conqueror explained. 'We took possession… in accordance with our customs and we killed all the people. Not one escaped … What of that? It was in accordance with our customs.'"

Maori kept the preserved heads of their enemies. They would taunt these heads. One Maori said to one of his preserved heads, "You wanted to run away didn't you? But my greenstone club overtook you! And after you were cooked you were made food for me! And where is your father? He is cooked. And where is your brother? He is eaten. And where is your wife? There she sits, a wife for me. And where are your children? The loads on their backs they carry as my slaves."

My reference to objective reality in the form of historical fact ignited a firestorm. An African American male Facebook user posted a lengthy message "correcting" and "educating" me. He pointed out that before white Europeans arrived, Maori were peaceful, traditional people of color. Only the presence of white people pushed them over the edge into genocidal violence. If I did not affirm this, I was clearly a white supremacist. Bea "liked" this man's posts.

Facts do not support the Noble Savage fantasy. Ten thousand years ago, archeologists report, nomadic hunter-gatherers massacred twenty-seven people at what is now Lake Turkana, Kenya. A heavily pregnant woman, bound hand and foot, was murdered with a blow to the head. Humans, tens of thousands of years before the Bible, contributed to the worldwide extinction of megafauna. Prehistoric humans also contributed to desertification. Australian Aborigines' hunting and burning practices may have altered that landmass' climate dramatically, according to University of Colorado at Boulder Professor Gifford Miller. Humans armed only with flint-knapped obsidian blades and fire kits proved quite expert at "raping the planet."

Male and female equality are in short supply in non-Judeo-Christian societies, even goddess-worshipping ones. In India Kali, the goddess of destruction, Laxmi, the goddess of wealth, and Sita, consort of Ram, are invoked millions of times daily. Even so, India aborts and murders its daughters at historic levels, as Indian economist Amartya Sen has pointed out.

Valerie Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer's 2005 MIT book Bare Branches provides a shocking and necessary look at female infanticide. In remote, tribal New Guinea, a woman gave birth. Her husband asked the baby's gender. When informed he had fathered a girl, he responded, "Break it and throw it away." "It" was his daughter. Bare Branches provides many traditional methods used to destroy female infants. Shove uncooked rice down their throats. Expose them. Poison them with oleander. Sell them to sex traffickers.

In China the corpses of discarded females clogged waterways. New Agers advance witchcraft as a woman-friendly alternative to the Judeo-Christian tradition. In modern China, The Christian Science Monitor reports, witches stand at the ready to destroy female children. "In the suburbs of Canton, there are even witches and sorcerers who cheat and undermine birth control by holding feudalistic and superstitious ceremonies after killing girl babies, alleging that by so doing they can get the wretched parents to produce boy babies … a basin full of water is placed in the room where the mother is giving birth so that if the baby is a girl, it may be drowned immediately."

Australian Aborigines are one of the most remote populations on earth. Outside of Africa, Aborigines can claim the longest inhabitation of a landmass of any human population. Aborigines may have left Africa 75,000 years ago, and they have inhabited Australia for tens of thousands of years. They were not colonized by Europeans until 1788. Given their remoteness, the ancientness of their culture, and their relatively recent exposure to the evil West, many New Agers prize Aboriginals as exemplars of a pure humanity, uncorrupted by the West's ills.

Bare Branches offers a less romantic view. When Europeans arrived, it reports, they found one hundred fifty Aboriginal men for each one hundred Aboriginal women. Of course one does not accept this statistic without skepticism; colonizers had agendas. At the same time, it would be foolish to pretend that this number has no significance whatsoever. Given that traditional Aboriginal culture left few artifacts that we can study, no law books, figurative art, play scripts, etc, how can we know how Aboriginal men treated Aboriginal women before contact?

Journalist Tony Thomas, in a 2013 Quadrant Online article, cites paleopathologist Stephen Webb's 1995 Cambridge University Press book, Palaeopathology of Aboriginal Australians. Webb analyzed 4,500 individuals' bones covering 50,000 years. "Webb found highly disproportionate rates of injuries and fractures to women's skulls, with the injuries suggesting deliberate attack and often attacks from behind, perhaps in domestic squabbles."

The gruesome tale told by ancient bones is reinforced in first contact accounts. "We have seen some of these unfortunate beings with more scars upon their shorn heads, cut in every direction, than could be well distinguished or counted," reported one European of Aboriginal women. There are many other quotes offering similar testimony. Traditional Aboriginal culture was no Noble Savage paradise for Aboriginal women. Thomas also quotes numerous early contact Europeans describing genocidal tribal warfare.

Colonized Aborigines suffered abuses as do all colonized people. My own ancestors, Polish peasants, were colonized by Russia, Prussia, and Austria between 1772 and 1918, and occupied by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, beginning in 1939. Aborigines have higher alcoholism, diabetes, depression, suicide, and death rates than do white Australians. This is wrong and every decent person wants these numbers to change. As someone whose immediate family members, friends, and loved ones have been plagued by alcoholism, domestic abuse, prejudice and negative stereotyping, chronic, stress- and poverty-related illness, whose loved ones have been lynched, gang-raped by Red Army soldiers and imprisoned in concentration camps, I empathize with Aborigines.

The problem is this. Leftists want badly to use Aborigines to prove their own fantasies. Aborigines must be made out to be superhuman in order to prove that remote, once primitive people are peaceful and egalitarian – and that the West is bad and must be overthrown. Too, leftists want to use Aborigines to signal their own, that is leftists', virtue. Leftists insist on clinging to cultural relativism beyond any rational justification.

Franz Boas, the "father of American anthropology," advanced cultural relativism in a measured way. Boas insisted, for example, that stylized art produced by Native American Kwakiutls, the art that one might see on a totem pole or a carved canoe, was every bit as worthy as a Rembrandt painting. Leftists take cultural relativism to an destructive degree when confronted with child sex abuse in the Aborigine community. What's that you say? You have never heard of child sex abuse in the Aborigine community? Why am I not surprised?

Sex abuse of children is a crisis in the Aborigine population in Australia. It made international headlines in 2007. Queensland District Court Judge Sarah Bradley declined to jail nine Aboriginal males who admitted to gang raping a ten-year-old Aboriginal girl. The judge said the girl "probably agreed" to intercourse. The attackers were from more "prominent" families; the girl was from a "less privileged" family. This notorious case would have been bad enough had it been unique. It wasn't.

In 2003, Janet Stanley published "Child Sexual Abuse in Indigenous Communities." The reader immediately notes that Stanley's paper opens thus, "I first want to start with an apology. You only have me presenting this paper – a white person talking about Indigenous issues." Seriously. Seriously. Stanley is writing about child sex abuse and her first focus is on "Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I am white and I have no right to say anything critical about anyone with more melanin than I." Stanley rushes to insist that she has partnered with Aboriginal co-researchers. She quotes a 1999 report, "Violence is now overt; murders, bashings and rapes, including sexual violence against children, have reached epidemic proportions." Her laser focus should be, unapologetically, on protecting children from rape.

In 2007, prominent playwright Louis Nowra published Bad Dreaming. He was inspired to write a book critical of Aboriginal abuse of women and children by real-life encounters. "I met a couple of guys in central Australia who were boasting that they were going off to buy some plastic toy dinosaurs in order that both men would actually have sex with a 12-year-old girl at the same time … when I was in hospital, you saw these women who were viciously beaten by their partners, their husbands and other relatives and I thought to myself, I can pretend this doesn't exist and I can just go off and maybe, you know, write about something else."

Nowra noted that cultural relativism was used to excuse the abuse of women and children. "I was fascinated in the 1980s, you started to get reports in newspapers about customary law being used as a defence when a man had kind of killed a woman or had severely brutalised her." Nowra said that white guilt, benign racism, a sense that Aboriginal women and children didn't experience rape and battery as white women do, and Aboriginal customs of kidnapping and gang-raping women all played a role in facilitating abuse.

Also in 2007, the Northern Territory government published Little Children are Sacred, a 316-page outline of the Aboriginal child sex abuse crisis. That report cites numerous previous studies and warns that unless drastic action is taken, another generation will be lost. The mechanism by which that generation would be lost is suggested in one case study.

"HG was born in a remote community in 1960. In 1972, he was twice anally raped by an older Aboriginal man … He never told anyone about it until 2006 when he was seeking release from prison where he had been confined for many years as a dangerous sex offender. In 1980 and 1990, he had attempted to have sex with young girls. In 1993, he anally raped a 10-year-old girl and, in 1997, an eight-year-old boy, ZH. In 2004, ZH anally raped a five-year-old boy in the same community. That little boy complained: 'ZH f---ed me.' Who will ensure that in years to come that little boy will not himself become an offender?"

"Little Children are Sacred" burns with urgency. Its authors want things to change. Have things changed? In 2017, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse published Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Child Sexual Abuse in Institutional Contexts. Here's the first full paragraph of this report, "The authors acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia and traditional custodians of the land and waters of the many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island nations of Australia. We would like to pay our respects to the Stolen Generations and their families. We celebrate the diverse cultures and customs that have nurtured, and continue to nurture this land and its peoples. We honour the Elders past and present and thank them for their wisdom and guidance in this endeavor."

It's a pity that the first full paragraph does not address sexually abused Aboriginal children. Virtue signaling trumps protecting children. The report goes on to state, "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures are protective of children. There is no documented evidence to indicate child sexual abuse was a problem in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities before colonisation. It is important to understand that any heightened risk that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children face today is 'not part of Aboriginal tradition or culture' … Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples 'have no cultural traditions based on humiliation, degradation and violation.'"

The myth of non-Western cultures as egalitarian paradises is advanced. "Prior to European contact, when an Aboriginal 'state' was maintained, families with their multiple roles practiced the age-old Indigenous practices of bringing up children. Work, safety, shelter and food, culture, pride in being black and Aboriginal, truthfulness and honour were all vital parts of growing up. It also included sharing responsibility for the caring of each precious child which was cherished as a significant experience."

One must ask, how did Aborigines know, "prior to European contact," that they should feel "pride in being black and Aboriginal"? That that faux pas made it past the editor is just another sign of how much pressure the authors felt to maintain identity politics, not child protection, as the primary focus.

From the report: sexually abused children should be educated as to "which clan's they are connected to; stories associated with their country and their totem." Note the incorrect use of "clan's" rather than the correct "clans." The report goes on to state that being conversant in an Aboriginal language will increase the likelihood that caregivers will be able to protect children from sex abuse. The report bemoans past attempts to "inculcate children into European values and … Christian moral values." Ask yourself, which of the following would be more likely to help children? Fluency in an Aboriginal language or the sobriety of the child's parents, and the loving presence of the child's father in the home? Knowing what "clan's" the child descends from and what those "clan's" totem animal is, or having a criminal justice system unafraid to prosecute child rapists, no matter their ethnicity? If "European" or "Christian" moral values can be interpreted to mean, "child rape is bad," why not inculcate the child in those values? The report acknowledges that parental alcohol use is correlated with child sexual abuse. Unless I missed it, the report does not focus on that as it does on language. I found the word "father" only twice in the report. Words like "racism" and "racist" appear almost fifty times.

If a society can't acknowledge its own failings, it can't correct its own failings. This report offers scant hope that Australians of any color will name, confront, and change their failings vis-à-vis their abused children.

In December 2016, ABC (Australia) reported that a fourteen-year-old boy was gang-raped by drunken men who put a bag over his head. The boy later committed suicide. A five-year-old girl tested positive for gonorrhea. Child protection workers described grim scenes.

In one family, "Five children were found to have the sexually transmitted infection gonorrhea. The mother is a drinker ... she told us she didn't know who had abused her daughter. The child wouldn't say … When we brought the child back to the family after getting treatment, she went over to her mum and the mum said "F*** off and go play!"'

"'That little girl was picked up about two weeks later and we found the mum and her partner and a whole lot of other people in the house, all rotten drunk. This is how kids get sexually abused, everyone gets drunk and passes out — without making sure that their kids are in a safe house. So anyone can do anything to these kids, because nobody is protecting them or caring for them.'"

An ambulance paramedic reported, "When we entered the house there was gambling going on and someone was breastfeeding a baby while drinking from a bottle of Jim Beam. Two intoxicated adults were having sex and there was a little kid sitting right beside them."

In 2002, a fifteen-year-old Aboriginal girl was "married" to Jackie Pascoe Jamilmira, a fifty-year-old man who had killed his first wife. The girl's parents had sold their daughter to the man in exchange for a percent of his monthly government allowance. The girl resisted the man's attempts to have sex with her, so he punched her, stepped on her neck, and raped her.

Women's News reports that, "Expert testimony submitted by an anthropologist in the case called the man's arrangement with the girl 'traditional' and therefore 'morally correct' … Several high-ranking government officials nodded with approval when the appeal judge upheld Pascoe's defense, explaining that while Pascoe knew he had done something wrong in the eyes of Western law, his conduct was 'Aboriginal custom' and part of his culture."  

Some argued that Aboriginal customary law should supersede Western law. If Aboriginal customary law said that the girl had to submit, she had to submit. The raped girl got lost in the shuffle.

On August 11, 2005, in excruciating detail, Chief Justice Brian Martin described the selling and rape of a fourteen-year-old Aboriginal girl. Her assailant was a fifty-five-year-old Aboriginal man. The judge called the case "extremely difficult." One must ask what was difficult about finding guilty a fifty-five-year-old-man who used battery sexually to penetrate a fourteen-year-old girl. The answer is cultural relativism. The judge felt constrained from bringing the full weight of Western law down on an Aboriginal man, who believed that his culture sanctioned battery and rape of a child. The judge said as much, "You are a 55-year old traditional Aboriginal man. You believed that traditional law permitted you to strike the child and to have intercourse with her."

The unnamed girl had been given to the man by her family when she was four years old. Ten years later, when she was fourteen, her grandmother lead her to the man. The man beat the girl with two boomerangs. The grandmother beat the girl with a large stick. The girl was forced to enter the man's house, where his other wife and children lived. The man grabbed the shaking and crying child by the leg. She kicked and screamed. He dragged her into his bedroom, where he again beat the child, threatened her with the boomerang, and anally raped her. "You caused a deep laceration at the edge of her anus. The child was later seen by a doctor and the examination also revealed painful areas over the child's body." Nevertheless, the judge stated, "The Crown accepts that you believed that intercourse with the child was acceptable because she had been promised to you … your fundamental beliefs, based on your traditional laws, prevailed in your thinking … I have no choice but to sentence you on that basis … I am not sentencing you for the crime of rape … In accepting that evidence I also accept that your traditional law regarded your striking of the child as justified in the circumstances. From your perspective, and the perspective of your traditional law, the child had done the wrong thing, and the punishment by striking her was permissible and justified … You have had a strong ceremonial life across widespread communities. You are regarded by the Yarralin Community as an important person in the ceremonial life of the community. You are responsible for teaching young men the traditional ways …  a number of members of the community are here in support of you and those members of the community who support you believe that you have not done anything wrong … I have a great deal of sympathy for you and the difficulties attached to transition from traditional Aboriginal culture and laws as you understood them to be, to obeying the Northern Territory Law."

Reading the judge's entire statement, one sees the judge attempting to dance a ballet atop eggshells. He says he wants to protect women and children, but he devotes a far greater amount of verbiage to exculpating factors for the violent child rapist. The judge advised that the rapist serve only one month behind bars.

In May, 2018, one twenty-five-year-old man and one twenty-four-year-old man were charged with raping a two-year-old Aboriginal girl from Tennant Creek in February, 2018. Before the rape allegedly occurred, the family had racked up thirty-five recorded incidences of domestic violence, eight aggravated assault convictions against one parent, more than one hundred fifty recorded interactions with police, and fifty-two child protection notifications involving all children, with allegations of physical and sexual abuse. Northern Territory Children's Commissioner Colleen Gwynne said, "In terms of child sexual abuse I think we've taken our foot off to a certain extent, particularly about what happens in remote communities."

The alleged victim's mother spoke to the media in June, 2018. The primary thrust of an article covering the mother's statements is that the mother does not want to be blamed. "It's not my fault," she said. "The media is saying that I'm an alcoholic. I'm not. I'm a social drinker." If it were not for the laws making it harder to drink alcohol in her community – laws put in place at least partly to curb child sex abuse – perhaps the rape never would have taken place, she insisted.

In March, 2018, Federal Children's Minister Dr. David Gillespie insisted that laws should be changed so that whites could adopt Aboriginal children. "His comments were 'incredibly offensive,' said Tim Ireland, the chief executive of AbSec, the peak body for Aboriginal child protection in New South Wales … Mr Ireland said Aboriginal child-protection organisations opposed the adoption of Indigenous children because it took away safeguards to connect a child with their wider family and culture."

In a May, 25, 2018 Guardian article, Dr. Terri Libesman and Hannah McGlade talk about racism, reparations, "loss of culture," past sins and colonization. These were all bad things, and therefore Aboriginal children should not be removed from Aboriginal families. Again, identity politics trumps child welfare.

At least one Aboriginal leader has publicly stated a contrary view, a view that puts abused kids first. On March 5, 2018, the Herald Sun published "To Protect Kids, We Need to Be Fearless." The title is accurate and unambiguous. The article's author is Warren Mundine, a man of mixed Aboriginal and Irish heritage.

"I say the only way to lift Indigenous people out of poverty is a job; that chronic welfare dependency destroys families, communities and culture; and that not sending kids to school is child abuse," he wrote. "There’s a particularly strong response when I say that Indigenous kids at risk should be put in safe homes and that their safety must come before anything, including culture and kin … None of these statements is racist … People abuse me with racist slurs like 'Uncle Tom' or 'coconut.'"

Mundine went on to outline how his attackers make use of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. "Here’s Rule 13: 'Pick the target, freeze it, personalise it and polarise it' … Abusing people as 'racist' for opinions that aren’t actually racist is straight from Alinsky’s playbook. So is calling black people 'Uncle Tom' or 'race traitor.' What that does is punish people for not sticking to socialist-left dogma that promotes the welfare state as a legitimate way of life and which hides the deep, social dysfunction caused by chronic welfare dependency … A leaked 2015 report into the Northern Territory’s child protection systems said that fear of being accused of racism … was interfering with child protection agencies doing their job. It said child protection staff believe culture should have 'unmoderated priority over child protection concerns' … Stick to the facts. Facts can never be racist."

Clearly, the Aboriginal child sex abuse crisis has been exacerbated by leftist ideology, just as the U.K.'s grooming gang crisis has been, as covered in the August 20, 2018 FrontPageMag piece, "Leftists Own the UK's Grooming Gang Crisis." Children were not helped because helping children would violate leftist ideology.

I care about abused Aboriginal children because I was an abused kid myself. My abusers, just like those abusing Aboriginal children, were also history's victims. Their history of victimization in no way minimizes or excuses what they did to me. Once, when I was a little kid, I went to the house next door. My neighbor saw that I had an untreated wound. She tenderly washed it and placed a Band-Aid on it. I had never seen a Band-Aid before. TLC and medical supplies were inaccessible luxuries in my childhood. To this day I associate Band-Aids with the care my neighbor showed me when I was a child, care I wanted to cling to. My neighbor was Pat Gibbs, and she was not an immigrant Slavic peasant like my own people. In fact, she was black. I embrace and honor her memory. Abused Aboriginal children need such care, from anyone, of any skin color. Leftists have distorted the difference between right and wrong. Abusing children and beating women are both wrong. Cultural relativism cannot erase that. Morality matters. Kids matter. And kids are more important than leftist ideology.

Danusha Goska is the author of Save Send Delete and Bieganski, the Brute Polak Stereotype. Her book God through Binoculars will be out later this year.

 This article first appeared in Front Page Magazine here

It Takes a Village to Destroy a Child. The Left Built That Village.

Leftists Own the UK's Grooming Gang Crisis and Tommy Robinson's Prison Torture

It Takes a Village to Destroy a Child. The Left Built that Village.

Her broad, sunny smile fairly bursts through the photograph. Her joy is so bright you almost squint. She is a child, innocent of life. Charlene Downes was 14 in 2003. She's been missing ever since. During a trial, jurors heard a tape in which a suspect stated that he chopped up her body and cooked it into kebabs. The case was tossed out because of problems with the gathering of evidence. Charlene's sister, Emma, was later tried for "racially aggravated assault." Emma slapped the face of the murder suspect's brother. Emma was convicted for her crime.

Lucy Lowe's smile is not as explosive as Charlene's. Her blonde brows are shallow crescents; her nose is a pretty little button. Lucy has that loving look that suggests that she will hit her stride as a kind, middle-aged matron. In fact, Lucy gave birth at 14. The child's baby daddy, Azhar Ali Mehmood, pimped Lucy and other underage girls. By 16, Lucy was pregnant with their second child. Mehmood then murdered Lucy, her mother, and her sister by setting fire to the family home. Mehmood is now in jail. Even so, Lucy's father received an anonymous threat warning him not to discuss grooming gangs.

Vicky Round is not so much smiling in her photo as sizing you up. She looks pretty, young, and afraid. Vicky dreams of becoming a model. She is hooked on heroin and crack. She died of an overdose at age 20. The pimps and rapists who gave her drugs and "who made her life hell still walk the streets."

Becky Watson looks like the star of a Nancy Drew Netflix series. Her deep dimples, her sportive cocked head, and her tomboyish pony tail all add charm to her lovely features. The grooming gang began raping Becky when she was 11. They took their victims to a dilapidated house. Rapists arrived in a chauffeured minibus. Becky's "mum" gave the police a list of ten men who had raped Becky. The police did not act. Becky was killed in a mysterious car accident. She was 13.

Charlene and Lucy, Vicky and Becky are a handful of the countless victims of the UK's grooming gang crisis. Grooming gangs have been in operation in the UK at least since 1975. The assailants were largely Muslim men of Pakistani descent. Doctors, police, teachers, social workers and judges knew about grooming gang activities. Too many not only didn't take any action, they abetted the crime. They blamed the victims. They labeled eleven-year-old girls "prostitutes" or "mentally ill" and sex between children and adult men "consensual." They arrested those attempting to rescue trafficked girls. No one knows how many victims there were. Estimates range between the thousands and the tens of thousands.

Why was this allowed to continue for decades, with new cases coming to light even now? Those who could have stopped the destruction of children were horrified at the thought of being thought "racist" or "Islamophobic." British authorities' facilitation of rape is not a thing of the past. On August 4, 2018, The Times (London) published an account of a police officer asking if it is okay for a 26-year-old Iraqi man to have a 12-year-old girlfriend. The officer did not want to be "culturally insensitive."

British media participated in squelching discussion of the grooming gangs. Human rights activist and citizen journalist Tommy Robinson was attempting to fill the gap when he was arrested on May 25, 2018, for reporting on a grooming gang trial. He was imprisoned and, he alleges, kept in conditions that can be defined as torture. Feces and spit were flung into his cell. He was told his food was poisoned and that his wife would be attacked with acid. He was kept in solitary confinement with minimum ability to move.

On August 1, 2018, a higher court verbally demolished the behavior of the lower court that imprisoned Robinson. Robinson was freed. But he was not safe. The Times (London), the New York Times, the Guardian and British tabloids rushed to publish pieces defaming the newly freed Tommy Robinson.

Men around the world lust after young girls. In spite of this universal proclivity, in the US sex between an adult man and a child is a crime. Why does the US protect girls, and why did the UK betray them? The answer is culture. It is not enough, in the case of the grooming gangs, to convict this or that assailant. One must also analyze and decommission cultural features that generate pathology.

In a March 18, 2018 Independent article, one grooming gang survivor cited Islam as one factor her rapists used to justify raping her. She wrote, "I was taken to various houses and flats above takeaways … to be beaten, tortured and raped over 100 times. I was called a 'white slag' and 'white c---' as they beat me. They made it clear that because I was a non-Muslim, and not a virgin, and because I didn't dress 'modestly', that I deserved to be 'punished'. … 'Muslim girls are good and pure because they dress modestly, covering down to their ankles and wrists, and covering their crotch … You show the curves of your bodies … showing the gap between your thighs means you're asking for it.'"

Indeed, the attitude that covered women are virtuous and that uncovered women are vile can be found in a variety of Muslim media, from the Koran and hadith to a modern Iranian propaganda poster that depicts a covered woman entering Heaven and a woman in a miniskirt entering Hell.

The anonymous author begged her readers not to condemn all Muslims. She reminded us that all religions have produced scriptures that have been used to justify atrocities. Counter-jihadis agree with her. No responsible counter-jihadi condemns all Muslims, and we all recognize that members of a variety of religions have done bad things. We ask that Muslims be frank and fearless when responding to critiques of Islamic scriptures that denigrate non-Muslims and that recommend sex slavery.

That grooming gangs are a cultural phenomenon, and not merely individual crimes committed by individual criminals, is supported by family involvement. Grooming gangs are a family affair, argues Peter McLoughlin, author of Easy Meat. Rapists include not just the initial contact who selects and grooms a given girl, but his father, brothers, uncles, and cousins. Female family members participate as well. They show up at trial venues and threaten accusers or otherwise derail prosecutions.

It is simply inaccurate to blame only Islam for the grooming gang crisis. There are other guilty parties. Leftist culture fed the grooming gang culture as roadkill feeds maggots. There is such a thing as corporate guilt, and leftists bear the corporate guilt for the rape gangs and for Tommy Robinson's unjust imprisonment and torture. Further, the spectacular perversions that leftist culture engendered are responsible for the tensions in the UK today. Working class white British people are no more naturally hateful or xenophobic than any other population. Their current rage has been building for decades as their children were abused and the powers-that-be betrayed them. If, God forbid, violence should break out, the spark will not be the supposed inherent bestiality of working class British people. The spark will be the abysmal performance of leftists in power and leftist culture. Leftists will have blood on their hands. And of course they will blame working class whites.

I am not alone in this assessment. On August 6, 2018, contrarian journalist Brendan O'Neill published "How the Left Made Tommy Robinson: It Was Their Censorship of ‘Islamophobia’ That Made Robinson a Star." In it he links to a May 23, 2017 column, "After Manchester: It’s Time For Anger: We Need More Than Mourning In Response To The New Barbarism. O'Neill argues in both columns that the left has suppressed free speech about Islam. The left has done so because it has contempt for and fear of working class whites. The suppression of free speech has created a vacuum that might be filled by the very frightening forces the left says it wants to forfend against.

Several features of leftist culture fed the grooming gangs. Leftists see the West as hopelessly corrupt. The West is racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic, oppressive, imperialist, fascist, cold, and capitalist. It needs to be overturned, so that a Marxist paradise can take its place. Non-Western cultures are useful as levers to overturn the West. Borders must be open so that newcomers can vitiate Western culture. Too, nanny states with cradle-to-grave benefits tend to produce fewer children. Someone must be brought in to do the work to support the welfare state. These newcomers must not be encouraged to assimilate, but, rather, must be urged to keep their own culture.

Discouraging assimilation and channeling immigrants into ethnic enclaves serves several purposes. European leftists despise America. They want to demonstrate, with their "embrace" of non-Western cultures, how righteous they are. They are virtue signaling on a national scale. European leftists peddle white guilt as another form of virtue signaling. To ask someone from a non-Western culture to assimilate to a Western one would be a sin. Finally, some argue that the lack of emphasis on assimilation was in fact a disguised form of racism. Europeans kept their immigrants in separate communities, and, in their snobbish minds, never had to worry about dirtying their hands by having day-to-day contact with such riffraff. Something like this process occurred across Western Europe after WW II, and it has been described in a number of books, including Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept and Douglas Murray's Strange Death of Europe.

In an October 23, 2009 article, Tony Blair speechwriter Andrew Neather wrote in the Evening Standard that immigration "didn't just happen; the deliberate policy of Ministers from late 2000…was to open up the UK to mass immigration … the policy was intended … to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date."

The above paragraph is not anti-immigrant or anti-immigration. My parents were immigrants. I respect and love them and their life experience. But there is a difference between allowing judicious numbers of immigrants, closing the door when need be, requiring assimilation, and powerful leftists consciously recruiting immigrants and engineering the immigrant experience to aid their plan to carry out a stealth cultural genocide of the Western homelands they despise.

Another leftist value that contributed to the grooming gang crisis is cultural relativism. Leyla Hussein is an anti-female-genital-mutilation campaigner from Somalia. Hussein offers a shattering description of her own mutilation in a YouTube video. "Four women held me down and cut my clitoris. I felt every single cut. I was screaming so much I just blacked out," she reports. It is her goal to ensure that what happened to her never happens to another child.

In 2013, Hussein approached British shoppers, asking them to sign a sham petition in favor of FGM. She told the shoppers that FGM is an aspect of her "culture, tradition, and rights." When approaching potential signatories, Hussein would say, "It's just mutilation." In thirty minutes, nineteen people signed the petition. Hussein proved her point. Political Correctness has reached a "crazy" level. She was furious. "FGM is not culture, it is violence. Stop using the 'culture' word. This is happening to children. We are human beings. We can't watch children being cut. I don't care what culture you belong to."

In her statement, Leyla Hussein, a Muslim woman born in Somalia, champions Enlightenment values, the values that, along with the heritage of the Ancient Greeks and the Judeo-Christian tradition, are one of the pillars of Western Civilization. "We are human beings," she insists. "Culture" is no excuse for torture, she insists.

Hussein's insistence on morality as a universal value for all human beings, independent of particular cultural trends, would find approval with Sir Charles James Napier, speaker of a famous quote about sati. When Hindus told him that it was their culture to burn widows alive on their husband's funeral pyre, Napier said, paraphrase, "You follow your culture and I'll follow mine. My culture requires me to hang men who burn women alive."

Leftists revile men like Napier – and "Uncle Toms" like Hussein. More importantly, they revile the concepts of right and wrong as independent of culture. To address the grooming gang crisis articulately, leftists would have to acknowledge that cultural relativism, their cherished dogma, sacralized the destruction of the lives of innocent girls. When debating this topic with cultural relativists, I often show them a map plotting sex ratio variation. Girls born into countries with a Judeo-Christian heritage, no matter how poor, are more likely to live out a full lifespan than girls born into Muslim countries, no matter how wealthy those countries are. You can "feel" however you want to "feel" about gender apartheid, but lifespan statistics don't lie.

Shazia Hobbs is the child of a Pakistani Muslim father. She spent five years of her childhood in Pakistan. She speaks out against FGM and what she characterizes as an epidemic of child rape in the Pakistani community in the UK.

In September, 2017, Hobbs was suspended from Twitter. Hobbs reported that "she is frequently called 'racist' and accused of being 'full of hate' for calling for the jailing of parents who subject their daughters to genital mutilation … 'I get the biggest amount of hate from Pakistani men and feminazis who tell me I'm "fueling the far right." I'm trying to put a stop to these harmful practices. I've had more love and acceptance from the so-called "far right" than from the Pakistani community.'"

In spite of Twitter's ban, Hobbs managed to reach London Mayor Sadiq Khan with a text asking him to bring the full force of the law against those who mutilate little girls' genitals. Although FGM is a crime in the UK, no cutter has ever been convicted. The National Health Service estimates 5,391 new "recorded" cases of FGM in the UK in 2017. One has to wonder how many "unrecorded" cases there were.

In March, 2018, the BBC featured Mayor Khan reading Hobbs' tweet in the context of a series of truly abusive messages that suggested, inter alia, that he blow himself up. Let me repeat. A daughter of a Pakistani father, raised as a Muslim, tweeted a request that the mayor of London address FGM, and that mayor classed as dangerous hate speech her courteous defense of little girls' anatomical integrity. Khan went on to denounce "misogyny" and tweets that damage "our" search for gender equality. He closed by alleging that Hobbs' tweet would recruit Muslims to become terrorists. There you have it. Shazia Hobbs, by caring about FGM, created a new crop of terrorists.  

Hobbs responded with an open letter to Khan. She wrote, "You … accuse me of hate speech. I constantly receive so-called hate speech from the Muslim community, the very community that is being protected under the guise of 'hate speech,' which has actualised into threats to my person whereby I live with a panic button and a personal alarm, both provided by the police. I live under this constant threat and for asking you a valid question about FGM you have endangered me further.

"I am a woman who has experienced the brutality of a forced marriage [at age 18, to a much older stranger, who acknowledged that he married her only for her passport] in which I was vaginally and anally raped for the best part of three years. [She was hospitalized after one rape, and required internal stitches.] I speak out in order to give a voice to those who still live under this.

"And while you are using the narrative of hate speech to silence people like me, young Muslim women, men and in fact anyone who lives under the harmful cultural practices of Islam find themselves further isolated and unable to talk about what is going on in the community."

Clearly, leftists betrayed and abandoned their stated commitment to women's rights in order to protect the good name of Islam, the non-Western lever they hope to exploit to topple Western Civilization.

The left fetishizes victimization, but it acknowledges only some victims. As Orwell put it, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

That the leftist victim caste system facilitated the grooming gangs is evident from a thought experiment. Imagine that in the UK, the US, or Israel, there have been, for forty plus years, grooming gangs of Christian or Jewish men. These men manipulate underage Muslim girls, who are then sexually trafficked. A heroic citizen journalist attempts to expose the gangs, but he is arrested on trumped up charges and tortured. We all know what would happen. The story would be front page news worldwide. The pope, the president, Hollywood, Oprah and the UN would address it. Victim names would be branded into our consciousness. But working class British girls' tears do not move leftists. They are the wrong flavor.

The left's caste system is also quite evident in a comparison between the decades it took the British left to address grooming gangs, and the rapidity that British authorities exercise when addressing alleged "hate crimes." Tommy Robinson was arrested, booked, and sentenced to torturous imprisonment in under five hours. In 2016, Kevin Crehan was found dead in a British jail. He was incarcerated for leaving a bacon sandwich outside a mosque. Sussex Police Hate Crime Sergeant Peter Allan (yes, "Hate Crimes Sergeant" appears to be a real job title) reported that Nigel Pelham would be imprisoned for posting negative comments about Muslims and Islam in his Facebook posts. Pelham's posts are revolting. Whether nor not prison is the answer to revolting Facebook posts is another question. What is not in question is the championing of Muslim victims of hate speech and British authorities tossing less ethnically well-endowed victims to the wolves. In 2018, Mark Meechan was convicted of a hate crime for teaching a pug dog to give a rather weak imitation of a Nazi salute. Meechan is not a Nazi; he is a Scottish comedian. His girlfriend talked about how utterly adorable the pug dog was, and so Meechan, as a prank, taught the dog to do the worst thing he could imagine – imitate a Nazi salute. Meechan was fined 800 pounds.

The Leftist caste system is also evident in who first covered the grooming gang crisis. Peter McLoughlin notes that in 1975 an article appeared in a Rotherham newspaper reporting grooming gang activity. That article, sickening though it is, appears to have sunk like a stone and left not a ripple. The first journalist to cover the gangs in depth and gain attention was Julie Bindel. According to Commentary Magazine, "The left-wing lesbian feminist writer Julie Bindel" published in "of all places, in Standpoint, the conservative English monthly … Bindel was compelled to publish the piece in Standpoint because 'progressive' outlets such as the Guardian would not touch the issue." Bindel was labeled a racist and "her name was included on a website called 'Islamophobia Watch: Documenting anti-Muslim Bigotry.'"

The left's caste system is glaringly evident on social media. In recent weeks and months, social media has hosted a moral panic about the US "torturing" immigrant children. At the same time, the left suppresses discussion of victimized British girls. The left is rushing to announce its support for freedom of the press, as CNN's Jim Acosta squares off with White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Yet left-wing media engage in a feeding frenzy to attack citizen journalist Tommy Robinson, even as he is imprisoned on unjust charges. British journalists repeatedly drew attention to Tommy Robinson's mother's house, even as she has received notification from the police that there are plans to murder her.

Leftists announce, with much breast-beating, their commitment to the poor, poor, working class. Ironically, poor and otherwise disenfranchised whites occupy the bottom of the leftist caste system. The left hates poor whites for a variety of reasons. Leftists care a great deal about image, and lumpen proletariat whites are not chic accessories. British leftists deploy a specialized vocabulary to demean their social inferiors, with words like "gammon," "yob," "thug," and "chav." Leftists also despise poor whites because whites are supposed to be so very privileged, and yet poor whites haven't risen to the top. "You were born with white privilege, which makes your life easy and you all-powerful, and yet you still have a working class job and drive an old car? You must be a total loser," is their attitude. Leftists hate poor whites for their ingratitude. Poor whites all too often are not grateful to the left for its salvific overtures. Poor whites may be religious, hard-working, and hoping to rise in a capitalist system. These are all negative qualities to the left. The revolution has room for only one religion, Marxism. Hard work and success interfere with the leftist narrative that the poor are doomed without Marxist rescue and that capitalism offers no hope.

There is a sinister, hidden reason why leftists hate poor whites. Leftists love to signal their virtue. They do so by bashing whites and whiteness. They, though, are often white. By bashing poor whites, they are creating a sub-class of whites that does not include them. Though white, they have a "get out of jail free" card. "I may be white, but I'm not that scummy kind of white."

The girls victimized by the grooming gangs were often either poor or disadvantaged in other ways. They often came from single-parent homes. Their lower class status played a role in how the crisis was handled. "I often wonder," Charlene Downes' mother asked, "if she had been from a posh family and was having piano lessons, would they have tried harder to find her?"

Rich, white leftists signal virtue by publicly supporting open borders, Affirmative Action, and multiculturalism. Then they choose to live lives virtually unaffected by any of the Utopian fantasies they espouse. Rich leftists often live in protected enclaves. Vocal support for Affirmative Action is a way for rich whites to signal their own virtue while sacrificing nothing. Rather it is poor whites who pay the price, as described by Russel K Nieli and Richard D. Kahlenberg. It is poor white kids, not rich ones, whose chances of being accepted to an elite university are eroded by Affirmative Action. Support for open borders is another virtue-signaling soapbox. It is poor workers, not rich ones, who suffer the negative impact of mass, illegal immigration, as Harvard's George J. Borjas has shown. Multiculturalism is a fine dream when you live in a gated community. Robert Putnam's work suggests that for the poor whites who live in mixed communities, diversity can mean an erosion in community cohesion, neighborliness, quality of life and safety.

Poor whites and rich white liberals live in different worlds. Some rich American liberals trying to understand the Trump phenomenon had an Aha moment when they realized that support for Trump overlapped with regions hit hardest by the opioid crisis.

Tommy Robinson himself is a working class guy who inhabits a different world than those who hate him. In 2017, Tommy received a tweet, "Please someone just murder Tommy Robinson." Robinson discovered that the sender was a privileged young white man who lived at home with his mother in a town with virtually no immigrants. When Tommy met with the young man in person, Robinson pointed out that he, Robinson, grew up under very different circumstances. In his working class town of Luton, he personally knew Muslims who joined ISIS. Tommy's cousin was victimized by the grooming gangs. In the BBC documentary, "My Hometown Fanatics," Stacey Dooley filmed Luton Muslims marching in the street shouting, "UK go to Hell." The privileged, sheltered young man who wanted Robinson murdered had no such life experience.

Finally, there is another feature of the left that may have contributed to the grooming gang crisis. Yes, the rapists are to blame. Yes, the authorities didn't do what they should have. But where were the families? Interviews with family members contain comments like, "I didn't know she was in trouble." Or, "I knew she was in trouble and I tried to intervene but she rebuffed me." Or, "I didn't feel I could change anything." Victims say things like, "I didn't realize I was being abused." No one has parented such girls. One also reads of victims' parents who were themselves drug addicts or absentee. The daughters of such parents were often fobbed off to the welfare state. The welfare state had no real investment in the girls, and allowed them to be exploited.

I asked a British friend for her perspective. She wrote, "The problem is the state incentivizing single motherhood. Young, uneducated women see no future for themselves. If they have a child, they can get benefits, housing, almost free groceries. Why work when you can get all that?" She described one situation. "A young woman, 16 years old, was the daughter of a single mother on welfare. The mother got a new partner and decided to kick her existing children out of the housing authority apartment. The 16-year-old wanted to continue her education and go on to Community College. She was offered a room in a halfway house for male offenders. Her boyfriend's family wanted to take her in but if they did, she would lose any financial assistance for her education. Her boyfriend's family invested in elaborate locks for her room at the halfway house. Her sister was 17 years old. She had a baby and got her own apartment, and financial support."

There is a slew of studies that demonstrate that children raised in the same home with both of their biological parents do better on an exhaustive range of measures than children raised with step-parents, in foster homes, or by single mothers. Fathers matter. Discipline matters.

Traditional values matter as well. In interviews with families of grooming gangs victims, one hears echoes of the sexual revolution. Parents say things like, "I didn't want to tell my daughter that she couldn't make her own choices about her own sex life." Really? A parent feels it's out of line to tell an eleven-year-old girl that sexualization is an unhealthy choice? For many children, traditional religion, as well as parental discipline, plays a protective role. Studies show that religious females engage in sexual activity later than non-religious females. These questions should be asked. Did erosion of the family, abetted by state policy, play any role in the grooming gang crisis? Do Britain's lowered rates of religiosity play any role?

I am Catholic. As such, I own the church sex abuse crisis. I want the full story to come out. I want to be a responsible Catholic who contributes to the church taking a more positive direction. I expect no less of a stance from my brother and sister Muslims, and from leftists. Shazia Hobbs, Leila Hussein and Julie Bindel have shown courage. Others must follow in their footsteps. Those who created the grooming gang crisis must publicly acknowledge their sin, make amends to the victims, and clean up the mess their ideology contributed to creating.

Danusha Goska is the author of Save Send Delete and Bieganski, the Brute Polak Stereotype. Her book God through Binoculars will be out later this year.

This piece first appeared at Front Page Magazine here

Comments

For some reason I have not been receiving alerts from blogger about comments on this blog, so many comments have not been published. I apologize. This must have been so frustrating. I am trying to address the matter. I found a bunch of old comments that were never published and I published them.

"America Is Just Like Nazi Germany!" The Anatomy of a Liberal Social Media Panic

"America Is Just Like Nazi Germany!"

The Anatomy of a Liberal Social Media Moral Panic

After 25 years online, I am trying to understand social media moral panics. Comparing and contrasting liberal social media panics with Jewish and Christians rituals may provide some insight.

People want to create. People also want to destroy. The human urge to destroy is dangerous, so societies channel it into controlled ritual. Ritual sacrifice is one form of socially mediated destruction. In Genesis, Abraham and his wife Sarah grow old without children. Children are essential to traditional people. God promises Abraham a son. Sarah finally gives birth to Isaac. God orders Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.

How to understand such a harsh tale? Abraham is widely considered to be the first historical Jew. As the first, he is the one to establish precedent by breaking with the past and founding new ways. Abraham came from Ur, where human sacrifice was practiced. He traveled to Canaan, and was surrounded by practitioners of child sacrifice. The Bible is rife with emphatic condemnations of this child sacrifice. When God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, God was not suddenly reversing his position. Rather, he was asking Abraham, "Are you willing to surrender what you most cherish to your relationship with me?" God couldn't ask Abraham for his Maserati, his 401K, or his dreams of Hollywood, because traditional people don't have those cherished possessions or ambitions. God was telling Abraham, and the reader, that we may be required to surrender everything to our relationship with God. After Abraham agrees to sacrifice Isaac, God explains that Isaac's sacrifice is not to take place. Thus Abraham broke with his natal culture of Ur, and the surrounding Canaanite culture of child sacrifice. God offered Abraham a ram. Abraham thus established the Jewish practice of animal, not human, sacrifice. Requirements for a Jewish sacrifice are rigid and complex. See Leviticus 1, here. Judaism strictly inhibits and prescribes the human urge to destroy. After the Roman destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, Jews could no longer perform animal sacrifice. Some Jews interpret circumcision as a "part for the whole" sacrifice to God.

Catholics are required to attend mass weekly. The central ritual of Catholic mass is a re-enactment of Jesus' sacrificial death on the cross, and the apostles drinking of wine and eating of bread that stand in for Jesus' flesh and blood.

Sacrifice is not the only ritual of destruction. Jews and Christians are both called upon to seek out what is unacceptable in themselves, to eliminate it, and to rededicate themselves to their values. Maimonides outlined three stages for a Jewish confession: verbal acknowledgement of sin, remorse over that sin, and a commitment to renewal for the future. For Catholics, confession to a priest is a necessary sacrament.

The values Jews and Christians rededicate themselves to involve service to others. Jews and Christians must participate with God in nurturing God's creation. Jews commit to tikkun olam. Christians must tend to the needy, as described in Matthew 25:35-36. Neither Jews nor Christians are adjured to, or believe that they can, save the world. They acknowledge a Higher Power and their own humility. Both Judaism and Christianity honor do-able, small deeds. Jesus praises a widow who donates a small coin, the so-called "widow's mite." Judaism cherishes the Lamed Vav Tzadikim, or 36 righteous saints. These saints, who are both utterly humble and completely anonymous, by living their quiet days in accord with God's commandments, keep the world turning. Indeed, the Talmud states that to save just one life is to save the entire world.

Finally, both Jews and Christians profess creeds. Neither the Shema nor the Apostle's creed prescribe hatred for, or exclusion of, any person or group.

Yes, apparently, humans need, want, and benefit from carefully choreographed destruction. Rituals that meet this need involve blood-letting, real or symbolic, the rejection of the tainted, the reaffirmation of community norms, and public declarations of faith.

In lieu of these rituals, my social media contacts practice moral panics. It works like this. Bob posts poetry. Betty posts photos of her garden, videos of her gamboling dogs, and pictures of her dinner along with recipes. Liz posts updates on her genealogical research. Roger posts his award-winning photos of scenic spots around the world. All is well in Facebook-land.

Roseanne Barr tweets a crude insult about Valerie Jarret. White nationalists march in Charlottesville, Virginia. Jack Phillips declines to accept a commission to design a cake for a same-sex wedding. North Carolina says that biological males must use restrooms set aside for males. Israel shoots arsonists targeting farmland with wind-borne incendiary devices. The Trump Administration decides to adhere to the letter of the law regarding illegal immigrants.

It's as if someone pressed a button. Mammatus clouds blot out the sun. Ominous pipe organ music crashes. Bats stream across skies of lurid orange and purple. Goodbye to cute puppy photos! No more flowers! It's a social media panic! Caps lock on! Blood is about to flow. The creed will be re-consecrated. True believers will rededicate themselves to community values. The unclean will be exorcised. The tribe will emerge tight as a phalanx and unwaveringly orthodox.

Social media moral panics share many of the following features.

THEATRICALITY. Social media panics are highly theatrical in many ways. They appear to exhibit ORCHESTRATION. Posts appear, like starlings in a murmuration, to be deployed by an unseen hand. Every one of my liberal contacts, from southern California to northern Maine, from heartland Indiana to beachfront Hawaii, spontaneously belches forth sulfur as if fed by the exact same underground lava flow. One candidate for the unseen hand manipulating the masses like so many marionettes is cable TV. If CNN or MSNBC needs a panic, it incites one.

Posts rapidly increase in number and ferocity. Betty, rather than posting once or twice a day, posts ten times in rapid succession. She usually uses words like "puppy," "hydrangea," and "corn bread recipe." Suddenly she is using words like "genocide," "fascist" and "torture." Participants themselves do step in to attempt orchestration. They say to each other, "Please don't post any jokes or cute cat videos today. Frivolity is inappropriate given that children are being tortured … Christian Nazis are persecuting transgendered people seeking relief in a public restroom … Roseanne is bringing back slavery days."

Social media panics generally last, like the common cold, a week to ten days. After they have crested and are reaching their denouement, participants, again, attempt to orchestrate their extinction. "We've all been ravaged by recent news. We owe it to ourselves to feed our souls a bit. Let's everyone post something uplifting." And, so, recipes begin to appear again, along with cute puppy and kitten videos, photographic records of craft projects, and photos of nature scenes.

TIMELESSNESS. One of the most important tasks that rituals perform is the structuring of time. During a rite of passage, a child becomes an adult. Thus, the passage of time from the past to the future is emphasized. But a rite of passage also defies time. The child undergoes the exact same rite undergone by his father, and his grandfather, stretching back through the mists of history.

Just so with social media rituals. Years ago, the social media panic prompt was alleged American "Islamophobia" in the wake of 9-11. Today the prompt is immigration policy regarding children. But all the rituals are the same in that they all freeze and defy time.

Just as in a play, when performers temporarily adopt costumes, scripts, and personas, those involved in social media panics temporarily adopt others' pain as fodder for their performance. Immigrants are fleeing poor economic conditions and gang violence in Central America. Numerous American charitable concerns have been involved in Central America for decades. As far as I know, none of my Facebook friends who are now wailing and gnashing their teeth over Central Americans have previously posted a word about Central America. None has ever previously mentioned supporting, either through donations or labor, any of the groups working to make Central America a better place. It is safe to say that after this panic passes, they will rarely if ever mention Central America or its long-suffering populations again. Thus, the topic of the panic changes, but the panic, like all rituals, remains essentially the same. 

The language of the panic is HISTRIONIC. Peter Fonda tweeted, "We should rip Barron Trump from his mother’s arms and put him in a cage with pedophiles." Barron Trump is twelve years old. After George Zimmerman was acquitted, one of my Facebook contacts, a mild-mannered, roly-poly comic book artist, said that he wanted to give Zimmerman a "Drano enema." In the wake of the Trump administration's child separation, one of my Facebook contacts has daily accused Trump of "torturing children." He has also called anyone who supports the Trump administration "Satanic." He insists that facilities to house immigrants are exactly like Dachau. I'm not sure why he didn't go with the more famous camp, Auschwitz. Possibly because "Auschwitz" is harder to spell.

After the word "Hitler" begins to wear thin, posters go down the hierarchy: Goebbels, Himmler, Eichmann, Speer. Just this morning I found, in my Facebook feed, a Mike Luckovich cartoon featuring the Nazi Mount Rushmore: Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and Goering. Luckovich's cartoon equates White House press secretary Sarah Sanders with Joseph Goebbels. Such cheap Nazi analogies are the moral equivalent of Holocaust denial. The Holocaust exists, to panic participants, only to serve their need to get attention.

SCRIPTED. No matter what the topic of the latest wave of hysteria, the DEMON is always the same: Americans, Christians, Western Civilization, white people, men, Republicans, Southerners, and Israel. As reliably as Bond or comic-book-superhero-movie villains, these demons plot to destroy the world. Bwa ha ha.

Jews and Christians acknowledge that sin resides within each human heart. Thus the need for self-examination, confession, and renewal. Panic participants do not acknowledge any sin in their own hearts, or any need for self-examination, confession, or renewal. Their CREED recites hatred against, and the necessary destruction of, their chosen demons. America is a racist hellhole. Christianity is an oppressive, irrational monstrosity. Western Civilization is a wasteland of shame. Southerners are white trash rednecks. Israel is an apartheid state. Anything that the archdemon, the heterosexual, Christian, American white man has achieved or thought or innovated, he stole from an oppressed person of color.

To Christians, original sin is rebellion against God. We are all guilty. To panic participants, racism is the original sin and only the designated demons are guilty of it. Even the transgendered bathroom debates involved accusations of racism. People who want to prevent biological males from using the same facilities as vulnerable little girls are accused of being "racist." "Racist" is the worst insult imaginable, and so it is furiously hurled no matter the panic du jour.

Because panics must always pillory the same demons as being guilty of the same sin, that is, the sin of racism, panics are highly SELECTIVE. I have never seen atrocities committed against Christians qua Christians or Americans qua Americans prompt a panic.

In April, 2013, Muslim terrorists bombed the Boston Marathon. In a photo, one can see Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, after he placed his backpack bomb right next to Martin Richard, an eight-year-old Catholic schoolboy. Martin can be seen in a photo online, carrying a handmade poster that reads, "No more hurting people. Peace." Tsarnaev murdered this child, and others, because, as he himself wrote, according to the Koran 61:10-12, murder of non-Muslims guaranteed him a place "among all the righteous people in the highest levels of heaven." In court, Dr. Henry Nields provided intimate details about exactly what Tsarnaev's bomb did to little Martin's body, and the "overwhelming" pain Martin felt before he bled to death. Participants in the current immigration panic post much about children's welfare. None of them said a word, not on my Facebook page, at least, in 2013 after the death of Martin Richard.

I have never seen a panic prompted by atrocities committed by non-Christian, non-Westerners against other non-Christian, non-Westerners. Communist, officially atheist, traditionally Confucian China puts Muslims in re-education camps. Muslims are forced, against their religious beliefs, to dance, and publicly to declare, "Our income comes from the Communist Party, not Allah." My Facebook contacts show no sign of caring.

Buddhist Burmese commit ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims. Not a peep. According to an April, 2018 report in the New York Times, Hindu men in northern India kidnapped an eight-year-old Muslim girl, committed unspeakable atrocities against her, including gang rape, and murdered her. I saw no evidence that any of my social media contacts were even aware that this occurred. One panic participant plays audio of immigrant children crying. This murdered girl's cries are inaudible to panic participants.

In 2012, Kassim Alhimidi beat his wife, Shaima Alawadi, to death in their California home. He insisted that Islamophobes murdered her. The Alawadi murder was piggybacked with the Trayvon Martin shooting. Linda Sarsour published "My Hijab is My Hoodie." Non-Muslim women donned hijabs and posted their photos online as part of Facebook's "One Million Hijabs for Shaima Alawadi." "Women Worldwide of All Faiths Post Pictures of Themselves in Headscarves After Race Hate Murder" shouted the Daily Mail. After a trial revealed that Alawadi was beaten to death by her husband, there was no social media panic protesting honor killing or Koran verse 4:34 that advises husbands to beat their wives.

On Wednesday, June 20, 2018, at the height of the immigration panic, Lesandro Guzman–Feliz was dragged from a bodega in the Bronx and stabbed to death in the street. His assailants used a machete and other knives. Guzman-Feliz was a good kid, actively pursuing, through the Explorers program for high school students, a career as a police officer. His attackers were members of a Dominican street gang known as the Trinitarios. Video of their atrocity appeared online. Community members expressed despair that bystanders did not intervene. Six of the suspects in the murder were arrested in Paterson, New Jersey, my city.

I posted about Lesandro's murder, and his grieving mother, and other gang-related killings, like the 2007 Newark Schoolyard Shootings. Terrance and Natasha Aeriel, Iofemi Hightower, Dashon Harvey, all good, African American kids, were shot by MS 13 gang members in a schoolyard in Newark. I was teaching in Newark at the time. I remember the palpable tension between Blacks and Hispanics on the public buses I took to and from work. I invited those involved in the immigration panic to mourn, with me, for Iofemi Hightower and Lesandro Guzman-Feliz. I invited them to consider how their feelings might differ if they lived in neighborhoods where gang murders occurred. None responded.

DIVORCE FROM OBJECTIVE REALITY. Perhaps the surest proof that the social media panic is a ritualized behavior is its theatrical divorce from objective reality. One would think that those engaged in the panic would focus on changing laws, taking up a collection, or volunteering to contribute to others alleviating the human suffering in question. In fact I have never seen, among my own contacts, a social media panic that involved any of these actions. No donations, no volunteering, no petitioning of elected officials. Hundreds of people are focused on problem X, and, during the social media panic, anyway, none of them does a thing to address the real-world aspects of problem X.

In fact, efforts to alleviate wrong are mocked as a drop in the bucket. Again, Jews and Christians are to "walk humbly with your God." We are not in charge; God is. We can't save the world, but we can donate a small coin, as did the widow. Panic participants reject such efforts as insignificant. The entire edifice must be brought down.

This divorce from objective reality is most obvious to me when it comes to panics involving race. My most fervent social media contacts on race are white liberals who have chosen to live not only in towns with few to no Black residents, they often live in states with few to no Black residents. I've known Chet for over a decade. I've never seen him talk to a Black person. I've never seen a photo on his walls of a Black person. He hosts parties with dozens of guests, none of them Black. He has no idea who Shelby Steele is, or any other Black conservative. Chet is certain that America is a white supremacist hellhole, and that only the ushering in of socialism will change that. 

I've known Igor, a curmudgeon, for a quarter of a century. Igor does not give dollars to bums; he does not send sympathy cards to bereaved friends; he does not pet dogs; he does not wish anyone "Merry Christmas," though he will say "Happy Holidays" if it will piss someone off. I'm not sure he's ever managed to utter two sentences together without a reference to himself.

Igor is one of the most enthusiastic participants in social media panics that I know. The interesting part is not what occurs in his posts; they are boilerplate. "Christians are hypocrites; America is Nazi Germany; my heart bleeds, it bleeds, I tell you, for these poor people of color / immigrants / transsexuals." He's been posting the same script for twenty-five years. Rather, it's the replies that make you sit up and take notice. Igor's hundreds of fans applaud him. "Igor, you are compassionate / empathetic / sensitive / kind / woke." Social media panics, like all theatrical productions, demand OSTENTATIOUS DISPLAY and APPLAUSE.

Panics are also divorced from objective reality in that they are often based on a dubious body of alleged facts. This is nowhere more the case than in the immigration panic. As even mainstream media has pointed out, every feature of the current panic has existed, in greater or lesser form, under previous administrations. In June, 2018, CNN's Brooke Baldwin said to US Senator Tammy Baldwin, "So many people in this country are certainly outraged by the cages, the thermal blankets, and the facilities housing these kids. You know, they were all there in 2014 under President Obama. And my question to you, Senator Baldwin, did you speak up against them then?" Senator Baldwin never replied.

Also in June, 2018, Rachel Maddow melodramatically broke into tears when reporting what she insisted was "new news" just "broken by the Associated Press" that young children were placed in "tender age shelters." This isn't new. "Tender age" was terminology used during the Obama administration. Further, as The Federalist pointed out, in 2105, 21,000 children were separated from parents who had committed crimes. There was no panic that year over those separations. In 2014, the Brookings Institution wrote of 47,000 Central American children who entered the US without any adult. No panic in 2014 condemned the parents who tossed their own children away. I wonder if Rachel Maddow cried when covering what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's heaven-earning bomb did to Martin Richard's little body. I wonder if she even covered that victimized American child at all.

Perhaps the most Orwellian fabrication of the immigration panic was the exploitation and misrepresentation of the suffering of Yanela Hernandez, the toddler featured on TIME's cover as emblematic of children separated from parents. Yanela's father, Denis Javier Varela Hernandez, a port captain, alleged that his wife Sandra, against his wishes, abandoned him and her three other children, paid a coyote six thousand dollars, and attempted to enter America illegally because "she always wanted to experience the American dream." US Border Patrol Agent Carlos Ruiz, who does not in any way resemble Heinrich Himmler, strikes the viewer as a kindly, concerned, Hispanic man. In his CBS This Morning interview, he described his own responsible and compassionate behavior toward this child, whose mother has abused her as a human shield to facilitate her breaking the law.

In fact, though, the entire social media panic over immigration policy is based on absurdity. Participants insist that America is the equivalent of Nazi Germany, and that Donald Trump is the equivalent of Adolf Hitler. They insist that America is racist and that racist America "destroys Black bodies," in the words of lefty darling Ta-Nahisi Coates. And then they go on to insist that the only salvation for Central American immigrants is to be admitted into the racist, sexist, United States, thus, to any rational mind, undermining their beloved Nazi analogies. Can you imagine anyone in 1939 insisting that Jews must be admitted into Nazi Germany? "If America’s so evil, why does the left think immigrants keep coming?" Heather MacDonald asked in the New York Post.

DESTRUCTION RATHER THAN CREATION. These panics always invoke destruction of their stock demons as cure. This focus on destruction is related to the participants' rejection of the Judeo-Christian emphasis on self-examination, confession of sin, and rededication to participation in God's plan of salvation through humble service. Panic participants do not examine themselves. They are utterly unaware of their own hypocrisy, their own unthinking, trance-like theatricality. Rather, they scrutinize their chosen demons, obsessively seeking evidence of their cherished sins: racism, sexism, homophobia. Unlike Jews and Christians, who examine themselves, confess their sins, and rededicate themselves to obedient service to God and their fellow humans, panic participants do not serve. They do not feed the hungry, or cloth the naked. Their underlying assumption, expressed or not, is that such acts are a waste of time. Western Civilization is hopelessly corrupt. The widow donating her tiny coin, the Lamed Vov Tzadikam's humble and anonymous adherence to God's law, are worse than useless. What is needed is a violent revolution that will take down the entire corrupt edifice of Western Civilization.

During the immigration panic, I repeatedly pointed out that Maryknoll and other Christian organizations have been working in Central America for years. Indeed, not a few martyrs have given their lives to such work. See, for example, Sister Maura Clarke and her companions. Aid organizations accept donations, and they offer many volunteer opportunities for persons eager to help Central Americans. I mentioned Father Gregory J Boyle, whose Homeboy Industries helps rehabilitate former gang members. These posts were, for the most part, ignored.

The POLITICAL SYSTEM of a social media panic is ONE-PARTY RULE. Its ECONOMICS are MONOPOLISTIC. The contested COMMODITY is VIRTUE. Only one side may lay claim to it. The THEOLOGY of a social media panic is MANICHAEAN. Those involved in the moral panic are virtuous. Participants flamboyantly display their commitment to orthodoxy, and, thus virtue. Public declarations of the CREED are as loud and repetitive as the fall of a hammer in a blacksmith's shop. There is no such thing as one's private conscience during a panic. One must be seen to be declaring the creed, loudly, repetitively, in lockstep.

Gad Saad observed that during the 2018 immigration panic, UNESCO tweeted the phrase "No human being is illegal" ten times. Saad said that anyone who uses simple repetition to make a point is the intellectual equivalent of a kindergartner. UNESCO is a piker. I have Facebook friends who have posted dozens of times that Trump's America is the equivalent of Nazi Germany.

Those who do not make public declarations of fealty to orthodoxy are accused and purged. As one of my social media contacts put it, anyone who disagreed with him about immigration is "Satanic." Any solution to the problem at hand can come only from the only virtuous side. There can be no negotiation, no compromise, no listening to one's opponent. 

The heterodox are purged. Normally grandmotherly Betty issues fiats. "If you agree with ___, you are not fit to associate with. Your exposing me to your toxic bigotry poisons my world. I have a chronic illness, and just reading your posts worsens my symptoms. I am an open-minded, caring, empathetic, nurturing person, and I'd like nothing more than to invite all my Facebook friends over for a big meal of my special, homemade jambalaya, but I will not allow haters on my page. Please remove yourself, or I will unfriend you."

Those who refuse to repeat the creed are challenged. Example: "If you don't agree that Roseanne's post is racist, and is part of systematic, structural oppression of Black people in this country, unfriend me right now." During the Charlottesville social media panic, I received negative feedback because I refused to sign on with the phrase that "Charlottesville is the world epicenter of hate." "What about ISIS-controlled territory? North Korea? The caste system?" I asked. I was unfriended and blocked by two men because I recommended that we attempt to understand, and initiate dialogue with, white nationalists, rather than to demonize and ostracize these men who are, like it or not, our fellow citizens. In 2014, the Pew Research Center reported that liberals are more likely to unfriend someone because that person's political views differ from their own.

David Horowitz, a former leftist, has written, "Tainting and ostracism of sinners is in fact the secret power of the leftist faith … This spectacle … is a warning to others not to try [independent thought.] … The community of the left is a community of meaning and is bound by ties that are fundamentally religious … For the left [politics] is the path to social redemption … it is about us being on the side of the angels, and them as the party of the damned."

After Horowitz left the left, stripped of elevating ideology, "For the first time in my conscious life, I was looking at myself in my human nakedness, without the support of revolutionary hopes, without the faith in a revolutionary future – without the sense of self-importance conferred by the role I would play in remaking the world. For the first time in my life I confronted myself as I really was in the endless march of human coming and going. I was nothing."

Well, yes. "What is man, that thou art mindful of him?" asks Psalm 8. And yet, Judaism counsels each person to feel as if God created the world just for him. Christianity teaches that "Jesus died for you." Jews' and Christians' intimate connection with a loving God serves as a shield against human insignificance. We don't have to save the world. We can't. We participate with God in nurturing the world, through the acts we are capable of performing that, feeble though they are, mean much to God.

Horowitz's powerful words spark compassion in my heart as I think of my latest unfriending. I posted a brief objection to ubiquitous and constant equations of Trump's America with Nazi Germany. One of my Facebook contacts called me a liar – she insisted, astoundingly, that she had seen no such comparisons. I briefly and politely indicated that I do not interact with those who falsely accuse me of lying. My Facebook contact responded, at length, in ten different posts. I read none of them. I responded to none of them. Finally, after three days of her posting every day, she sent me a private message, over three hundred words long, accusing me and our "conversation" of exacerbating her health problems, deepening her depression, causing her to obsess on death, and "shutting her up." She also sent me a TED talk on empathy, entitled, "How I Have Conversations with People Who Hate Me."

Applying the insights provided by Horowitz, we can see that my former Facebook friend had invested her very identity in her open-borders stance. To encounter someone who does not share her point of view didn't just irritate her, it devastated her. Social media panics are not about alleviating suffering. They are about the universal human urge to use religious ritual to establish identity. They are serious business indeed.

Quotes are taken from The Collected Writings of David Horowitz: The Black Book of the American Left IX: Ruling Ideas. Los Angeles: Second Thoughts Books, 2017: 166, 144.

This piece first appeared at Front Page Magazine, here. 

Danusha Goska is the author of Save Send Delete and Bieganski, the Brute Polak Stereotype. Her book God through Binoculars will be out later this year.