… and the same goes for child sex abuse cases, and of course the matter of our little ones’ vaccinations.

Another WE CHILDHOOD MEASLES school has been shut down by New York City.

Islamic scholars heard from on the burqa.

Sad opinion piece in the New York Times, by a Hasidic Jew distraught at the failure of significant numbers of his fellow orthodox to protect their children – and the rest of us – from disease. Here’s the most interesting passage of an essay that rehearses ironclad destructive know-nothingism in several aspects (these most notoriously at the moment include the un-education of children and certain grotesque forms of circumcision) of the larger ultraorthodox community – not merely in the anti-vaccination preaching of a powerful subgroup within that community.

Whether out of shortsightedness or strategic malice, some of our religious leaders have directly fostered an atmosphere where thorough research is sneered at, the scientific method is doubted and the motivations of professionals are assumed to be nefarious and steeped in anti-religious animus.

Hardly shortsightedness, is it? I mean, that’s a pretty innocuous word, suggesting that if we can only point out the longer-term results of various rabbis’ behavior, they will maybe change it. No, the author’s use of the phrase strategic malice is far more interesting. The author’s rightly seeking a nasty motive for a nasty set of behaviors. Malice against whom? Strategic in regard to what end? (If he’d written ignorant malice, we could say What do you expect, given the appalling state of education in many American yeshivas? Weep for where the rejection of enlightened modernity lands you…)

The author repeats the word strategic at the end of his essay: Certain religious leaders are exhibiting “the strategic deployment of a siege mentality.” What’s the percentage, for powerful rabbis, of inculcating in their followers an outside-world-rejectionist mentality so severe as to mentally and physically cripple significant numbers of their children for life, and to put the health of the rest of us at risk because of their followers’ behavior? Answer: It’s obvious. These men are insanely power-hungry. As in other abusive, endgame cults, this is how cult leaders totally control people. Unto besieged death.

And, to use the technical term, this is nuts, ain’t it?

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Nuts it may be, but it’s hardly unprecedented or enigmatic behavior. Mildly cultic groups notoriously spin off radical subcults (see Warren Jeffs and the like), and respectable sects know to shun their various psycho subsectarians. Maybe they’ve got people sucking infants’ penises and thereby infecting and sometimes killing them. Maybe they’re infecting their own children with measles. “While it is reasonable to allow adults to martyr themselves to their religion, it is not reasonable to allow them to martyr their children,” says an observer.

UD‘s pretty sure it ain’t reasonable to allow adults to self-martyrize either; but anyway the theme within some orthodox Jewish communities of – in a remarkable number of ways – martyring their children is lately unignorable. Yet these communities – often modern as well as ultra – seem incapable of the shunning that other secretive and tight-knit religious communities are able to accomplish. (Not that they don’t love to shun! They just seem to shun the wrong things.) Nor is New York City’s government willing to go there. So here we are.

I know it’s not supposed to make you laugh, but it makes it sound as though you turn to it only when the utilities fail.

SHORT OF ELECTRICITY, FOOD, AND WATER, VENEZUELANS TURN TO RELIGION

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Americans? Not so much.

An excellent article about al-Hol camp raises the right questions.

The reporter’s walk through the camp reveals, in all its fullness, the surreality, depravity, and indescribable stupidity of its inmates.

But it also gets something fundamental wrong: The children are of course innocents, and governments are slowly identifying their child nationals and, if they can, taking them out of the camp. But “their women and children”? The women were also the enemy, fully paid-up, active ISIS members; and if descriptions of some of them in the camp are accurate, they are still very much caliphate combatants.

Be on the faculty of Brigham Young University.

Samantha Bee does a typically hilarious take on the dumbshits who are killing us because they won’t vaccinate their children. (Her visit to Kurdish women soldiers is even funnier.) But with some yeshivas lying about compliance and spreading measles wider and wider, the New York Department of Health isn’t laughing: It has now threatened to close noncompliant yeshivas.

This is a real win-win. Closing yeshivas that lie about their sick students makes children everywhere safer. And simply by virtue of being free of New York’s many substandard ultraorthodox yeshivas, students will almost certainly be able to set out on an actual education. Indeed the shameful noncompliance of some of these schools is shining a much-needed light on their scandalously low standards. Good.

Who can say why countries are reluctant to have them back?

And it ROCKS!

Another thoughtful argument for trying them over there.

In a recent France 24 documentary on ISIS foreign women in the Kurdish-controlled Al-Hawl camp in north-eastern Syria, a camp director said that “when they [foreign ISIS women] gave themselves up, some of them told us that the IS group briefed them, telling them, ‘Surrender, go back to your countries, get your strength back and we will start again.’”

The Unsinkable Molly BOOM.

Come out, come out, wherever you are: The only Islamic high school in Amsterdam needs your support! Municipal subsidies have been withdrawn because… well… We had to threaten the inspector in order to make him leave… And then despite our scaring the shit out of the inspector, the authorities still managed to find out about our … visitors… and our … practices… and our foreign contacts… and our guest lecturers. And all. Send money!

 [George Pell] is well known … for protecting church finances from large payouts to abuse victims… He could frequently be found raising money for conservative causes in Australia, publicly condemning homosexuality and stepping into policy debates as well, opposing, for example, legislation to allow adoption by gay parents.

At the same time, he was trailed by accusations of sexual abuse reaching back to the 1960s, when he was a seminarian. His denials always won out, until two years ago, when he returned to Australia from the Vatican to face a variety of charges.

Rabbi Susan Silverman told me she was pushed to the ground and ended up banging her head on the Jerusalem stone. An ultra-Orthodox teenage girl went to kick her in the head, Rabbi Silverman said, and was only stopped when the rabbi’s 24-year-old daughter screamed at her…

[One of the violent ultra-Orthodox young girls in the crowd said that] it hurts them to see Reform Jews practicing Judaism in a way they are sure, they tell me, God does not like. That they love God so much that they deny their own desires — like singing out loud in public — to show Him their devotion. That they turned out that morning because their rabbis told them to.

Once Israel allows the girls not merely to kick but to chop off the infidels’ heads (in a way, they are sure, God likes), the country will have made itself a second home for all of the displaced ISIS ladies, who seem to share this haredi girl’s sadomasochistic authoritarian world view. Problem of where to put the displaced soldiers of the lord solved.

What? Different religions? Don’t make me laugh. Read any interview with any ISette. They know jackshit about Islam. They’ll feel right at home.