Five years ago, Raphael Magarik said what many people who care about distributive justice in America know – systemic welfare abuse rages among the country’s growing ultraorthodox sects. This is money that should go to the actually needy. It’s being stolen.

Strangely, as Magarik notes, the practice is as flagrant as it is widespread. Larger and larger communities of people not entitled to welfare benefits work the system and take them anyway and suffer no consequences. How is this possible?

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You see how it happens when (very) occasional law enforcement action comes down, as it has in the last week in Lakewood, New Jersey. The first person arrested for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars that should have gone to, for instance, struggling public schools was the community’s rabbi. Its spiritual leader.

Not only have the authorities known for ages about these criminal conspiracies; they actually met with the community a couple of years ago and suggested they knock it off.

asks a recent local headline. The article quotes local citizens wondering why an entire community got a helpful suggestion from the police rather than the sweeping arrests it’s getting now. All the money lost over those years might not have been lost had police “just admitted there’s widespread fraud” and arrested people for it.

How Did Massive NJ Welfare Fraud Scheme Work?

Another headline.

Answer? Just by doing it.

The paper trail shows the relative ease the families had in allegedly defrauding the government. In one case, authorities say a woman was able to withdraw $1.5 million from a company and deposit the money into her personal bank account while still collecting public assistance.

You just do it. The authorities know what you’re doing and they do nothing. They call a town meeting. Years later they arrest a bunch of people and the sect agrees to try not to do it anymore.

Hundreds of people have called local officials, inquiring if there would be amnesty for those who admit lying about their incomes, and the APP reported that Ocean County authorities have been swamped with calls from public assistance beneficiaries seeking to stop receiving benefits.

Then, since it’s “a lifestyle,” they do it again.

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So nu. Israel is increasingly a religious state and it can’t do much about its own humongous haredi mess: Close to a million unemployed or underemployed people, many of whom deny the legitimacy of the state and make sure their children continue the unemployability tradition by refusing to follow the mandated national curriculum.

America is another matter. UD is baffled as to why our own fiscal and legal institutions, fully aware of the situation, do little or nothing.

[Josiah Austin] placed what ended up totaling $4.8 million in Elea Capital, a hedge fund that [Martin] Shkreli started, in 2007.

“To make money,” Austin said, when asked why he did so.

… to clear the front fields.

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Taken this afternoon at our upstate house.

UD will be there for her birthday this August.

Each woman tried pleading her belly.
Each man said “No, no. Much too smelly.
There’s puke, crap, and fartin’
But nothin’s like Martin.
I can’t be a juror for Shkreli.”

“The only thing I would be impartial about is which prison he goes to,” one [prospective Martin Shkreli] juror said. That person was dismissed — as more than 250 were…

Positive reviews are pouring in for Everyday Women’s and Gender Studies, a new textbook. An excerpt from it about the burqa:

Everywhere, such veiling signifies belonging to a particular community and participating in a moral way of life in which families are paramount in the organization of communities and the home is associated with the sanctity of women.

It’s a beautiful sentiment, and UD loves the thought of young American college students encountering it in our classrooms. There are particular communities in the world so moral as to elevate women to the status of saints. They actually sanctify them. Here in the United States, families are not quite so paramount, and indeed we fail to think of women as exclusively restricted to home and family life. Here we not only think of women as having lives outside of the domestic sphere; we let them drive cars and take jobs and walk around outside without male handlers. Clearly we have much to learn from moral communities in which women are housebound saints allowed outside in desert heat under the condition that every inch of their divinity is covered in thick black cloth.

Early morning criminal raids by state and federal authorities Monday sent tremors through Lakewood [New Jersey] as officials signaled that more arrests are impending in a massive investigation into welfare fraud.

In the last two days, hundreds of residents called township leaders asking how they can avoid arrest or get amnesty related to an alleged public-assistance fraud scheme that could stretch into the millions of dollars, according to one law enforcement with knowledge of the ongoing probes.

That source, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said that dozens have also called Ocean County Social Services in Toms River to cancel their public assistance or update their income information.

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Haredim: A word meaning Those who do not tremble at their own fraud.

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“[T]he dominant culture of Lakewood.”

… Twitter page.

June 27: Our rabbi arrested for massive welfare fraud.

The struggle continues.

Meanwhile, it helps to know your enemy as intimately as possible:

Women, it seems, are like dirt. When there’s dirt in the seat next to us, we don’t ask to change seats; we politely ask to have the dirt cleaned off. The passenger who asked to “move the woman” related to her as an object, like something disgusting. It’s the same to him no matter how old she is; she’s a woman and must be moved out of range.

… I believe this desire to “move this dirt” stems from the distorted notion that women must cover their bodies so as not to lead men to have improper sexual thoughts, heaven forbid. The women, not the men, are responsible for men’s thoughts. Poor guys, all they want is to be able to go out in public without being hurt, and they encounter alluring demons there. It’s not just ultra-Orthodox society; every society that deals obsessively with covering women up to protect men begins with the same premise. If it were possible to sweep all this dirt into a pile in the corner, it would be wonderful.

The epicenter of women’s filth is the clitoris. That’s why almost every defender of female genital mutilation – the highest profile defender lately is Alan Dershowitz – talks about the procedure as a form of “cleansing” and “purification.” Have the dirt cleansed off.

But, you know, you can scrape and scrape at a woman’s genitals and she’s still filthy. Cover her up so we don’t have to see.

Well, what else would he hang him from?

According to court paperwork, [East Tennessee State University defensive line coach Jeffrey] Brumett threatened to kill, beat, and hang a hotel clerk “from a noose” because his room key card didn’t work… He’s charged with disorderly conduct, assault, and public intoxication.

So says a commenter on this odd story, and so say all of us. Plagiarize a scholarly article, a commissioned report, a poem, yes. But a letter introducing yourself? Yourself?

The group maintains it does not condone female genital mutilation and that it only practices a form of female circumcision that involves no cutting — just a minor nick of the clitoral hood…. Their procedure, they maintain, is extremely minor, not harmful and involves only a nicking of the clitoral hood. They say it’s not done to suppress a woman’s sexuality, but as a requirement for purity.

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“Vacation cutting,” as the practice is deemed by those who oppose it, has existed in immigrant enclaves around the world for decades. Federal law has banned genital cutting in the United States since 1996, and last year it became illegal to transport girls for that purpose.

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Vacation Cutting

Deep in the shadows mothers pause
Out come little scraping claws
Some local woman with dirty knives
All so the little ones have purer lives

Ho, ho ho! Who wouldn’t go? Ho, ho ho! Who wouldn’t go?
Deep in the shadows, bleed, slash, flick
Now give your money to good Saint Nick

Ho, ho, ho! Who wouldn’t go? Ho, ho, ho! Who wouldn’t go?
Deep in the shadows, bleed, slash, flick
Now give your money to good Saint Nick