Date: Friday, 22 May 2026
https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/religion-and-rape
https://theduran.com/religion-and-rape/
Religion and Rape
22 May 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)
None of the ‘laws of God’ in the Bible use any word that has the same meaning as the word “rape” does; and, so, none of the standard Biblical concordances shows any biblical passage listed under (i.e., which uses) the term “rape” (and just think about that for a moment: the very WORD “rape” did not appear in any of the many books in the Bible, the Scripture that is taken by billions of people as being their foundation for thinking about ethics) — that concept (rape) didn’t even exist at that time. However, there are biblical passages that by implication are referring to rapes. For example, the “English Standard Version” (translation) of Genesis 34:1-31 says “the prince of the land saw her, he seized her and lay with her and humiliated her.” The “New Revised Standard Version” says the “prince of the region saw her, he lay with her, and he seized her by force.” The most-authentic English-language translation, the “Holy Bible with the Ancient Eastern Text, … From the Aramaic” says the “prince of the country saw her, he took her and lay with her, and defiled her.” But the Good News Bible (which is generally accurate but often uses modern terms to communicate what the original texts were hiding — what they didn’t even have terms for) says that the “chief of that region saw her, he took her and raped her.” That usage of the term “rape” omits much of the Biblical passage’s real, authentic, meaning, which in the more literal versions (and in the original texts) entailed “humilitated” her — NOT abused her, not attacked her, not raped her, but that SHE was the one who was “humiliated” by the act that was done to her — the attacker WASN’T “humiliated” or “defiled” by having done it to her. Just think about that for a moment. The Good News translation of that passage was the truest, but also the least authentic to the original text. Throughout the Bible, there is opprobrium to being raped. However, only in some circumstances — such as when the victim happens to be some other man’s wife — there is opprobrium ALSO to the rapist. Usually, there was no opprobrium to the perpetrator. Throughout the Bible, females and children are the property of men. They exist in order to satisfy their owner’s desires. How can there be “rape” in such a society as that? There cannot. This is in keeping with the basic nature of religions — and certainly of all Western religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — that it worships “The Almighty,” the very personification of power. That IS its ‘God’: it is the personification of power. The weak are thereby being intrinsically despised, as the farthest from God. All of the religions are authoritarian: the most powerful has rights against all of his subordinates (all of whom are weaker than ‘Him’). That is religion’s very foundation. They are fundamentally anti-equalitarian philosophies as regards rights. The weak have little if any power. They are dispensable, expendable. This provides the ethic to ‘justify’ the power of the powerful. It is one reason why the powerful tend to BE religious — it ‘justifies’ themselves as BEING not merely powerful but ALSO authoritative. Consequently, religion tends to be funded the most by the most powerful and the richest (wealth being itself the biggest source of power because it entails the ability to hire agents to do your will). It provides the authority, the property-right, that stands behind power. These religions are “Might makes right” philosophies. That is what they most essentially are: might-makes-right philosophies. They worship “The Almighty.”
In the Hebrew of the Old Testament, terms such as עִנָּה (ʿinnâ) denoted affliction or humiliation of the victim, not the guilt of the perpetrator. The raped woman or girl is “humiliated.” The perpetrator is not, nor is he punished for raping (unless the violation happens to be upon a married woman, in which cases the aggrieved party was held to be the woman’s husband, not herself).
In the Koine Greek of the New Testament, terms such as βιάζω (biazō) denote force or constraint. However, these terms do not function as a consistent designation of forced sexual intercourse, and appear in limited and often metaphorical contexts.
In the Quranic corpus, no lexical item appears whose meaning is forced sexual imposition. Later Arabic terms corresponding to that concept do not occur in the Quranic text itself.
This absence of the crime of rape itself, is not merely lexical. It reflects that in those canonized religious Scriptures, the concept or forced sex — imposition of sex against an unwilling participant — was not yet conceptualized sufficiently within the given culture for a linguistic term to represent it, much less to recognize it as being intrinsically criminal. Thus, it wasn’t so recognized. Individuals who get their ethics from such canonized Scriptures are getting it from an ancient culture, not from today.
The scandals concerning the rapes of children by priests and other clerical authorities, such as in the Roman Catholic Church, are well-known and publicized and thus won’t be discussed here. Following here will be examples of religious rape among Muslims and among Jews, so as to indicate that other faiths also have this profound defect (as being an ethical guide).
On 22 May 2015, the Washington Post headlined “Islamic State burned a woman alive for not engaging in an ‘extreme’ sex act, U.N. official says”, and reported:
Zainab Bangura, the U.N.'s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, recently conducted a tour of refugee camps in the shadow of the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, war-ravaged countries where the Islamic State commands swaths of territory. She heard a host of horror stories from victims and their families and recounted them in an interview earlier this week with the Middle East Eye, an independent regional news site.
"They are institutionalizing sexual violence," Bangura said of the Islamic State. "The brutalization of women and girls is central to their ideology."
Bangura detailed the processes by which "pretty virgins" captured by the jihadists were bought and sold at auctions.
Here's a chilling excerpt: "After attacking a village, [the Islamic State] splits women from men and executes boys and men aged 14 and over. The women and mothers are separated; girls are stripped naked, tested for virginity and examined for breast size and prettiness. The youngest, and those considered the prettiest virgins fetch higher prices and are sent to Raqqa, the IS stronghold.
There is a hierarchy: sheikhs get first choice, then emirs, then fighters. They often take three or four girls each and keep them for a month or so, until they grow tired of a girl, when she goes back to market. At slave auctions, buyers haggle fiercely, driving down prices by disparaging girls as flat-chested or unattractive.”
On 16 June 2016, the “Patriotic Vanguard” headlined “Zainab Bangura presents annual report on sexual violence in conflict” and presented Bangara’s annual summary of her annual report to the U.N., in which she said,
Today, as we deliberate here, women are being traded in an open slave bazaar in Raqqa;
Price-lists exist to regulate their sale, like livestock at a farmers’ market;
A so-called ‘Fatwa’ has been issued by Daesh that codifies sexual slavery, attempting to justify sexual violence through Holy Scriptures;
Social media platforms are being used to facilitate trade and trafficking – women and children are offered in the same on-line forums as rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
“This one is young, beautiful and good in bed. I need at least 7,500 US dollars for her, you won’t regret it.”
This is part of the message thread under a photograph of a girl painted with bright red lipstick. She cannot be older than 12 years. Eventually the winning bid is 7,700 dollars, offered by a Libyan ISIL fighter.
Whereas in Judaism a “teacher of Judaism” is called a “rabbi,” and in Christianity a “teacher of Christianity” is called by various titles such as “pastor” or “priest,” in Islam there are many such titles, including ulema, mufti, ayatollah, sheikh, and shaykh. Of course, all of these individual practitioners have different interpretations of their Holy Scripture, but what Bangara was talking about was slavery, and there isn’t any clear prohibition in the Quran outlawing these slave-markets. And when Bangara said “There is a hierarchy: sheikhs get first choice,” those teachers of Islam were certainly NOT opposed to slave markets. These were teachers of Islam who bought girls in order to rape them repeatedly. These religious teachers were buying sex-slaves and thought that this was okay to do.,
Like the Bible, the Quran (which is written in Arabic) has no word for يَغتَصِب (yaghtasib) “rape.” The word “يَغتَصِب” does not appear in the Quran. That word did not even EXIST at that time. Consequently, just as with Christians and Jews, there are contradictory views about whether or not, or the conditions when, rape is a violation of God’s law. The Quran accepts the 613 ‘laws of God’ in the Torah (the Christian Pentateuch, first five books of the Christian Bible) as being from God; but, otherwise than that, the Quran is vague about what should be also Islamic law (as distinct from Jewish law). The Quran’s Chapter 3 contains a section devoted to Jesus’s birth and ministry, but it does not worship him as a god, only as a prophet, along with Mohammed and Moses. There is lots of ambiguity in all religions’ ‘holy books’ (canonized Scriptures). Even if for no other reason, no such alleged “Scripture” can be cited as a basis for any scientific belief. That is yet another reason why they’re, at best, unreliable as being ethical guides. As Momal Afzal said in her 2022 study “Sexual Slavery in Islam and through the Islamic State”: “In essence, the lack of explicit assertion, and the presence of ambiguity, encourages ambivalent perspectives. Because the answer is not crystal clear, it is not feasible to proclaim the Quran’s stance on the question. Hence, the need to interpret, which leads to innumerable perspectives.”
The main thing that ALL religions share in common is their supremacism: that THIS is the BEST religion — all others are inferior to ours. If they don’t believe that, they’re NOT a religion. So, what they share in common is their belief that all other religions are INFERIOR. This belief in their own superiority is their raison d’etre, their very reason for BEING a religion, at all. It intrinsically causes conflicts between each against the others. It intrinsically creates hostilities. And, of course, rape is likelier if there is hostility towards a particular woman, rape isn’t an expression of liking, nor even necessarily of finding her attractive, it is an intrinsically hostile act; and, so, religious extremists in any faith might be especially inclined to do it.
——
Since all three of these religions derive from Judaism, the most ancient one and the foundation of what we today call “The West,” the rest of this article will focus on rape in Judaism.
Here, then, is a report from Israel’s Al Hayom newspaper, about rapings that are countenanced by, or even participated in, or even led, by rabbis. This will be the first-ever translation into English of the only extensive article in Israel regarding religion-inspired rapes — an article that was suppressed even by its own publisher and therefore not (as it usually does with its major articles — this one being over 7,000 wrds — published not only in Hebrew but also in English; so, outside of Israel, this article has had almost no circulation, till now.
https://www.israelhayom.co.il/magazine/shishabat/article/17668103
[GOOGLE AUTOTRANSLATION of the Hebrew original. Note here that the article’s title refers to rapes as part of “Cult Rituals” — not “Religious Rituals” — because the newspaper is devoted to Judaism; and, so, even in the article’s title, a trick is being used in order to separate these instances from what “we” (Jews) do; it is instead only “Cults” that are doing this, so that the reader is not being challenged to look inward toward oneself, about what the report actually indicates (that the Torah itself actually allows rape):]
“The Bottom of Black: Girls Raped in Cult Rituals Reveal the Horrors - Investigation”
Sacrifice. Binding. Punishment. Correction. Redemption • Prayers. Mumblings. Ecstasy • Extreme pain. Torture. Humiliation • …
4 February 2025, By Noam Barkan, journalist for "Israel Hayom" and magazine, and investigative reporter for the weekend supplements. …
"I went through painful sodomy, I really felt like I was splitting in two. It's a terrible experience, but there's something about these things, maybe in their strangeness, that's like... Maybe the hardest part is these things that if you tell them, they'll think you're crazy. I remember many types of severe sexual abuse, but there's something about these abuses, the rituals, that are the bottom of blackness."
In direct words and a clear voice, Emunah (a pseudonym, like all the names of the victims in the article) describes the severe abuse she endured, she says, as a child. Organized sexual abuse that included, among other things, "rituals," supposedly religious. Horrific rituals in which religious people, some of them members of her family, sacrifice her for the sake of ascension or redemption.
Emunah is not the only one. More than ten women aged 20-45 with whom we spoke describe a serious phenomenon that raises serious concerns that in Israel, as in many countries around the world, a serious phenomenon of organized sexual abuse of children is occurring right under our noses.
“Maybe the world knows that rape takes place, that incest occurs, but the world doesn't know this,” says Emunah. “They managed to keep these acts a secret for years, maybe because of their madness... It was always very, very strange. As if there was an internal logic there, but it was so crazy... The strangest things happen there, which are normalized in a ritualistic and orderly way. There is a time, there is a time when this verse is said and when that verse is said, there is such an order that it seems like things are supposed to be done this way…"
Each of the women we spoke with as part of the investigation has a different life story. They come from different regions of the country, from north to south. Each is at a different place in her life. Some are students, others work and manage careers and family lives, and there are also young women who are barely surviving, clinging to life by the nails.
They are women who did not know each other before, grew up in different communities and come from different sectors and sects, and yet - the stories of ritual abuse they describe are similar in a way that requires us to listen and not close our eyes. Some of them were harmed in a preschool educational setting or in a girls' educational setting, others in the family home, in a yeshiva or in a synagogue. In this setting, we present only a very small sample of long hours of interviews and information, and some of the descriptions presented in this article are difficult to read. The great concern of everyone who spoke to us is that organized sexual abuse of children continues to occur even today.
Ayala: "It's always a dark place. There are between six and nine men there. They tie me to the bed by my hands and feet, stand in a circle, mutter prayers or blessings, and there is the rabbi who always leads the situation and says what to do. There is a ceremony, and each of them rapes me."
"Blessed is He who permits prohibitions”
Sacrifice. Binding. Punishment. Correction. Transcendence. Redemption. These are some of the concepts that repeat themselves. The prayers, the murmurs, the ecstasy all around. The extreme pain, the humiliation, the torture. The crushing of personality and soul. Testimony and testimony and testimony and testimony of women who experienced organized abuse in their childhood that included, among other things, gang rape carried out as part of rituals.
We met them over the past few months. We spoke with family members of some of the victims, with treatment providers and with experts in Israel and abroad in the field of trauma and dissociation (a range of conditions from emotional distancing to complete disconnection from emotions, sensations, memories, and more, p.s.). We gathered information about the phenomenon of organized ritual abuse of children - as it is known, and is known, throughout the world.
The picture that emerges from all the information we have gathered is disturbing and difficult. It requires, at the very least, a thorough and meaningful investigation by law enforcement authorities. "It is a national-religious mission to expose the phenomenon and get down to investigating the truth," a religious community official involved in the details of the phenomenon tells Israel Hayom.
"Identical Patterns." Dr. Naama Goldberg, from the private album
Dr. Naama Goldberg, CEO of the "We Don't Stand By - Helping Women in the Cycle of Prostitution" association: "Sometimes the testimonies are so shocking that you doubt the credibility of the speakers. On the other hand, since the reports are repeated in a similar way from victims who don't necessarily know each other and from different regions of the country, it sounds like they are well-founded."
Most of the women we met come from national or ultra-Orthodox religious communities, although "Shishab" has received additional testimonies of similar cases that have also occurred in secular society. Therefore, it is important to emphasize that this is not a sectional spotlight, but rather a beam of light directed at suspicion of some of the most serious crimes imaginable, which are being committed in a parallel and transparent world, even though it is so black and dark.
The names of several rabbis were repeated in some of the testimonies. Several complaints filed at various police stations across the country were all closed, relatively quickly. Even when suspicions arose in the past about the existence of a network that harmed children in Jerusalem, police investigators, at best, did not have sufficient tools or knowledge to carry out their task.
In that case, which was extensively exposed in 2019 on the program "The Source" and raised suspicions of the activity of a pedophile network that harmed dozens of children in the Nachlaot neighborhood, investigators tended to believe that it was an "invention," an "exaggeration," or a "panic" by parents and caregivers - and the case was closed almost without relevant indictments.
A man named Benjamin Satz was convicted in 2013 for committing indecent acts and sodomy on girls and boys aged 5 to 8. Another suspect was acquitted due to doubt. In practice, dozens of girls and boys were left damaged and required years of emotional trauma therapy.
Corinne, whose daughter Eden was abused: "There's an entire community that's hiding, and it seems like a lot of people have something to hide. Eden talked about six men who participated in the rape – and something like that needs to be kept a secret. It's hard to fight an entire community."
"Not marginalized people”
"I remember a five-pointed star on the floor, usually red. When the ceremony was in the forest - the five-pointed star was marked with a hoe and around it were lit candles in a circle. The rabbi says a blessing: 'Blessed is the one who permits prohibitions,' men around pray with a tallit, sometimes they were dressed in black and the rabbi had a white cloak. There were several men and boys around the age of 16-17, who participated in the ceremonies for the ascension. They prayed to Baal Peor.
"There was a time they asked me to dig a hole and laid me in it. There were times they injected me with something and said, 'Now you will feel better,' and then my body would go limp. They would recite Psalms repeatedly, like 'A Psalm for David, God is my shepherd, I will not be lacking.' They told me, 'You are special, you are chosen,' and they would inject me... I remember a lulav, Hanukkah candles, a shofar."
Limor: "When the ceremony was in the forest – the pentagram was marked with a hoe and around it were lit candles in a circle" , GettyImages
Limor: "When the ceremony was in the forest – the pentagram was marked with a hoe and around it were lit candles in a circle," Photo: GettyImages
Limor (not her real name) grew up in an ultra-Orthodox religious home. Her father, she says, was always violent towards her and her mother. Over the years, she even required medical treatment in a hospital and was accompanied by a professional because of injuries caused by the violent abuse she suffered.
According to her, it was her father who brought her to those "ceremonies." The manner of arrival, by relatives, characterizes many testimonies. Limor says that sometimes the ceremony took place in the forest, sometimes in a closed apartment. There were times when she saw and heard other children being harmed. Testimony regarding other children also repeats itself in some cases. In many of the testimonies we heard and became familiar with, women also participate in the ceremonies and abuse.
"Organized rape of children is one of the most horrifying phenomena I encounter," says Dr. Anat Gur, a psychotherapist specializing in treating women and trauma, head of the psychotherapy program for treating sexual trauma at Bar-Ilan University and the Tel Aviv Assistance Center. "It's a phenomenon that is probably much more widespread than we think. It's found in many places you wouldn't expect it to be."
"A much more common phenomenon than we think." Dr. Anat Gur, Efrat Eshel
Boaz (pseudonym), a senior therapist in the religious community, agrees: "The perpetrators, for the most part, are not marginalized people in the community. One patient told me, 'You see, this is the one who blows the shofar on Rosh Hashanah.' The shofar is the symbol of the pipe - the man who is considered the most spiritually worthy is the one who blows the shofar, because he is closest to God. And he is the one who tells her that she is evil, that he is helping her atone in this incarnation. Do you understand the distortion?”
"A crime without witnesses"
In addition to the women who dared to meet and talk to "Israel Hayom," there is information among professionals about other victims who report sadistic ritual abuse in their childhood. The content that emerges is similar. The information indicates that in most cases the sexual abuse began in very early childhood at home, by a father, grandfather, or other relative. In another part of the cases, the abuse occurred in an educational or therapeutic setting.
"What I've seen over the years," says Dr. Gore, "is that those who go through these things suffer horrific damage. This is also one of the problems with disclosure, because the victims are so shattered that it's hard to believe them. The more cruel and sadistic the abusers are and the younger and more horrific the abuse was - the less likely the criminals will be brought to justice, because there's no one to testify." The abusers shatter the victims' souls so much that it becomes a crime without witnesses, which of course serves the society that continues to abuse or carry out these rituals."
Dr. Joyana Silberg, an international expert in the treatment of dissociative disorders in children and adolescents and former president of the International Association for Trauma and Dissociation, spent five years treating 70 children who were suspected victims of organized abuse in Israel. In Chapter 14 of her book "The Child Survivor," she describes the severe symptoms the children suffered from "due to multiple forms of abuse - physical, sexual, emotional, and spiritual."
Dr. Silberg cites several sources for the numerous testimonies about the cases of organized abuse in Jerusalem. In one of the cases reported in the professional literature, a child who was injured in Israel and treated in the United States described how several men tortured him and recreated an incident in which they submerged his head under water.
The descriptions of sadistic abuse are repeated in all the testimonies we heard, such as in Emunah's story: "There was a ceremony like a circumcision that I went through. I was 10 or 11 years old. It was in the synagogue of the settlement. They tied me up, a kind of binding of Isaac, and injured my penis.
"My father is there, my mother is there, a rabbi from the community. I'm tied to the table, looking at the window and imagining how I'm jumping through it, how I'm tying a rope, dangling from there by rappelling to the stones. I kept wishing it wouldn't happen. That's what makes it special... I kept thinking how it wouldn't happen, how I'd get out. I kept telling myself I wasn't there. It's terribly hard to understand that I was there. That this is me - the crooked girl."
Dr. Silberg: "I had hope that there would be an understanding in Israel that this is an international phenomenon, and that there would be cooperation between elements in Israel and other countries. But when a complaint was received and a case was opened in Israel, the police did not conduct the investigation as required."
"The Youngest and Most Vulnerable”
Organized sexual abuse, as mentioned, occurs worldwide. Researcher Michael Salter defines it as "a conspiracy by several attackers to abuse several victims."
Rabbi Dr. Udi Froman quotes Salter in his article "Ritual Abuse in the Land," who defines ritual abuse as an ideological framing in organized contexts of child sexual abuse, "which function as strategic practices, through which abusing groups instill a misogynistic worldview in victims, through violence, in order to control them."
"In other words," Rabbi Froman writes in his article, "ritual abuse occurs when a religious, political, or spiritual authority uses its position of power to manipulate the belief system of victims and thereby control them." He argues that "ritual abuse is primarily a strategy employed by groups involved in producing images of child abuse, child prostitution, and other forms of organized abuse, and does not constitute a separate category of violence."
"Using a position of power." Rabbi Dr. Udi Froman, photo: Eliora Efrati
Rabbi Froman also presents the study by Johanna Schroeder and other researchers from Germany, who examined attitudes among 165 adults who testified that they were victims of organized ritual sexual abuse, as well as the attitudes of 174 professionals who supported victims of this type of abuse. In 88% of the reports from both groups - therapists and victims - the same ideological expression emerged. The ideological content and goals were also presented in a similar order: "justifying violence," "justifying sexual exploitation," and "maintaining power and control." They were followed by "maintaining group commitment and promising redemption."
"Researchers conclude that ideologies are primarily a means of justifying organized sexual violence," says Rabbi Froman. However, in his article, Froman claims that some reports in Israel indicate that ideology was not only a means of justifying organized sexual violence - but was at the root of the abuse.
Rabbi Froman refers, for example, to the Nachlaot affair, which "is just one of many similar affairs, most of them in Haredi neighborhoods. For example, a private Haredi court writes that ritual sexual abuse is cruel and frequent, and is accompanied by traumatic, accusatory and confusing rituals. The abuse is committed by large criminal organizations and/or cults and/or secret organizations, with financial investment and recruitment of auxiliary personnel. The abuse brings large profits for its perpetrators, such as satisfying perverted desires, trade and pornography, threats and extortion, and more."
According to Froman, the court's document describes the practice of organized attacks: "From preparing the scene, to recruiting collaborators from educational institutions and transportation drivers, to the ceremonies themselves... The ceremony is led by an important rabbi. After a Torah lesson, about once every two weeks, parents of children gather for what is called 'Tikkun HaNeshma'. All the couples recite Tehillim together, sing verses in tune over and over again, all while standing without clothes. They stand in a circle, naked, pray, light candles. The children in the middle of the circle are also naked."
In a document intended for parents, educators and rabbis, the Haredi Shaarei Mishpat court in Jerusalem details many methods and actions that abusers employ - with the aim of warning and showing alertness to the spreading phenomenon and to protect children. Among other things, the document states that in order to protect themselves from exposure, the abusers' actions are deliberately carried out in an extreme and illogical manner, "so that even if the children tell, they will sound completely delusional."
A "partial" list describes actions such as the use of costumes and masks by the perpetrators, along with sadistic torture such as putting the children's hands in boiling water, drowning them for a few seconds, or threatening them with aggressive animals, in order to frighten them and increase the effect of the trauma. Other actions mentioned are the insertion of objects and work or kitchen utensils.
In order to humiliate the children and instill feelings of guilt and shame in them, they show them naked pictures of themselves or give them food and tell them that they ate "carrion", organize staged "weddings" between children, humiliate them by eating feces and stage their burial.
"All confidence in themselves and their ability to resist is destroyed," says Froman. "The regular and frequent abuse is so destructive that the children despair of 'normality' and abuse becomes a routine in their lives. Psychiatrists have diagnosed a complete 'personality breakdown' in the normal part, so the child continues to function normally at school."
According to Dr. Silberg, in each group, each participant may have their own motivations, such as sexual deviations, bizarre ideological affiliations that include performing rituals, or financial enrichment - for example, through human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation - or the production of images of child sexual abuse. The motivations are not necessarily shared by everyone.
Dr. Silberg further notes that networks engaged in the production and distribution of child pornography, including organized abuse, have been exposed all over the world, and "despite the recurring, almost ideological skepticism, there have been several successes around the world in convicting members of organized abuse networks."
Over the years, there have been several examples of cases in which authorities have been able to expose and convict members of such networks. According to Dr. Silberg, as well as other researchers, since the development of the Internet, and especially the development of peer-to-peer networks and the darknet, the phenomenon of child sexual abuse has intensified.
"These are the youngest and most vulnerable victims in society," it is claimed. "Live-streaming platforms from home make it possible to exploit children in front of a camera and broadcast videos of the acts to the whole world, without leaving a trace."
On the other side of the screen, cyber-investigation experts are aware of the high demand among consumers for extremely horrific videos, including sadistic child abuse. In a conversation with Israel Hayom, Dr. Silberg emphasizes that it is very difficult to track down members of such an organization, since most of the activity takes place on the darknet.
"I had hoped that in Israel there would be an understanding that this is an international phenomenon and that there would be cooperation between elements in Israel and other countries," she says, but in reality, "when a complaint is received and a case is opened in Israel, the police did not conduct the investigation as required. The investigators treated each case as if it were individual. If you separate each case and do not look at the overall picture, you do not ask where all the points lead. And maybe they did their best and the attackers were simply more sophisticated."
Dissociation and a thorn in it
"I don't want to go to school, I don't want to!" Ayala (a pseudonym) says in tears. "I don't want to ever go again. Never. I don't want to! No! No! The teachers at school are scary. I don't want to be taken away from school. I don't want to go to this class anymore."
Ayala's words are mixed with tears. In these very moments, she is sucked back along with the memory attack. Although she is 25 in chronological age, she is currently 9 - and there is nothing that can convince her that the danger has passed. Even when her partner mentions "Do you know you are already a big girl?", trying to bring her back to the here-and-now, she remains terrified. Trembling deeply from the past.
Like many of the victims we met, Ayala also faces the challenges of dissociation. This is a survival mechanism of detachment that protects the child's psyche during the injury, which will be explained later. Ayala grew up in a religious community in a family with many children. "In many community communities, children walk around alone," she says. After years of acute deterioration in her mental state, which included severe anxiety attacks, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, severe suicide attempts and ongoing suffering - the clear inner knowledge that she had been raped emerged.
Memories began to emerge in severe flashbacks in which, to this day, she relives the abuse she experienced. This is also a familiar phenomenon that recurs in some of the cases we encountered.
Prof. Daniel Brom, a clinical psychologist and director and founder of "Mtiv," the Israeli Center for Psychotrauma in Jerusalem, listened to a recording in which Ayala is heard during the memory attack, describing how she is taken from school to a scary place, where she is beaten, tied up, and led to a place where painful things happen to her.
"She talks about rabbis who abuse her and take control of her with statements about being in direct contact with God," writes Prof. Brom. "The form of the conversation is familiar to me as a conversation with a woman with dissociative identity disorder. I have seen such phenomena in the clinic quite a bit. Since 1990, I have repeatedly met children and adults who talk about organized abuse by men who not only abuse sexually, but also film their actions.
"The investigations are not going well." Prof. Daniel Brom
"I have heard the stories both personally from my patients and from therapists who have come to me for guidance, individually or in groups. I have no doubt that the phenomenon of organized sadistic abuse exists in the State of Israel, and the stories are often very similar. It is difficult for me to say whether all the cases are connected, and I assume that there are several groups that have learned the methods of abuse that cause the victims to become unreliable witnesses.
"In my experience, people who have gone through such things are truthful, but because neither the courts nor the police are familiar with dissociative phenomena, the investigations of these cases do not go well, and the cases I was involved in ended in acquittals due to the abusers' doubt."
"Silence, make disappear”
"There are injuries that occurred in the building and there are in the forest," Ayala continues, "there are in a cemetery and there are in a synagogue, in all sorts of unusual places. In the building, you go down the stairs and come to a very messy room with a lot of tools, cans of paint, a lot of boards. In the middle of the room there is a bed, more like a wooden table. It seems there are more rooms there, because there are injuries that I really remember being in one room and hearing a child being hurt in the other room, and then I know what they will do to me.
"I hear children screaming, crying. It's always a dark place. There are between six and nine men there. They tie me to the bed by my hands and feet, stand in a circle, mumble prayers or blessings, and there is the rabbi who always leads the situation and tells everyone what to do, and everyone listens to him. There is a ceremony, and each of them rapes me.
"Sometimes the great rabbi comes, and then he leads the ceremony. He talks to Hashem, and Hashem tells him what to do. He puts one hand on my heart, one hand on my penis, and it hurts when he talks to Hashem. There are times when I scream, and there are situations where I stop because I know they're going to hit me on the head. There were cases where I didn't cooperate or cried and I knew I deserved punishment. There were a variety of punishments, crazy things: they put my head in a bucket of water for a long time, they beat me with a cable, there's also a mikveh and a taharah, where they clean me thoroughly, and then they dip me in a spring of water and explain to me that I need to be pure.
"There was a time when they took out a Torah scroll and started with the Binding of Isaac. One of them read, and they simply did what they read about me. They tied me up, put the knife to my neck, and the Lord said to take the knife down. Then there was rape.
"There was an event in a cemetery, and I see a place where there are stones with many words written on them, and then they tell me to get into a pit and cover me with sand. I don't know how I stayed alive."
Nurit: "They tied me up, and the experience is that they are trying to imitate the binding,"
Noya was sexually abused by educational personnel who cared for her in early childhood. The same people, she says, invited other men into the setting who participated in ritual abuse. The abusers were severely violent and used extreme and powerful sensory stimuli, which helped her consciousness to split.
"I always had symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder," she says. "I was hospitalized, I had nightmares, eating disorders. I also had flashbacks of small fragments of moments from the injury, but I didn't understand what they meant."
"In her youth, dissociative seizures began that looked like epileptic seizures. When I would return home beaten and bruised from the abuse, for example with a head injury or blood from my lips, I would say that I had a seizure on the stairs."
No one asked too many questions, and in her older years, when the trauma was over, Noya consciously decided to forget. "I told myself that nothing had happened to me. I had a mantra that I repeated over and over: 'Silence, hide, make disappear, move, disguise, turn off, hide, throw away, disconnect, forget.' And I really did forget, for a few years."
During these years, Noya fulfilled her dreams and established her life - until the difficult memories began to bombard her consciousness. Over the years, and later during the treatment she underwent, "figures" created during the abuse began to surface, figures that held the difficult memories in place.
"When there is such massive and extreme harm, the symptoms are extremely severe, especially dissociation," says Sylvia, a therapist from the center of the country for victims of complex post-traumatic stress disorder due to prolonged childhood abuse. "It is a defense mechanism of the psyche that manifests itself in detachment at various levels. It can be detachment from bodily sensations, emotions, thoughts and memories. Dissociation allows the victim to get up the next morning and lead a normal life - go to school, play with friends, study and build her personality despite the massive threat she is subjected to. The mechanism is activated during the harm as a response to an existential threat or unbearable pain, or as a result of the abusers' use of mind-altering substances."
Dr. Sagit Blumrosen-Sela, a clinical psychologist specializing in the treatment of trauma related to sexual abuse, dissociative identity disorder, and autism, sees cases of dissociative detachments and patients dealing with dissociative identity disorder (DID) in the clinic.
"Today we are discovering that dissociative identity disorder is more common than previously thought. Many of those who suffer from it are not diagnosed - either they hide it, or they don't tell themselves. Many of them are hospitalized and receive incorrect diagnoses. Many psychiatrists are not familiar enough with the phenomenon, and it is important that they understand that these can be patients who lead normative lives, work, study, raise children. There are real gaps between normative functioning and the abysses that are not expressed in the outside world."
According to her, "This is a mechanism created as a defensive reaction to intense physical or emotional pain, when it is impossible or dangerous to fight or flee, and parts of an experience are removed from the accessible stream of consciousness. When the injuries recur, a system of identities may be created that carry the traumas, while disconnecting the memories and emotions associated with them from ordinary consciousness."
Based on years of evidence from around the world, there are situations in which the perpetrators are aware of the possibility of creating such a disorder in young children. "One of the patients underwent repeated sadistic attacks, with the perpetrators' intention to cause a split in her consciousness, so that she would not remember or tell. When she was an adult, she even met one of the attackers in a mall and did not recognize him," says Blumrosen-Sela.
“To train evil”
"There's an atmosphere of excitement, as if we're doing the most sacred and noble thing in the world," says Nurit. "I was very young. The pictures showed people and verses... I have scars on my penis. They hurt it, they damaged it. It's an act that involved a lot of cruelty, abuse, humiliation, control, ownership, all under the guise of religion and high spiritual work. It's taking God and using him for passions. It's something central to my traumas. On the other hand, something like that happens once, but the abuse itself is a way of life... Therefore, the destruction inside is very great. So yes, the damage and consequences of these things are terrible."
Nurit: "This is an act in which there was a lot of cruelty, abuse, humiliation, control, ownership, all under the guise of religion and high spiritual work. It is taking God and using him for passions. The destruction inside me is very great."
Throughout his many years of experience, Boaz has met dozens of survivors of cults who were harmed by rituals, but also in many cases of patients who were harmed by rituals only at home, "usually by fathers or uncles who used, over years and chronically, rituals they invented and mixed in religious texts and content."
According to him, "This is a takeover of the mind. The child is forced to take on the role that is sewn for him. If they tell him, for example, that he came to fix the world and therefore he must suffer, or that suffering must be overcome, that if he learned to survive what was done yesterday, the suffering must be increased - because he is the victim. The child is told that if it is not him, they will have to choose another child from the family to sacrifice.
"In the rituals there are invented prayers, mumblings, songs with religious texts. I think that with the help of the mantras and mumblings, not only the victim dissociates, but the perpetrator also dissociates himself. Immediately afterwards, he can go to the synagogue and blow the shofar. There are cases of such institutionalized organizations around the world, in which the techniques for creating dissociation - detachment - in a child are repeated.
Boaz (pseudonym), a senior therapist in the religious community: "The child is forced to take on the role that is being sewn for him. He is told, for example, that he came to fix the world and therefore he must suffer. He is told that if it is not him, they will have to choose another child from the family to sacrifice."
"I think that in the patients I met, the abusers were devilishly sophisticated, but I think they didn't read it in some manual but rather arrived at it through intuition. As if evil has intuition. In one case, there was a patient who had been subjected to massive abuse that caused her external harm, a lot of humiliation and contempt. To this day, decades later, she believes that she is a creature from another world. Even if she understands intelligently that this is not true - emotionally she was meant for this.
"Or how easy, for example, to tell a child that he was born from the power of impurity and therefore must now suffer? These mantras go so deep, especially when a child is abused and brought to the brink of death, certainly spiritual death, but in some cases that I have encountered, some of the abuse was also almost killing, and then leaving him alive. In such a situation, there are changes in consciousness, and the beliefs that are ingrained become part of the blood, because what is stronger than a person who almost died - and was saved?"
"An organized, planned ceremony”
As we are about to say goodbye, Eden's mother shows me a picture of her daughter smiling broadly and her eyes laughing. "Look at the girl I lost," she says painfully. "Write for her."
"When Edna was 25, she started remembering the rape she had experienced as a child," says Corinne, the mother. "It was a very unusual rape. She called it a gang rape that happened like a play, in which everyone had a role. When she had flashbacks, it just came flooding back and she told shocking things. Events of men from the community doing something together, a gang rape with a lot of violence, drugs, nudity. Somehow after that she came home clean and unharmed, it's not clear how. She filed a police report and the complaint was closed. She fell apart from that."
According to the mother, her daughter began to suffer from severe anxiety attacks and reached states that were defined as psychotic, when in fact she mainly expressed great terror while being convinced that the main perpetrator would murder her. "She really felt like she was being followed. There is an entire community here that is hiding, and it seems that many people have something to hide, and some people turn a blind eye or are too weak. Eden talked about six men who participated in the rape - and something like that needs to be kept a secret. It is difficult to fight an entire community. There are also people who are unable to believe."
Many of the women we met described that in some cases there were ceremonies in which stories from the Bible were supposedly reenacted. The reenactment of "The Binding of Isaac," for example, is repeated in five of the testimonies.
This is how Nurit describes it, for example: "They tied me up, and the experience is that they are trying to imitate the 'Akeidat Yitzhak,' even though it's not the same thing because I'm a girl. It's taking a certain symbol, using it however you want and connecting it to a type of circumcision... There's nothing in the halacha that requires doing the Akeidat Yitzhak like that. But still, the feeling is that things are being read, texts are being said, that it's really an organized, planned ceremony, there's a process. It's legitimizing evil."
Arnon, a senior clinical psychologist who, among other things, guides therapists in the field of trauma, encountered signs of ritual abuse four decades ago, and several times in clear cases until recent years, when he began to "fear that this was some kind of network."
He said, "There is a distorted reading of Kabbalistic sources here. I think these are psychopaths who are recruiting Kabbalah to objectify and exploit their victims. When 'kabbalistic' forces combine with the desire to exploit sexually - it's a bomb. Anyone who is truly afraid of God should be careful and stay away from this stream like fire."
"I'm sure it also exists in the secular world. The spiritual world can be used to justify exceptions and deviations from the norm, while conducting oneself in a way that requires blind faith. They can decide to do it in a synagogue, in front of the most sacred thing we have. We'll do it in holy clothes, we'll say the names of God, and they're using the idea that there are people who are allowed, who are even commanded, to behave differently than usual.
"But the idea of prohibitions being lifted for certain people is foreign and alien to the religious world. It's dangerous, because at a certain point they believe themselves when they perform the horrible rituals you've heard about. These are the most shocking things I've ever heard in my life, and I'm afraid they believe they're bringing God closer in this way."
"Stealing the Faith”
"In order for a child to survive, he often becomes attached to the abuser with no choice," says Boaz. "Like Stockholm Syndrome. He believes the abuser has a role in the world. Part of the catastrophe of healing is that suddenly, after 30 years, a person realizes, 'What, I didn't have a role? Was it just evil?' And that's a truly enormous, suicidal break, because it collapses everything. They are robbed of their faith from within.
"At school, they pray and talk about private providence, about how everything has a reason and God runs the world, but He is not here for her. This is terrible mind control, and it takes many years of therapy to touch this pain. Therefore, any testimony you hear is just a fraction of what actually exists. The spiritual harm here is unbearable. Just as sexual harm is a harm to trust in people, spiritual harm is robbing a child of faith. In my opinion, there is a function of faith in the soul - and those who have their faith robbed will always feel that pain."
Noga, who according to her was in a "cult" that engaged in organized and ritual abuse of children until a late age, says that "there is some kind of agreement with the gods. The whole theory is that everything is in the name of 'correction.' The words 'the great correction' are repeated. For the great correction, one must suffer, first of all because suffering purifies and promotes redemption...
"The gods I remember are Baal Peor and Ashtoreth. I vaguely remember statues. I remember them saying, 'Our Lord Peor and our Lady Ashtoreth.' It's really disturbing because these are 'Dos' who observe the commandments of Judaism, light and heavy, not as a show. They truly observe the commandments of the Torah according to the Orthodox stream. They despise Reformers and at the same time, in a parallel universe, they are truly idolaters.
"I had a connection to something, I can't explain. Both a very strong faith and a connection to God that was very innocent, and they took advantage of that. As if a girl who is so spiritually open and connected, it's easy to instill messages in her and give her a twisted twist."
“What messages?”
"Messages that stem from confusion between values, between heaven and earth, between darkness and light, between evil and good. It's about getting to the root of things, to the dirtiest, lowest places, and supposedly raising them to holiness, and in the name of this they create a lot of distortions. They actually blur the boundaries between good and evil, between sexuality and love, and family. Everything that can be mixed and mixed - they do. There were rituals in which people dressed in the opposite gender, transvestites like that, very promiscuous sexuality of men with children, men with women, and also within the family."
"A religious-national mission”
During the investigation, we were exposed to harsh and horrifying, unimaginable descriptions. How is it possible that horrific crimes against children are being committed for years under the noses of all of us, and especially law enforcement officials?
"We, the care providers, also have an existential need for denial," says Dr. Gore. "When you hear that a woman who collaborated with the abusers would wash the victimized child of the remains of the abuse, your whole soul screams - this can't be, this can't be."
"Just as the girl disconnects, because she knows that if she doesn't forget what happened, she won't be able to continue living - we, the witnesses, also have to make a choice, conscious or unconscious, whether we are willing to believe that such horrific things are happening. It undermines our very private existence, so there is an imperative of silence here that is not only external, but also on an internal level."
"In religious terms, these are the most serious offenses that can occur. Revealing the story is important, and especially catching the perpetrators and bringing them to justice. Beyond the physical and sexual harm, there is also spiritual abuse here," says a religious figure involved in the details of the abuse and very disturbed by the information he has been exposed to in recent years from testimonies of victims.
"It's important to understand - these are the most serious offenses that can exist in Judaism," he continues. "From a religious point of view, it's blasphemy. Many of the victims in the ceremonies are taken there by relatives, who also sexually abuse them, and this is a sin of incest. If the perpetrators have a religious motivation, this is idolatry. Therefore, it is a religious-national mission to expose the phenomenon and get down to investigating the truth, and every person who values religion should demand the investigation of the truth."
Alongside the defensive mechanism of doubt, when we see the terror of death that has been embedded in our bones, when we understand the rocks of silence that have been cast, and the chains of diabolical threats that have bound the victims - to deny without examination is a privilege we do not have.
The crimes allegedly committed in the testimonies we collected and obtained by "Shishab" were not allowed to be heard in court, were not allowed to be thoroughly investigated. These are serious offenses for which the precise law has not yet been drafted, and yet - based on existing sections of the law, including human trafficking and sections on rape offenses - the law enforcement authorities are obligated to investigate complaints of unspeakable monstrous wickedness.
“Comments”
The Israel Police stated: "Every complaint received by the police is examined in depth and professionally, and investigators are working as necessary to examine possible connections between similar cases, in accordance with the findings that emerge as part of the investigation. The issue mentioned in your request is known to the police and is under investigation. Naturally, at this stage we will not elaborate further."
Dr. Naama Goldberg, CEO of the "We Don't Stand By - Helping Women in the Cycle of Prostitution" association, said: "Unfortunately, I have been hearing similar testimonies for many years, describing identical patterns of these abuses. Sometimes they are so shocking that you doubt the credibility of the speakers. On the other hand, since the reports are repeated in a similar way from victims who do not necessarily know each other and from different regions of the country, it sounds like they are well-founded."
"Furthermore, from my professional experience working with victims of crime, the victims who have come to me over the years match the behavior of someone who was sadistically victimized in childhood.
"The dissociative episodes, the time gaps that passed before it was possible to talk about it, etc., confirm the fact that the complainant was exposed to such abuse at a young age. This is a terrible story that must be heard loud and clear and thoroughly investigated by the state."
Orit Soliciano, CEO of the Association of Assistance Centers for Victims of Sexual Assault, said: "In recent years, the Association of Assistance Centers for Victims of Sexual Assault has received inquiries about ritual sexual assaults. These are assaults that are committed mainly in closed societies, under the pretext that they are part of a religious ritual. There is no doubt that the bond of silence in religious society often prevents the exposure of difficult cases of exploitation and harm, so it is of great importance to surface these assaults, in order to give words to what is happening and allow the victims to release the secret.”
——
MY COMMENT: Such phrases as "The brutalization of women and girls is central to their ideology,” “sacrifice her for the sake of ascension or redemption,” and “maintaining group commitment and promising redemption,” reflect aspects that are distinctively religious to all of these accounts. Religion doesn’t merely accompany these rapes; it is at least philosophically fundamental to them, and to how the Government (and ITS laws) responds to them. It is part of the background to them. It’s not part of a solution to such evils; it is a contributing cause of these evils, an inspiration for them, and a reason why these evils are almost never punished. Conservatives can’t accept such facts, but they are true. A solution will instead require authentic progress — the opposite of conservatism. Religion is intrinsically conservative. It is against progress. Its Scripture locks-in ancient values. That’s what happens when a scripture becomes canonized — locks-in that text, AS the faith’s foundation, its “Scripture.” And — UNlike any truly democratic Constitution, which has specific provisions for Amendments to it — NO Scripture contains ANY allowance of an amendment. That is how ancient values become “locked-in” when a previous scripture based on faith gets canonized into being the faith’s “Scripture.” Consequently, for examples, there is no way in which Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, can become progressive — this canonization locks-out progress. From a conservative standpoint, rape doesn’t even exist, and can’t possibly exist, ever, because: How can a man mis-use and abuse what he OWNS? That’s the religious attitude. It is canonized. It has been locked-in. Human societies have a long way yet to go before rapes can be fully recognized as being what they actually are and always have been: a reflection of fundamental conservative values, not just at the surface, but intrinsic to religion itself. These aren’t necessarily psychopathic acts; they can also be motivated by values — very conservative values — values that are hostile toward progress. Conservaative values are false values (empirically false because there can be no logical justification for the act of rape, and anything like that is therefore logically impossible to justify, but can only be ‘justified’), but they ARE values: false values. They are NOT merely psychopathic (such as such crimes as rape are commonly thought to be.
Consequently, too, no religion prohibits marital rape. The very IDEA of prohibiting marital rape is ENTIRELY a post-religious, scientific, PROGRESSIVE, innovation — the opposite of conservative. Conservatives oppose it; they oppose progress in values. On values (ethics), they are pre-scientific. That opposition to scientific values is the foundation of conservatism. Individuals who are committed to physical, “technological,” progress, but who are conservatives, have this self-contradiction, this split personality. It’s built into conservatism.
An American jurist who had theocratic values — not Constitutional values — was well exemplified by Antonin Scalia.Scalia, who was well known for his support of the (biblically very supported) death penalty and of the prohibition against abortion, and for his ‘finding’ both of those positions to be applicable in U.S. law — and, generally, for his conservatism as a U.S. Justice. For example, the 26 June 2003 case “Lawrence v. Texas” was a 6-to-3 decision by Justices Kennedy, Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer, and O’Connor, reversing the 1986 “Bowers v. Hardwick” U.S. Supreme Court decision that had outlawed homosexual sodomy; and, the 3 very conservative Catholics, Scalia, Thomas, and Rehquist, dissented from “Lawrence v. Texas” — Scalia’s writing the dissent — to allow the Texas law that had prohibited consensual sodomy. He denied that consensual homosexual sodomy is a “fundamental right,” and condemned any such “massive disruption of the current social order” as “the overruling of Bowers [the 1986 “Bowers v. Hardwick” U.S. Supreme Court decision] entails.” Those 3 far-right jurists did not mention the Bible in their opinion, but religious attitudes permeate in the background, even in a society that isn’t officially theocratic.” In fact, the Episcopalian U.S. Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger, in his 1986 concurring opinion in the Bowers decision, had explicitly said, “Condemnation of those practices is firmly rooted in Judaeo-Christian moral and ethical standards,” and he cited the 1765 British Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, for interpreting the U.S. Constitution, essentially basing America’s Constitution (including its 1865-created 14th Amendment!) upon the laws of America’s enemy-nation at the time, England, as-if the U.S. Constitution (INCLUDING its Amendments!) hadn’t been intended to ignore and REPLACE the enemy’s laws, but were instead to absorb them into ours — so, why, then did our Founders even WRITE a new Constitution, if it were to be interpreted upon the basis of the one that had preceded it — from the laws of our enemy? What was the Revolution supposed to have done — to have achieved? (Britain had remained our enemy, and even burnt down the U.S. White House on 24 August 1814.) Interpreting our existing Constitution on the basis of Britain’s in 1765 is stupid, not to say blatantly idiotic — if not outright evil (i.e., knowingly false to do). Can our Supreme Court ‘Justices’ be that stupid?
Scalia headlined his 1 May 2002 article “God’s Justice and Ours”, in the Catholic magazine, First Things, and he said there that he agreed with Saint Paul that, as Scalia paraphrased Paul, “Government — however you want to limit that concept — derives its moral authority from God [not from the people].” Scalia went on to say:
That consensus has been upset, I think, by the emergence of democracy. It is easy to see the hand of the Almighty behind rulers whose forebears, in the dim mists of history, were supposedly anointed by God, or who at least obtained their thrones in awful and unpredictable battles whose outcome was determined by the Lord of Hosts, that is, the Lord of Armies. It is much more difficult to see the hand of God — or any higher moral authority — behind the fools and rogues (as the losers would have it) whom we ourselves elect to do our own will.
He there advocated for the “Might makes right” ethic (ethics as coming from “the Almighty”), and against democracy. (A dictatorship — the opposite of a democracy — is the Governmental embodiment of “Might makes right.” So, he favored it. If all power derives from “God,” “The Almighty,” then a dictatorship necessarily represents God — NOT the people whom the Government rules over. This would be a theocratic Government, not a democratic one. Scalia had been hired onto the U.S. Supreme Court to carry out the U.S. Constitution, not the Bible. But he despised the public “behind the fools and rogues (as the losers would have it) whom we ourselves elect to do our own will.”
Evil that is accepted must even more explicitly be rejected therefore — lest it continue plaguing us even into our future (not merely into our present, as it certainly is).
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
