Justice Denied author Marci Hamilton just sent me a couple of stories of interest in the recent cases involving abused children in the Orthodox Jewish communities of Brooklyn.

Channel 11 news did a powerful piece yesterday on the current state of the investigation, and spoke with Marci about it.

The video can be seen here.

Meanwhile, TIME Magazine published the results of a study in The Lancet, a British medical journal, which makes the sad conclusion that most abuse cases still go unreported.

Some of the reasons for this, however, include the desire to avoid subjecting children to the child welfare system designed to protect them.

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Columnists have approached last week’s deadly Mumbai terrorist attacks from many angles, as William Kristol points out in his New York Times column today. Are we dealing with the a repressed minoritystriking out? Revenge killings for prior attacks by Hindus? A coordinated group with an agenda? What does this mean for India’s peaceful Muslims?

Kristol emphasizes the attackers’ rationale over what Politico columnist Jim Leach describes as “barbarism.”

But Leach doesn’t want to discuss that rationale — even though it’s not hard to find. Ten minutes of Googling will bring you to a fine article, “The Ideologies of South Asian Jihadi Groups,” from the April 2005 issue of Current Trends in Islamist Ideology. It’s by the respected journalist and diplomat Husain Haqqani, who, as it happens, is now Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States.

Lashkar-e-Taiba, Haqqani explains, is a jihadi group of Wahhabi persuasion, “backed by Saudi money and protected by Pakistani intelligence services.” He notes that “Lashkar-e-Taiba has adopted a maximalist agenda for global jihad.” Indeed, the political arm of the group has conveniently published a pamphlet, “Why Are We Waging Jihad?,” that lays out all kinds of reasons why the United States, Israel and India are “existential enemies of Islam.”

I suspect that there is a middle-way; one that underscores both the senseless, cultic (to use a loaded word) practices of jihadist violence and the nationalistic agenda-based jihad that is at odds here. Cambridge author Laurent Murawiec wrote an article for this blog (Can Terror Be Understood? Oct. 9) rebutting a study of terrorists that seemed to indicate that a street-gang-like sense of belonging has as much to do with terrorist motivations as anything else.

Murawiec’s The Mind of Jihad, instead, examines the practice of jihad as something truly barbaric, but with definite roots.

Read Murawiec’s article here >>

In an Op-Ed in this morning’s New York Daily News, Justice Denied author Marci Hamilton decries another situation in which sexual abusers are shielded from public scrutiny. It’s a familiar criticism of the Catholic church, but this time, it’s happening in New York’s Orthodox Jewish community.

Most people think our culture offers no sympathy to perpetrators of child sexual abuse and goes to great lengths to protect victims. But in reality, sex criminals still get far too much protection and victims far too little help. The most recent reminder is the case of Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who is sitting on files that detail such abuse in the Orthodox Jewish community - including the names of 60 accused sexual predators.

Hikind isn’t revealing the information to the authorities because, he says, his sources - the people who say they were victims - had sworn him to secrecy and are afraid of becoming outcasts in their community. But the case, and Hikind’s excuses, only underline the need for urgent reform.

First, he says that most of the victims are in their late 20s or older, meaning the statutes of limitations have expired and no prosecution or civil lawsuit could be filed. Regrettably, that is true; state law mandates that criminal charges must be filed by the time a victim is 18 and civil claims by 23.

Second, Hikind maintains that the victims spoke to him in confidence. Again, this is correct. If Hikind were a doctor, police officer or one of the other professionals required by state law to report such abuse, he would be prohibited from refusing to inform authorities because of a deal with victims. He is not.

This is infuriating. In the name of protecting victims, a state assemblyman is shielding people accused of committing the most heinous crimes imaginable.

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Future Imperfect author David Friedman spoke at the CATO Institute earlier this month. The edited podcast and Book Forum video are now live.

Listen to the Podcast >>

The full video of the presentation can be found here.

Is the concept of patriarchy still a useful one? Or has it lost its meaning through years of feminist criticism and criticism of feminism?

In the latest issue of Bookforum, Feministing blogger and American Prospect editor Ann Friedman delves into two books on patriarchy, including the work of Cambridge authors Carol Gilligan and David Richards.

Who’s Your Daddy?

Making sense of Patriarchy’s Long Shadow

The word patriarchy is often fodder for crude caricature in today’s debates about gender politics. On the one hand, it furnishes a ready touchstone for feminist academics—an all-purpose indictment of gender injustices, past and present—as any glance across women’s-studies sections in academic-press catalogues will quickly confirm. On the other, it serves as a no-less-convenient rhetorical cudgel for antifeminist writers (and, for that matter, bloggers, cable talk-show hosts, et al.) keen to dismiss or deride the sweep of feminist thought; in this usage, it doubles as a winking, half-ironic way of suggesting that, no, we don’t really live in anything so monolithic and rigidly old-world as a patriarchy.

It’s tempting, amid such abuses of the term, to just give up and endorse its retirement. Yet a pair of new books make clear, in very different compasses, that the patriarchy is indeed alive and well—measured either in the long view of Western political thought or in the urgent latter-day battles over what kind of women in which circumstances are granted control over their reproductive lives. In The Deepening Darkness, Carol Gilligan and David A. J. Richards argue that the Western political and cultural tradition is so imbued with a particular brand of manhood that “patriarchal” is, if anything, a mild descriptor for its repressive aims. And in Our Bodies, Our Crimes, Jeanne Flavin traces the life-and-death power that the little-examined patriarchal assumptions informing our common life can have—especially among poor, nonwhite women.

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