Biblical Values Strike Back Against Mass Rape
In his series on the Five Books of Moses, Covenant and Conversation, the late and justly lamented Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Jonathan Sacks, wrote on the connection between sex, power, and violence. He noted how in Genesis and in the beginning of Exodus, a series of conflicts occur between the covenantal family of Abraham and the surrounding peoples:
In three separate incidents, Abraham and then later his son Isaac seek relief from famine in a neighboring kingdom, only to find that the king in each case demanded they surrender their wives to the royal harem.
Abraham’s nephew, Lot, is confronted by the demand of the residents of Sodom that he hand over his male guests so they could be raped.
Abraham’s great-granddaughter, Dinah, is raped by the son of the ruler of the city of Shechem.
Abraham’s great-grandson Joseph is imprisoned, presumably for life, on the false charge of trying to rape the wife of his Egyptian master.
Why does Genesis make such an emphasis on this? Rabbi Sacks proposes that this was the great first step in the establishment of a proper society in the world. What was at issue between the new covenantal community and the rest of the world was not a religious doctrine — we don’t find here the patriarchs making prophetic orations to the people around them about wrong modes of worship — but the nature of the relationship between the sexes. As Sacks puts it, the world accepted that sex was the reward given to powerful men. Their value system
turns women into instruments of male desire. It places power, not love, at the heart of human relationships. It treats women as objects rather than subjects with equal dignity and integrity. It divorces sex from compassion and concern. It dishonors the most intimate human bond, the one in which we are most like God Himself: the love that brings new life into the world.
The message that was being established by these events listed above was that this old mode is fundamentally incompatible with a livable world. If the core relationship that reproduces the species cannot be established on the bases of love and respect, the building of the structure of society inevitably give way, as it will be built on a faulty foundation.
The long drive of the progressive Left has been to overthrow all values that do not serve their own power.
In the centuries and millennia that ensued, the West chose the Abrahamic values. True, the old views were not entirely expunged — think of the scene in Braveheart in which the nobleman takes the newly married bride for the first night before turning her over to her husband, the practice of droit de seigneur or jus primae noctus.
But as the middle classes started to make their clout felt in the modern age, the power of the ancient biblical counter-idea asserted itself against kings. King George IV did not grab brides away with the threat of violence as did kings of old and Edward Longshanks in the film, but his ugly profligacy nearly resulted in a complete alienation of the middle and lower classes from the monarchy. Victoria restored luster to the throne in no small part due to her exemplary love-filled marriage, which captured the hearts of the public and informed the tacit morals of the age.
In America, in which religion had a far larger role in society than in modern educated Europe, the covenantal view of the relation between the sexes was tacitly accepted as the norm. It is only recently that public figures felt they could safely assume that mixing sex with force and violence could be overshadowed as a moral priority by intersectionality, the supreme and only value that remains standing in the woke mind after their work of total deconstruction.
The long drive of the progressive Left has been to overthrow all values that do not serve their own power. So when it comes to the relations between the sexes, they did not stop with Henry Kissinger’s observation that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” The true atavism was seen in all its force in the chambers of Stalin’s chief secret policeman, the sadistic Lavrenti Beria, who was a serial rapist. The flights to Epstein Island were a milder Western reflection of that ethos, substituting statutory rape for Beria’s more explicit form of violence.
More telling and more violent has been the lack of interest in the proliferation of sex slavery that has been a major part of the cartel-infested plague of the open borders invasion. The ruling class shrugged so what — in the progress towards Utopia, mere collateral damage that interests only the clingers. No powerful sense of revulsion that would compel a serious effort to stop a defining threat to our own moral standing as a people.
Nowhere is this throwback to accepting sexual violence more evident today than in the homeland of the late Rabbi Sacks, the UK. A modern day J’accuse is featured in this week’s Free Press, written by Dominic Green and entitled “The Biggest Peacetime Crime — and Cover-up — in British History.”
Green tells the story of more than a decade of grooming and rape of thousands of underage British girls, almost all from the lower class, most often personally vulnerable due to poverty, broken families, abuse, or the like.
As Green makes clear, it is not that many people have not been aware of what once were considered by all among the most horrific of crimes. The shameful failure is of the entire governing class, whether Conservative or Labor, though Labor is portrayed as the most egregious in its failures. As Green writes:
every level of the British system is implicated in the cover-up.
Social workers were intimidated into silence. Local police ignored, excused, and even abetted pedophile rapists across dozens of cities. Senior police and Home Office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called “community relations.” Local councilors and Members of Parliament rejected pleas for help from the parents of raped children. Charities, NGOs, and Labour MPs accused those who discussed the scandal of racism and Islamophobia. The media mostly ignored or downplayed the biggest story of their lifetimes … zealous in their incuriosity.
Since the rape gangs have been largely ethnic Pakistanis, the woke power structure felt that it would be a far worse moral problem to direct any blame to those who stand higher in the intersectional hierarchy of victimization. And so it went on and on, brutalizing thousands of intersectionally expendable ethnic English girls.
But it now at last seems that the covenantal values are more resilient and more widespread than the amoral power practitioners. The woke gospel has not established itself in the hearts of the public. It has not expunged, as the powerful had believed, the powerful revulsion to sexual violence that the Bible sought to establish at the beginning of its mission in the world.
It looks and feels like a corner has been turned. The good people of the West have listened to all the moral exhortations of the Left and given it all a sincere try. It seems the people have enough data to draw conclusions that they feel are robust. They do not like the damage that has been done to their culture and their lives. The cure the wokeists had forcibly administered, so programmatic and all-encompassing in its scope, so breathtaking in the moral promises it made — that cure has proven far worse than whatever disease it may have addressed.
Equally breathtaking is the world-wide scope of the rejection of what stands revealed as moral pretension and dereliction of duty of those at the helm. The woke ruling classes are losing their grip in France, in Germany, in the Netherlands, in Canada, in America.
And now Britain, appalled at the broad assault on free speech and the ongoing and ever-more appalling revelations of the Great Rape Gang Coverup, has lost confidence in the new Labor government in record time. Already in October, the Independent reported that the Starmer Labor government, elected in a landslide only last summer, has slipped below a 30 percent approval rate.
Starmer’s long role as chief prosecutor, in which he did very little to deal with the epidemic of organized rape, is not helping him at all. People are finally openly talking about the magnitude of the disaster over which so many presided, and about which they did little, appeasing the monster in their midst. At least the object of Chamberlain’s appeasement lay across the Channel. Here, the hungry savage beast is already on England’s shores and has found itself no small measure of political power.
But as with Chamberlain, the nature of the beast is making itself clear, and the people are rising up to reject their leaders’ weakness and capitulation to violence. A severe political struggle lies ahead, but it just may be, with a fresh new wind blowing, the change will come faster than anyone might have thought possible just yesterday.
Just like inauguration day in the U.S., it can’t come too soon.
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