MKs bid to tackle ‘harmful cults’ that ensnare 20,000 Israelis. But it’s not so simple.
From polygamous sexual predators to the ‘Jewish Taliban,’ sects draw in large numbers of susceptible adherents. Will new legislation break the spell? Or does it go too far, threatening religious freedom?
By Marissa Newman February 22, 2016
....a new bill proposed by Knesset member Orly Levy-Abekasis of the Yisrael Beytenu party, which has the coalition’s support and passed its preliminary reading in the Knesset on Wednesday.
The bill would for the first time in Israel’s history enshrine in law a definition of a “harmful cult,” and allow the courts to jail cult leaders for up to 10 years and seize their assets. But, in its current formulation, which will still likely be revised before it is brought to the three votes needed to pass it into law, there is one caveat: it would only apply to cult leaders who committed other crimes, thus compounding their sentences. This stipulation ensures that religious leaders won’t face prosecution merely upon allegations of “cult-like” features. It also won’t help people like L., who needed therapy after leaving her community....
The bill defines a cult as a group that “rallies around a person or an idea, in a way that there is exploitation, dependency, authority, or emotional distress experienced by one or more members, uses methods of controlling mental processes or patterns of behavior, and operates in an organized, systematic, and sustained fashion, while committing crimes under Israeli law that are felonies or sexual offenses or serious violence.”
According to the director of the Israeli Center for Cult Victims, there are some 100 cults active in Israel, with 15,000-20,000 adults and 3,000 children in their ranks.
Rachel Lichtenstein, the director of the Israeli Center for Cult Victims, says what makes a group a cult is never ideology, but rather the techniques of control exercised by its leader. The criteria she lists include having a leader at the center, emotional, psychological, and occasionally economic exploitation, social sanctions and humiliation, isolation of members from their families, surveillance, and more. The group gathers testimony and, once it receives a number of reliable accounts (she stresses the organization will never rely on a single account), it will classify some groups as cults. (The organization identifies the Harish group as a cult, based on the testimonies of 15 families who left)....
The bill marks the first time the anti-cult efforts have reached Israel’s legislature (countries such as France and Belgium have anti-cult laws)....
Can you lose your free will?
While entrenched in the cult, you are “not operating out of free will,” maintains L. After receiving complaints, the ISKCON umbrella group for Hare Krishna at one point intervened and representatives conceded to her that there was a problem. The organization sent in other teachers, gave the leader a warning, and kept tabs on the group, but L. maintains their response – which she says strengthened her resolve to leave — was insufficient. “I think they needed to tell everyone there, listen there’s a problem here. They didn’t do that.”
While she was in the group, L. says, there was a certain amount of control over her mental faculties. “There are people who will say it doesn’t exist, but of course it does.”....
http://www.timesofisrael.com/will-israels-first-anti-cult-legislation-harm-religious-freedom/
'Satanic' sergeant suspended for posting degrading slurs before Greens MP Jenny Leong harassed
April 17, 2016 Eamonn Duff
Police officers were posting homophobic and sexually degrading posts on social media before a NSW Police Integrity Commission investigation homed in on the racial and sexist harassment of an MP.
A Sun-Herald investigation can also reveal that one of the ringleaders behind the online trolling of the Greens MP Jenny Leong is an inner-city based sergeant who for years has spouted a string of anti-gay slurs and online comments that objectified and sexually degraded women.
After viewing material linked to his Facebook account on Saturday, the NSW Police released a statement advising it had "acted to immediately suspend" the Central Metropolitan Region officer.
It is now apparent that far from being an isolated, politically motivated online attack, the recent hate campaign against Ms Leong was part of a culture of abuse within certain elements of the force.
Until the sergeant's Facebook page was shut down last week, it was a public window into the private world of a trusted protector of the community.
Harbouring a morbid fascination with the devil, the officer had uploaded numerous satanic images onto his social media feed and was one of nine followers of a Facebook page that shares images of mutilated corpses.
"I love evil and being evil. It's who I am," he said after posting an image of Satan in 2013, adding: "I just love the picture and what it stands for. EVIL".
In 2013 he was engaging in public posts, with another police officer, that depicted women as sexual objects. The comments are too vulgar to publish....
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/nsw-police-sergeant-posted-homophobic-sexually-degrading-slurs-before-greens-mp-jenny-leong-was-harassed-20160415-go7kyj.html
Showing posts with label free will. Show all posts
Showing posts with label free will. Show all posts
Thursday, April 21, 2016
Friday, January 7, 2011
Is free will simply a myth?, Bush Six, Investigation into U.S. Torture
articles:
The uncomfortable truth about mind control: Is free will simply a myth?
Bringing the 'Bush Six' to justice
The Spanish Investigation into U.S. Torture
The uncomfortable truth about mind control: Is free will simply a myth?
In the Sixties, a groundbreaking series of experiments found that 65 per cent of us would kill if ordered to do so. By Michael Mosley 6 January 2011
We have vain brains; we see ourselves as better than we really are. We like to think that we exercise free will, that put into a situation where we were challenged to do something we thought unacceptable then we'd refuse. But, if you believe that, then you are probably deluded. I make this claim, based partly on the work of psychologist Stanley Milgram. Milgram devised and carried out ingenious experiments that exposed the frailty and self-delusion that are central to our lives. He showed how easy it is to make ordinary people do terrible things, that "evil" often happens for the most mundane of reasons....
Milgram argued that far from being in any way fake, his experiment demonstrated in a very stark way something that we all know happens, but which we can't bring ourselves to believe. It is more comfortable to imagine that there was something uniquely evil or weak about German prison guards than to believe that most of us would behave the same way when faced by the same set of circumstances. "One of the illusions about human behaviour is that it stems from personality or character, but social psychology shows us that often human behaviour is dominated by the roles that we are asked to play."....
Milgram once wrote that we are "puppets controlled by the strings of society". Yet what is also true is that not all puppets jump when their strings are pulled. Many of the fast-food managers who were rung up the "policeman" refused to follow his orders. In Milgram's own experiment, although 65 per cent of the volunteers were prepared to give apparently lethal electric shocks, that still left 35 per cent who would not.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/the-uncomfortable-truth-about-mind-control-is-free-will-simply-a-myth-2177014.html
Bringing the 'Bush Six' to justice - If those responsible for the Bush administration's torture policy will not face charges in the US, then in Spain it must be Michael Ratner guardian.co.uk 7 January 2011
Today, the Centre for Constitutional Rights filed papers encouraging Judge Eloy Velasco and the Spanish national court to do what the United States will not: prosecute the "Bush Six". These are the former senior administration legal advisors, headed by then US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who violated international law by creating a legal framework that materially contributed to the torture of suspected terrorists at US-run facilities at Guantánamo and other overseas locations.
Friday's filing provides Judge Velasco with the legal framework for the prosecution of government lawyers – a prosecution that last took place during the Nuremberg trials, when Nazi lawyers who provided cover for the Third Reich's war crimes and crimes against humanity were held accountable for their complicity.
CCR would prefer to see American cases tried in American courts. But we have joined the effort to pursue the Bush Six overseas because two successive American presidents have made it clear that there will be no justice for the architects of the US torture programme, or any of their accomplices, on American soil.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jan/06/george-bush-torture
The Spanish Investigation into U.S. Torture - Synopsis
Seeking a venue in which to hold former high-ranking U.S. officials accountable for their individual roles in directing, implementing or planning the U.S. torture program, victims and human rights advocates filed criminal complaints in Spain in 2009.
Status - Currently, there are two investigations related to the U.S. torture program pending in the National Court of Spain. The Center for Constitutional Rights has made filings in both, in an effort to ensure that victims have their day in court and that the individuals behind the program that tortured and otherwise seriously abused detainees are prosecuted. (has pdfs of "Relevant Filings in U.S. Torture Program")
http://ccrjustice.org/ourcases/current-cases/spanish-investigation-us-torture
The uncomfortable truth about mind control: Is free will simply a myth?
Bringing the 'Bush Six' to justice
The Spanish Investigation into U.S. Torture
The uncomfortable truth about mind control: Is free will simply a myth?
In the Sixties, a groundbreaking series of experiments found that 65 per cent of us would kill if ordered to do so. By Michael Mosley 6 January 2011
We have vain brains; we see ourselves as better than we really are. We like to think that we exercise free will, that put into a situation where we were challenged to do something we thought unacceptable then we'd refuse. But, if you believe that, then you are probably deluded. I make this claim, based partly on the work of psychologist Stanley Milgram. Milgram devised and carried out ingenious experiments that exposed the frailty and self-delusion that are central to our lives. He showed how easy it is to make ordinary people do terrible things, that "evil" often happens for the most mundane of reasons....
Milgram argued that far from being in any way fake, his experiment demonstrated in a very stark way something that we all know happens, but which we can't bring ourselves to believe. It is more comfortable to imagine that there was something uniquely evil or weak about German prison guards than to believe that most of us would behave the same way when faced by the same set of circumstances. "One of the illusions about human behaviour is that it stems from personality or character, but social psychology shows us that often human behaviour is dominated by the roles that we are asked to play."....
Milgram once wrote that we are "puppets controlled by the strings of society". Yet what is also true is that not all puppets jump when their strings are pulled. Many of the fast-food managers who were rung up the "policeman" refused to follow his orders. In Milgram's own experiment, although 65 per cent of the volunteers were prepared to give apparently lethal electric shocks, that still left 35 per cent who would not.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/the-uncomfortable-truth-about-mind-control-is-free-will-simply-a-myth-2177014.html
Bringing the 'Bush Six' to justice - If those responsible for the Bush administration's torture policy will not face charges in the US, then in Spain it must be Michael Ratner guardian.co.uk 7 January 2011
Today, the Centre for Constitutional Rights filed papers encouraging Judge Eloy Velasco and the Spanish national court to do what the United States will not: prosecute the "Bush Six". These are the former senior administration legal advisors, headed by then US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who violated international law by creating a legal framework that materially contributed to the torture of suspected terrorists at US-run facilities at Guantánamo and other overseas locations.
Friday's filing provides Judge Velasco with the legal framework for the prosecution of government lawyers – a prosecution that last took place during the Nuremberg trials, when Nazi lawyers who provided cover for the Third Reich's war crimes and crimes against humanity were held accountable for their complicity.
CCR would prefer to see American cases tried in American courts. But we have joined the effort to pursue the Bush Six overseas because two successive American presidents have made it clear that there will be no justice for the architects of the US torture programme, or any of their accomplices, on American soil.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jan/06/george-bush-torture
The Spanish Investigation into U.S. Torture - Synopsis
Seeking a venue in which to hold former high-ranking U.S. officials accountable for their individual roles in directing, implementing or planning the U.S. torture program, victims and human rights advocates filed criminal complaints in Spain in 2009.
Status - Currently, there are two investigations related to the U.S. torture program pending in the National Court of Spain. The Center for Constitutional Rights has made filings in both, in an effort to ensure that victims have their day in court and that the individuals behind the program that tortured and otherwise seriously abused detainees are prosecuted. (has pdfs of "Relevant Filings in U.S. Torture Program")
http://ccrjustice.org/ourcases/current-cases/spanish-investigation-us-torture
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