The Reality of Evil.

'Nefarious' gets demons right.

By Robin Schumacher, Exclusive Columnist | Monday, April 24, 2023

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                              Unsplash/Marek Piwnicki

“What happened next literally took our breath away.”

So writes M. Scott Peck, famous New York psychiatrist and author of the wildly popular book The Road Less Traveled.  Peck had been asked to evaluate a woman thought to have a variety of mental illnesses, whose treatment he describes as initially proceeding down the typical path of other patients.

But during a session where he called into question her intelligence and then exclaimed she was faking her psychosis, “Jersey” changed instantly and manifested an icy, evil facial derisiveness that chilled him to the bone — something Peck describes as the most “haughty” look he’s ever seen.

What came out of the woman’s mouth next rocked Peck’s worldview.  

“I did not believe there was such a thing as possession,” writes Peck in his book Glimpses of the Devil, where he records the above case of Jersey along with several other confrontations with possessed people in his psychiatric practice. But his encounter with the demon who decided to finally reveal itself in full to Peck during his session with Jersey changed his opinion.

While the demon in Peck’s first case he chronicles in his book hid for some time, the one in the movie Nefarious takes the opposite approach. “I am a demon” it right-from-the-start tells the atheist psychiatrist, Dr. James Martin, sent to evaluate the inmate that the demon possesses who is about to be executed on death row.

What follows is a dialogue between the demon and the psychiatrist, played by Jordan Belfi, that takes up the vast majority of the movie. It’s a conversation similar to the precision-styled dialogue with which the demon in Peck’s case spoke and is sprinkled with some of the best biblically-based demonology I’ve heard in any film whose theme involves the demonic.

“I am the most rational being you will ever meet”

My oldest daughter and I enjoy going to scary movies together. When she picked "Nefarious" for our weekend film outing, neither of us knew we were walking into a movie that would be so spot-on where demons are concerned.

About a third of the way through the film, I turned to her and said, “The writers must have gotten a Christian professor schooled in demonology to consult on this because it’s so accurate theologically.” I had completely overlooked the fact that the directors and writers of the film are Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon, the same team that produced God’s Not Dead, so it’s no surprise they did their homework.

The plot revolves around Belfi’s character assessing a murderer, who is about to be executed that evening at the prison, in order to determine if he is sane and therefore legally allowed to die for his crimes. The demon tells Belfi that its goal with him is two-fold: to have the person it possesses die in the electric chair (“because we have no need of him anymore”) and have Belfi evangelize the demon’s Gospel to the rest of the world.

Sean Patrick Flanery plays the part of the demon named Nefarious (along with “Edward,” the demon’s host) and does an outstanding job in the role. He transitions from the demon to Edward with perfect fluidity and aces it when it comes to delivering a hostile combination of contempt, arrogance, and maliciousness as the demon when conversing with and mastering Belfi’s psychiatrist.  

Flanery’s character is on death row for 11 murders, which he claims Nefarious has committed: “Six convicted, one suspected, four that they don’t have the capacity to figure out.” When the skeptical Belfi questions Edward’s reason and rationality, the demon responds, “I am the most rational being you will ever meet” — a good reminder to us that the enemy adheres to a logical teleology in how he operates.

Another powerful scene involves the demon speaking to the psychiatrist about an abortion his girlfriend is about to undergo. The demon’s narrative includes Old Testament references to infants being offered up to false gods and is sickeningly insightful: “The Creator creates, and we destroy. And we do all of it through you. We always have. Did you forget your history, Jimmy? Even in ancient times, the arch-demon Molech was celebrated by tossing infants into flaming bonfires.”

The film, through the mouth of Nefarious, also provides good cultural commentary on the escalations of crime and malevolence seen in almost every news article today:

“Now there’s evil everywhere, and no one even cares … we achieved our goal. Slowly. With your movies, your TV, and your media. We desensitized you. Redirected your worldview. To the point that you can’t recognize evil when it’s right in front of your face. More to the point, James, you can’t even feel it when you’re doing it. As for winners and losers, whoa, whoa, whoa! That gets decided at the time of death. The exact numbers are a closely guarded secret, but there are more of you ending up in my master’s house than with the Enemy. A lot more, Jimmy.”

Is the movie scary? It depends on how you define ‘scary.’ There are no real jump scares, nor CGI or anything similar to tantalize you.

But if you understand the demonic, that’s really not needed. There’s a reason that nearly every time in Scripture when the natural encounters the supernatural, the former can rarely stay upright. I can testify to that with the two confrontations I’ve had with demons. Their presence alone makes your skin crawl.

Moreover, watching the demon terrorize, humiliate, and deprive the Edward character of everything in his life and then be ultimately responsible for his death and assignment to eternal punishment is the very definition of ‘horror.’  

"Nefarious"is definitely worth a watch and beats the vast majority of demon-themed films where accuracy in the devil’s thinking is concerned. In a Hollywood way, it shows itself to be a good case study of Satan’s strategy with humankind.

That strategy can be difficult to see sometimes amidst the superficial layer of the culture wars that play out every day. M. Scott Peck noted in his time with his first demonically-possessed patient how her evil facial manifestations that he and others with him saw multiple times were never picked up by the video recorders capturing her and their sessions.   

Speaking about how evil is sometimes difficult to see and detect, Peck quotes Malachi Martin who wrote, “evil moves cunningly along the lines of contemporary fads and interests, and within the usual bounds of experiences of ordinary men and women.” The movie "Nefarious" does a good job of reminding us of just how cunning the devil’s evil can be and how dull we can be to it even when it’s staring us in the face. CP.

Robin Schumacher is an accomplished software executive and Christian apologist who has written many articles, authored and contributed to several Christian books, appeared on nationally syndicated radio programs, and presented at apologetic events. He holds a BS in Business, Master's in Christian apologetics and a Ph.D. in New Testament. His latest book is, A Confident Faith: Winning people to Christ with the apologetics of the Apostle Paul.

Christian Music.

 https://www.christiantoday.com/article/theres.a.reason.every.hit.worship.song.sounds.the.same/140074.htm

Birdie.

 

Over My Life, I Wish I Had Paid More Heed To This Important Verse.

Of Course We Are Not Racist, It Is A Word With Increasingly Less Meaning Than Ever Before!

 Policy Institute reveals in a recent study we are clearly one of the LEAST racist places on earth.

To listen to the left you ... oh, never mind. We all know emphatically where all of the rubbish on this matter originates.

We have all but surrendered and the dimmer souls amongst us probably half believe the wicked accusations!

Why you can't vote Green. (Note the date - they are worse now!)

Five reasons you shouldn’t vote Green.

Anti-growth, anti-human and bizarrely pro-horse riding: a Green government would be awful.

RUSSELL MCCARTHY

10th March 2015

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With the UK General Election only a couple of months away, there has been much discussion about the Green Party’s growth in popularity. This is something that both the Greens’ supporters and their detractors are putting down to disaffected Labour voters going in search of a progressive, left-wing party that fights for the interests of ordinary people.

In the 2010 election, then Green Party leader Caroline Lucas won the Greens their first seat in parliament, and netted them just under one per cent of the nationwide vote. Despite current leader Natalie Bennett’s recent car-crash interview on LBC, and a subsequent string of unimpressive performances, some polls suggest the Greens could win up to 11 per cent of the vote in this election, giving rise to what people are calling the ‘green surge’. But this surge is based on a sham. The Green Party is not now, nor has it ever been, a progressive party. Here’s five reasons why.

1) The Greens are Malthusians

Thomas Malthus is about as far from a progressive man of the people as you can get: the eighteenth-century cleric’s central idea was that the poor must be prevented from reproducing in order to stem overpopulation. And yet Malthusianism is the foundation of Green Party politics. The party was born in the early Seventies, when a middle-class couple from Coventry came across an article on overpopulation in Playboy. Solicitor Lesley Whittaker and her husband Tony, a former Tory councillor, decided something must be done. They formed the cloyingly named People Party – the Green Party’s first incarnation. The party subscribed to the Blueprint for Survival, a manifesto for sustainability by environmentalist Edward Goldsmith which, among other things, advocated deindustrialisation, a return to living in small peasant communities, the sterilisation of women and an end to all immigration. Up to the early Nineties, the Green Party, and its then spokesman David Icke (he of lizards-run-the-world fame), still wanted to reduce the UK’s population by 20million.

Over the past decade, the Greens have attempted to distance themselves from Malthus’s arguments – perhaps because the only other party advocating Malthusianism is the BNP. But although the Green Party’s recently published manifesto makes no mention of overpopulation, its website still has a population-policy page that talks about striving to achieve ‘sustainable population levels’. In order to do so, the page encourages people to live ‘sustainable lifestyles’ – ‘sustainable’, in this case, being a thinly veiled euphemism for ‘childless’.

2) The Greens are anti-growth and anti-abundance

As the Green Party has distanced itself from its Malthusian roots, it has had to look for another way to reduce the human footprint. And so it has focused on curtailing economic growth and people’s consumption habits. A growing economy that produces more employment, more material goods and a higher standard of living has always been considered a desirable and progressive aim. But the Greens are insisting that growth must stop. Apparently, poor people’s desire to live plusher, more comfortable lives is nothing more than greed.

The Green Party’s website tells us: ‘Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, society has expected continual increases in material affluence for the people of the world, and has therefore relentlessly pursued the goal of economic growth.’ In place of this, the Greens advocate a shift from material production and prosperity to something called ‘wellbeing’. The fact that prior to the Industrial Revolution the vast majority of people in the Western world lived in unimaginable poverty seems to have escaped the Greens.

3) The Greens hate science and infrastructure

There was a time when, if there was a water shortage, people might think of constructing a new reservoir. This isn’t how the Greens would like to do things. We’ve got to make do with what we have, remember? New, large-scale infrastructure is anathema to the Green ideology. You can’t go anywhere in Britain without seeing traces of the blight of human civilisation on the landscape, and the Green Party is having none of it. The new Green manifesto gloats that the party would spend nothing on improving roads or expanding airports. What’s more, it plans to continue to fight for two old Green favourites: bans on nuclear power and genetically modified crops.

4) Green taxes would hit the poor hardest

Many of the Greens’ killjoy policies, like shutting down zoos and banning alcohol on planes, would make everyone miserable, regardless of social standing. But despite the Green Party’s talk of redistributing wealth and creating a fairer society, most of the Greens’ proposed taxes would hit the poor the hardest.

Under the party’s proposals, goods and services would be taxed according to how much damage the party deems these products do to the environment. So, if you’re less well-off, you can say goodbye to your carbon-belching car and jetting off for foreign holidays; the Greens’ plan is to make these sorts of luxuries unaffordable for common folk. Instead, you’ll be told to walk or cycle. And if you’re elderly, disabled or just lazy, their 2015 manifesto tells us that ‘animal-powered transport, in particular horse-powered transport, is also sustainable’.

As for exotic luxuries like coffee, bananas and chocolate, these will be taxed beyond the reach of the average pleb. Maybe if you save up you can have them at Christmas. Oh, and booze: the Greens want to raise the price of all alcohol by 50 per cent.

5) People will always come second

Central to the Green ideology is the idea that humanity is a burden on the planet; that we should be subservient to nature, not masters of it. The Enlightenment idea that humans should seek to control and dominate the world around them is wrong, Greens say, as it undermines ‘healthy interdependence of individual, nature and society’. Instead, the Green Party believes we need a ‘reduction in the physical burden human societies place upon our planet’. That ‘burden’ is what most of us call civilisation. And a lot of us quite like it.

To enquire about republishing spiked’s content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan.

Blogger: the huge rise in poverty in the UK and across the globe is because Green policies on energy have malevolently terrified so many voters that more mainstream parties than they have been obliged to follow the leading of these toxic, misguided and often malice-filled ne'erdowells.

Oh.

 Donald Trump on Tuesday claimed that the 'Biden crime family' had been involved in shady business dealings he described as 'Watergate times 10'. On Sunday, the Republican chair of the Oversight Committee, James Comer, said more members of the Biden family were involved in 'influence peddling' than previously believed. Democrats have denounced the 'findings,' and say that the claims pushed by Comer and Oversight Republicans are merely allegations without any ties to true wrongdoing so far. But Comer on Sunday was adamant that his committee had uncovered significant wrongdoing. Hunter Biden's lawyers have meetings this week with the Department of Justice, but it is unclear what steps might be taken against the president's son. Comer said that the Justice Department is in a 'pickle' over 'what do you do with this many family members of the president?' Mail.

No Change There.

Trotskyites have infiltrated the teachers’ union.

They aren’t pushing strikes in order to help teachers, but to pursue ideological war against capitalism

JONATHAN GULLIS27 April 2023 •DT.

Hell: A Location To Avoid.

 Hell as Endless Punishment.

AN ESSAY BYDenny Burk The Resurrection

DEFINITION.Hell is a place of eternal, conscious torment for everyone who does not trust in Jesus Christ. Hell involves final separation from God’s mercy and from God’s people, unending experience of divine judgment, and just retribution for sin. SUMMARY

Jesus himself speaks more about hell than any other figure in scripture. Jesus’s teaching relies on Old Testament depictions of final judgment (Isa. 66:22–24; Jer. 7:32–8:3). The Bible describes hell as a place of eternal conscious torment. Eternal conscious torment has been the majority position of the Christian church throughout its 2,000-year history. In the modern era, other views have emerged among Protestants as rivals to the church’s traditional teaching. These alternatives include annihilationism and universalism. Nevertheless, the Bible teaches that Hell involves final separation from God’s mercy and from God’s people, unending experience of divine judgment, and just retribution for sin. By definition, these three characteristics of Hell rule out the annihilationist position (which denies that the torments of hell are everlasting), the universalist position (which holds that all people will eventually be saved), and the notion of purgatory (which views the flames of final judgment as a potential gateway to eternal life).

The person who talks most about hell in Scripture is none other than Jesus himself. Indeed, except for James 3:6, the only person even to use the word hell in scripture is Jesus.

• “Whoever shall say, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into the hell of fire” (Matt. 5:22).
• “It is better for you that one of the parts of your body perish, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell” (Matt. 5:29, 30).
• “Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28).
• “It is better for you to enter life with one eye, than having two eyes, to be cast into the hell of fire” (Matt. 18:9).
• “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you travel about on sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves” (Matt. 23:15).
• “You serpents, you brood of vipers, how shall you escape the sentence of hell?” (Matt. 23:33).
• “If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life crippled, than having your two hands, to go into hell, into the unquenchable fire” (Mark 9:43).
• “If your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame, than having your two feet, to be cast into hell” (Mark 9:45).
• “If your eye causes you to stumble, cast it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes, to be cast into hell, where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:47–48).
• “I say to you, My friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear the One who after He has killed has authority to cast into hell; yes, I tell you, fear Him!” (Luke 12:4–5).

The only other place where the term hell appears in the Bible is James 3:6, “and the tongue is a fire, the very world of iniquity; the tongue is set among our members as that which defiles the entire body, and sets on fire the course of our life, and is set on fire by hell.”

Read more:  https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/hell-as-endless-punishment/

Always Remember ...

‘It’s Easier to Fool People Than to Convince Them That They Have Been Fooled.’

Mark Twain.

GAFCON, At Least - Keeping The Faith!

Majority of world's Anglicans formally reject leadership of Archbishop of Canterbury.

Susie Leafe  22 April 2023.

 The Archbishop of Canterbury preaching at the closing service of Lambeth 2022.(Photo: Lambeth Conference)The Global Anglican Futures Conference (GAFCON) has committed to join with the Global South Fellowship of Anglicans in the "urgent matter" of resetting and reordering the Anglican Communion.

It cannot come as a surprise to those who have kept an eye on events in the Anglican Communion. The decision of the bishops of the Church of England to commend Prayers of Love and Faith for those in relationships other than holy matrimony may have been the last straw, but as the GAFCON Conference Commitment states:

"Despite 25 years of persistent warnings by most Anglican Primates, repeated departures from the authority of God's Word have torn the fabric of the Communion. These warnings were blatantly and deliberately disregarded and now without repentance this tear cannot be mended."

The document says it is "pastorally deceptive and blasphemous to craft prayers that invoke blessing in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit", and calls public statements by the Archbishop of Canterbury and other leaders of the Church of England in support of same-sex blessings "a betrayal of their ordination and consecration vows to banish error and to uphold and defend the truth taught in Scripture".

The document continues, "We have no confidence that the Archbishop of Canterbury nor the other Instruments of Communion led by him (the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates' Meetings) are able to provide a godly way forward that will be acceptable to those who are committed to the truthfulness, clarity, sufficiency and authority of Scripture.

"The Instruments of Communion have failed to maintain true communion based on the Word of God and shared faith in Christ.

"Successive Archbishops of Canterbury have failed to guard the faith by inviting bishops to Lambeth who have embraced or promoted practices contrary to Scripture.

"This failure of church discipline has been compounded by the current Archbishop of Canterbury who has himself welcomed the provision of liturgical resources to bless these practices contrary to Scripture. This renders his leadership role in the Anglican Communion entirely indefensible."

So, the repeated failure of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the other Instruments of Communion (the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates' Meetings) to offer godly leadership have now led to a vote of "no confidence" by the majority of the world's Anglicans.

Bishop Stead, who chaired the statement writing group, explained, "This grieves us, but it is they who have walked away from us."

As the Kigali Commitment - the name given to the conference statement - was read to the gathered delegates, the weight of what was happening descended on those gathered. There was a time of silence and the doxology was sung before the conference shared the Eucharist together.

Afterwards, there were tears, mourning the sin and broken relationships that have led to this point, but there was also the joy of those freed from oppression.

Archbishop Samy Shehata, the Primate of South Sudan, who warned the Church of England's General Synod of the consequences of moving foward with the Prayers of Love and Faith, said, "It is sad but at least it is now clear."

Since the inception of Gafcon, it has been necessary for the Gafcon Primates to recognise new orthodox jurisdictions for faithful Anglicans, including the Anglican Network in Europe, which stands ready to welcome those who feel they can no longer remain in the Church of England or Church in Wales because of the failure of the leadership.

Susie Leafe is director of Anglican Futures, which supports orthodox Anglicans in the UK.

My Conclusion Is Different.

China is preparing for war with the West

Britain appears to be in wilful denial of the truth about China’s bellicose Communist regime

MATTHEW HENDERSON25 April 2023 •DT.


Blogger: China has been invading us economically for years. Almost all goods we now buy appear to have been made in China.If they are already winning - why fight a war?

Samaritan's Purse Works in Jesus' Name.

 https://www.samaritanspurse.org//?utm_source=FY23ColsonNationalConferenceBannerVanityURL&utm_medium=direct&utm_campaign=m_YMIN-23L1&utm_content=banner-ad

Birdie.

 

AI Should Be Stopped Before Everything Gets Out of Hand.

 

John Stonestreet

Kasey Leander

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Recently, a number of prominent tech executives, including Elon Musk, signed an open letter urging a 6-month pause on all AI research. That was not enough for AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky. In an opinion piece for TIME magazine, he argued that “We Need to Shut It All Down,” and he didn’t mince his words:  

Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI … is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in “maybe possibly some remote chance,” but as in “that is the obvious thing that would happen.” 

Using a tone dripping with panic, Yudkowsky even suggested that countries like the U.S. should be willing to run the risk of nuclear war “if that’s what it takes to reduce the risk of large AI training runs.”  

Many experts suggest that the current state of artificial intelligence is more akin to harvesting the power of the atom for the first time than upgrading to the latest iPhone. Whereas computers of yesteryear simply categorized data, the latest versions of AI have the ability to understand the context of words as millions of people use them and thus are able to solve problems, predict future outcomes, expand knowledge, and potentially even take action.   

The possibilities, these critics suggest, are not limited to AI somehow “waking up” and achieving consciousness. A well-known thought experiment, the so-called “Paper Clip Maximizer,” explains a scenario in which a powerful AI is given the simple task to “create as many paper clips as possible” without any ethical guardrails. The AI could decide, in order to proceed in the most efficient way, to lock us out of the internet, assume control of entire industries, and dedicate Earth’s resources towards that singular goal. If it didn’t immediately know how to do these things, it could learn how, executing its goal of paperclip maximization to the detriment of all life on Earth. It’s a scenario that seems both frightening and possible in an age in which the internet is everywhere, entire industries are automated, and companies are racing to develop artificial intelligence that is more and more powerful. 

The real danger posed by AI is not its potential. It is the lack of ethics. When our science and technologies are guided by an “if we can do something we should” kind of moral reasoning, bigger and faster is not better. Years ago, the theologian and ethicist Peter Kreeft pointed out the reality of technology outpacing our ethics: “Exactly when our toys have grown up with us from bows and arrows to thermonuclear bombs, we have become moral infants.”  

Questions of right and wrong and what it means to be human are integral to the ethics of AI. Designed with malice or carelessness, the destructive capacity of our technology is not evidence of its fallenness, but of ours. As Dr. Kreeft wrote, technologies like thermonuclear weapons achieve something “all the moralists, preachers, prophets, saints, and sages in history could not do: they have made the practice of virtue a necessity for survival.”  

At the same time, Christians should never fall into fatalism. For atheists like Eliezer Yudkowsky, the threat of extinction by a superior race of sentient beings is somewhere between possible and inevitable. If the story of reality is the survival of the strongest and fittest, as atheistic Naturalism declares, then AI seems perfectly cast to take humanity’s place at the top of the heap. Absent a better definition for “humanity” than brute intelligence and ability, AI is a new and potentially violent Übermensch, destined to replace humanity. 

Christians know that this is not how the story ends. Though we are capable of great evil, Someone greater than us is at the helm of history. Christianity can ground a vision of technology both ethically and teleologically. AI is neither an aberration to be abandoned, nor a utopian dream to be pursued at all costs. Rather, like all technology, it is a powerful tool that must be controlled by a shared ethical framework and accurate vision of human value, dignity, and exceptionalism.  

Of course, that vision is only true if we were created by Someone with superior intelligence, love, and wisdom. 

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Kasey Leander. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to colsoncenter.org. Breakpoint

Psalm 23.

 

Accusations of Rightwingism Rarely Have Any Substance In The Age of The Snowflakes.

Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s ‘far-Right’ PM, doesn’t seem so dangerous after all.

Rishi Sunak has an ally in the Italian leader – who has proven surprisingly moderate in government. DT.

FRASER NELSON27 April 2023 •

The Twenty Point Plan.

 https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/22183567/piers-morgan-antiwoke-manifesto/

Views On Racism and Anti-Semitism That Make No Sense - Explained By Melanie.

The antisemitism that drives identity politics

For many in the west, Jew-hatred is invisible and grossly misunderstood

MELANIE PHILLIPS APR 28

Diane Abbott MP

A furore over a British Labour Party politician tells us a great deal about the tsunami of Jew-hatred rolling across Britain, America and the west.

Diane Abbott, who in 1987 became Britain’s first black female member of parliament, caused widespread outrage last weekend when she wrote in The Observer that Jews, Irish people and travellers don’t face racism but merely suffer the same level of prejudice as people with red hair. The only possible victims of racial prejudice, she suggested, are black people.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer promptly suspended Abbott from the parliamentary Labour Party. Her comments threatened to derail his strenuous efforts to rid the party of the stain of antisemitism, which under Labour’s previous hard-left leader Jeremy Corbyn reached epidemic proportions.

The views held by Abbott, who remains a Corbyn acolyte, inhabit the intersection between Jew-hatred and the “identity politics” that is driving western society off the rails.

Abbott ignored the fact that many Jews are brown or black-skinned. The reason for that omission gets to the heart of the antisemitism of the left.

The left’s dogma of “intersectionality” holds that groups are defined by power and powerlessness. People of colour are said to be powerless because they are oppressed by the west, which is powerful. The west is said to be powerful because it is capitalist, and is therefore deemed innately exploitative and rapacious.

Because the west is a historically white culture, white people are themselves deemed innately exploitative and rapacious and can never be victims of black people. Moreover, like Marx himself, such leftists believe that the Jews control capitalism and manipulate all the levers of global power in their own interests to the disadvantage of everyone else.

So, to them, it follows that Jews are innately exploitative and rapacious. They are therefore deemed guilty of “white privilege” even when they are dark-skinned and they can never be victims, only victimisers.

This is why the “intersectional” left treats Israel with such obsessional hysteria, unremittingly presenting Israeli self-defence as aggression. Israel, which defends itself through military strength, is the antisemites’ nightmare of Jewish power on steroids.

Of course, this is old-style antisemitism sitting bang smack at the heart of the identity politics that currently drives the left.

It is therefore beyond troubling that the Democratic Party in the US and so many liberal American Jews have signed up to identity politics. Worse still, these Jews tell themselves that such ideas are Jewish values. In fact, they negate Jewish values and provide the ideological rocket fuel behind the current onslaught against Judaism, Jewish people and the Jewish state.

At the core of this support lies a Jewish terror of being different from the rest of the world. That fear is inseparable from the contempt for and even fear of unabashed religious belief, a hostility that motivates the western left in general.

The result has been that, for many Jews and non-Jews in the west, Jew-hatred has become largely invisible and hugely misunderstood and devalued.

Among her offensive remarks, Abbott said that in pre-civil rights America only black people were required to “sit at the back of the bus”.

This provoked a stinging response from Herschel Gluck, an ultra-Orthodox rabbi in Abbott’s constituency — which contains the largest Haredi community  in Europe —whom she has, in fact, often supported on local issues.

As Gluck told The Jewish Chronicle, there are now constant reports of Jews being abused on buses, kicked off buses and asking the bus driver for support only to find none is forthcoming. When Gluck recently tried to get on a train in Abbott’s own constituency, he was pushed off by football fans, one of whom said, “We don’t allow Jews on the train.”

In both the UK and the US, antisemitic attacks are at record levels and a disproportionate number of them — particularly physical attacks — are against the ultra-Orthodox. Yet these are mostly ignored.

There are two reasons for this invisibility. First, such violent attackers are disproportionately black or Muslim and so directly contradict the unchallengeable “intersectionality” narrative of licensed victim groups.

Secondly, the secular world finds the ultra-Orthodox mystifying and alienating, and many Jews do not want to be associated with them either.

This is partly because such Jews regard the Haredim as a threat to liberal Jewish life. It’s also because they fear that, by protesting on behalf of the ultra-Orthodox, they will be lumped together with them as “the other” by the gentile world.

In Israel, resentment and hostility towards the ultra-Orthodox is a factor behind the four-month long anti-government protests. Disturbingly, in both America and Britain civic authorities have also come to regard the ultra-Orthodox as a threat.

New York State has been tightening requirements for ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools to teach curricula that are “substantially equivalent” to those in non-religious schools. This has been accompanied by aggressive reporting about Hasidic schools in The New York Times and other outlets, with similar media attacks in Britain.

They have claimed that such schools don’t teach basics such as English or maths, routinely beat their pupils and sentence them to adult lives of poverty.

These accounts have been accused of distortion, selective reporting and exaggeration. In City Journal, Ray Domanico reported last month that at the Hasidic school he visited in New York all the boys seemed to be fluent in English, which was freely spoken at home, while graduates had gone on to be successful business owners and leaders.

Critics of such schools also don’t appreciate that Talmud study fosters analytical thinking to a level far higher than anything taught in regular schools.

Rabbi Asher Gratt is a governor in one of the largest Haredi schools in Britain. As he has written, Talmud study creates practical images of abstract concepts, connects these through lateral thinking and teaches concentration, memory skills and problem-solving to a high level.

It might therefore be thought that the Haredi approach has something of value to impart to mainstream schools — where illiteracy and innumeracy levels are often very high through fundamental deficiencies in the way children there are taught.

In Britain, pressure applied to Haredi schools goes far beyond any apparent concern about basic standards. For a number of years, the education regulator Ofsted has been trying to force Haredi schools to teach LGBTQ+ issues.

The schools’ protest that they never teach sexuality at all, because they believe it to be inappropriate and against their religious values, has fallen on deaf ears. A liberal society, they are told, demands that all schoolchildren be taught about all kinds of sexuality in order to promote tolerance and inclusiveness.

Yet preventing a religious minority from teaching its children according to its own religious precepts is fundamentally intolerant and exclusive. To Britain’s “liberal” bureaucratic mind, however, the fact that the Haredim pose no threat to anyone else and that their children are largely free from the antisocial behaviour commonplace elsewhere cuts no ice at all.

Difference, particularism and separateness are now viewed in themselves as a threat that must not be tolerated. The only values permitted are universalist ones. The equality of outcomes promoted by identity politics is a universalist value.

Universalism, however, is a fundamentally anti-Jewish creed. Jews are the most particularist community on earth. Universalism denies them the difference that defines their unique behaviour as well as their unique experience of suffering.

Jews who flinch from their historic burden of difference have latched onto universalism as the ultimate means of erasing difference. That’s why they support Black Lives Matter, campaign against Israel and relativise the Holocaust by equating it with “many genocides”.

They have thus signed up to the very creed that lies behind the mindset of Diane Abbott and the terrifying onslaught against Jews throughout the west.

Jewish News Syndicate