Under The Olive Tree

As the saga unfolds - “Texas authorities have legal custody of 416 children.”

These people’s homes and village are continually derided in the press as “a compound”. We are being fed a pejorative view of these people - and they are being accused in the press of criminal activity within their community. We are told that the young men in this community are “groomed to perpetuate the cycle.”

If we are to believe that the authorities are stepping in to “protect” these children on the grounds that “Court documents said a number of teen girls at the 1,700-acre compound were pregnant, and all the children were removed on the grounds that they were in danger of “emotional, physical, and-or sexual abuse.” - then we had better look closer to home to see if our children are next.

In a quick search on the Internet, the following official statics for the United States can be found:

The teenage birth rate in United States is the highest in the developed world, One million teens in the USA will become pregnant over the next twelve months. More than half of them are 17 years old or younger when they have their first pregnancy.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), there were 854,122 legal induced abortions in the US in 2003. That is 1.6 abortions per minute day and night, 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the year 2003.

During 2005, an estimated 899,000 children in the 50 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico were determined to be victims of abuse or neglect.

An estimated 1,460 children died due to child abuse or neglect.

In 2005, more than three-quarters of perpetrators of child maltreatment (79.4%) were parents, and another 6.8 percent were other relatives of the victim.

According to United States Department of Justice document Criminal Victimization in the United States, there were overall 111,490 white and 36,620 black victims of rape or sexual assault reported in 2005 or a total of 148,110. That is one rape every 3 1/2 minutes in the US.

You might want to ask yourself if any of these things are taking place in your community, or your church, or your child’s school, or even your own home.

Our children attend public schools - compounds really - where access is through a metal detector, drugs are rampant, sexual activity takes place on a regular basis, student/teacher liaisons are common, and condoms and contraceptives are distributed to students.

In 16 States a child can have an abortion without parental consent.

Can we as a society honestly say we are not grooming our children to perpetrate a cycle of exposure to possible emotional, physical, and-or sexual abuse? Have all the siblings and parents of the girls who beat a classmate deaf and nearly blind, and then posted it on the Internet, been taken into “protective custody”? Have all the children in their community been put in legal custody of the State? What about the Michigan community where a man was gruesomely killed? Is that community under lock down?

Remember, in Texas “all the children were removed on the grounds that they were in danger of “emotional, physical, and-or sexual abuse.”

What is the real reason for what is taking place in Texas? Is it to protect anyone? Are we kidding ourselves?

We all might want to ask ourselves the question as to whether or not this is religious persecution. Remember, all of this is being done on the power of one warrant to investigate one accusation of the abuse of one individual.

Remember the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany, and the Jews.

“In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up.” - a poem attributed to Pastor Martin Niemoller (1892–1984)