Somebody should free them from their delusions.
“Slaves we were in a land not of our own…”
Amy Klein was 29 years and living in Jerusalem. She wanted to begin a new life so she snagged a job as managing editor of the Jewish Journal and flew to Los Angeles.
One Wednesday when the Journal was about to go to press, Amy wanted to go to the beach and have a few drinks but her boss Rob Eshman made her stay at work until the paper was ready to print.
Any and her multiple personalities were victims of human trafficking. They had become slaves…
I quote from the March 30, 2007 Jewish Journal Cover: ‘Freeing The Slave…In Los Angeles’
When I first read that, I didn’t think, ‘Oh, that’s terrible. What can we do?”
No, because of the inundation of these poorly-documented stories, I thought, “Amy Klein has written another hysterical piece and the Journal’s Rob Eshman published it because he loves this credulous crap.”
Here’s Slate’s takedown of a similar piece in The New York Times Sunday magazine (Jan. 25, 2004).
Klein’s story begins with the story of a desperate illegal alien (Flor) from Mexico who chose to enter this country illegally. Surprise, the criminals she allied herself with did not treat her too good, forcing her to work long and hard for little pay.
What a shocker! When you choose to join a criminal enterprise, you often don’t get treated too good.
I don’t blame Flor or anyone else who tries to enter the United States to create a better life for themselves and those they love. If I was in their shoes, I’d probably do the same thing. Nor do I blame Flor and other illegals trying to get as much support as they can to make a better life for themselves. But they are as much slaves as people who join the Mafia and then find out they can’t leave.
Amy Klein’s story reads like a publicity release from one of the anti-trafficking activist groups such as Kevin Bales’s Free the Slaves.
As Jack Shafer wrote on Slate Jan. 26, 2004:
For instance, in 2002, the U.S. government estimated between 700,000 and 4 million international victims of human trafficking each year, with 50,000 people trafficked into the United States. In 2003, the U.S. conceded the unreliability of its previous nose-count by reducing its estimate to 800,000 to 900,000 people trafficked worldwide and 18,000 to 20,000 into the United States.When Landesman cites the 18,000 to 20,000 number in his article, he acknowledges that the government has yet to determine how many are sold into sex slavery, but then he lets Kevin Bales of the nonprofit group Free the Slaves hype his premise with the speculation that the number is “at least 10,000 a year.” How credible is Bales? How credible are his numbers? Bales claims 27 million slaves around the world, which is only 10 times larger than the estimate of the Anti-Slavery Society, which puts the number at 2.7 million.
State Department go-to guy on slavery John Miller tells Landesman that the 10,000 new sex slaves a year estimate by Bales “could be low.” But the fact is nobody in the field seems to have a good handle on slave traffic numbers or the sex slave population in the United States. So, when Bales surmises that there are between 30,000 to 50,000 sex slaves in the United States at any time, don’t feel the need to believe him. Nobody really knows the true answer, but we do know whose interests are served by any inflation of the numbers.
Klein introduces zero skepticism into her story about the claims of the various activist groups she touts even though Slate.com published their skeptical inquiries two years ago.
