Just as the 1991 Los Angeles Riots provoked soul-searching on the part of this city, the London Riots are causing a rethink of social policy in Great Britain in particular and the western world in general.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach writes: Who is a responsible for the moral rot that has set in Britain? The police are blaming the youth for being hooligans, as if young people are supposed to learn values on their own when almost half are growing on the streets without fathers. The politicians are blaming a culture of selfishness, egged on by Wall Street, as if bankers staring at wads of cash would garner inspiration to put the communal interest before their own pockets.
No, Britain has become a rotting carcass due to the failure of a moribund, stultifying, and amoral religion, more concerned with propriety and causing no offense than simply teaching right from wrong.
I lived in Britain for 11 years where I slowly watched the Church of England and other mainline Christian bodies succumb to PC correctness, refusing to ever condemn immoral behavior. Six of our nine children were born in Oxford and London and on virtually each occasion the three other women who shared my wife’s hospital room had their parents present for support rather than a boyfriend or husband. Even so, religious leaders failed to ever condemn the narcissistic, selfish, womanizing men who behaved like Neanderthalic inseminators rather than gentlemen.
Contrary to public opinion, values do not come from schools or University professors but from the Ten Commandments. Teachers merely convey an established moral system to their pupils. But if that system is allowed to rot by religious leaders forgetting that their first responsibility is to communicate moral behavior and courageously criticize actions that unweave the fabric of society, the result is newspaper editors who will listen in to a dead girls messages to boost circulation and youth who feel the right to burn down a city when angry.
