As we struggle to comprehend the growing evil of the terrorist group ISIS, we need to look no further than our own neighborhood bullies to understand key weaknesses within ISIS’s tactics in order to thwart them.

Terrorists aren’t the only villains who use violent acts to create fear in part by targeting innocent, non-combatants. Bullies do so every school day in America, causing more than 160,000 children to stay home and motivate others to take their life. Bullies also wed power to fear and target innocent classmates, except bullies do so to gain social status as terrorists strive to usurp political power.

Both ISIS and schoolyard bullies endeavor to dominate a target’s psyche through addling fear, foreboding powerlessness, and threat of future cruelty. Both groups sneer at others with disdain and contempt, believing they are a kind of master race, destined to rule and superior to their targets who “deserve” to be treated with unspeakable cruelty.

Most of us have no opportunity to thwart terrorism. We rely upon our courageous men and women in uniform for that. But we can muster a more common courage to thwart terror from bullying in our schools

“Terrorism,” wrote New York Times columnist David Brooks, “is not an act of war but of taunting,” and taunting is among a bully’s sharpest knives.

A taunt is a battle cry intended to demoralize another and make a target abandon self-defense, such as the late Alex Moore of Jemison, Ala., who in May, 2010 took her life in part due to taunts from classmates who called her “fat bitch,” among other slurs for more than two years.

A group of eight male bullies stalked a younger and smaller target in California for months. They made the ticking sound of a clock when he walked by, letting him know that as the ringleader told him, “You can run, faggot, but you can’t hide.”

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, through escalating their barbarism upon the innocent, wants the free world to feel the same dread, drop its guard and give up.

As terrorists are willing and able to kill the body, most serial bullies want to damage and even kill their target’s spirit. And just as terrorists rejoice in their brutal murders, some bullies rejoice in their evil deeds as well.

When the suicide of overweight Alex Moore was announced at her school, one of her most enthusiastic terrorizers proclaimed with swagger, “That fat bitch deserved to die!” In backwater parts of the world, being non-Muslim can be a fatal distinction. In backwater parts of America, so can being overweight.

Genocide is also a tool of terrorism, and “to begin to fathom genocide,” writes international bullying expert Barbara Coloroso, “the place to start is not with conflict but with bullying. Bullying is a conscious, willful, deliberate activity intended to harm, to induce fear through the threat of further aggression, and to create terror in the target.”

Though the battle plan to thwart ISIS and adolescent bullying differ, one important similarity must be heeded.

Martin Luther King said that evil carries within itself the seed of its own destruction. When it comes to terrorism and bullying, one of those seeds is an intoxicating hubris, which causes both groups to over-estimate their abilities.

Like schoolyard bullies, ISIS’s driving arrogance may have caused it to march into a self-made trap. By burning people alive, drowning others in cages and beheading many more and with such demonic theatrics, crucifying innocent children, burying children alive and selling others into sex slavery, it has moved the world from fear to indignation and anger, creating an unintended foundation of hope because as Augustine realized, “Hope has two beautiful daughters: their names are anger and courage. Anger that things are the way they are. Courage to make them the way they ought to be.”

President Obama’s comments this week about ISIS shows he has yet to demonstrate such needed anger, nor fully comprehend the sadism that electrifies a terrorist’s mind and perverts his soul. “Ideologies,” he said, “are not defeated with guns but with better ideas and more attracting and more compelling vision.”

This may be true when assessing conflict, misunderstanding, miscommunication and so on. But terrorists and bullies are not motivated by these conditions. They are motivated by disdain and contempt, which stem from a volatile mixture of supremacy and hatred. They glory in a form of evil that requires potent force, not “better ideas.”

Most of us have no opportunity to thwart terrorism. We rely upon our courageous men and women in uniform for that. But we can muster a more common courage to thwart terror from bullying in our schools, the leading form of child abuse in the nation and where millions of innocent children have their psychological skin seared from taunts, terror and threats of further abuse daily.

Evil isn’t just “over there.” It slithers each day through our playgrounds and classrooms. Anger toward it is easy. The hard part, as with ISIS, is wedding our anger to courage in order to thwart it.

Paul Coughlin is an expert witness regarding bullying and the law, a former newspaper editor and is the author of numerous books, including Raising Bully-Proof Kids. He is the Founder of The Protectors: Freedom From Bullying-Courage, Character & Leadership for Life, which provides a comprehensive and community-wide solution to adolescent bullying in schools, summer camps, faith-based organizations, and other places where bullying can be prevalent.

Sayreville Schools Superintendent Rich Labbe made the announcement last week during a meeting with football parents, after a criminal investigation found credible evidence of pervasive and generally accepted forms of harassment, intimidation and bullying on the team. Now, the Associated Press reports, seven teens are facing sex crime charges.

The was the right decision by the school district because contrary to popular myth, bullying players and coaches don’t listen much to peace, love and understanding. They listen to swift, immediate and painful consequences, which is exactly what school officials did.

It’s the right medicine for an illness that plaques this nation.

Still, some New Jersey parents are furious, saying the school’s decision is unfair to innocent players who didn’t bully. Not so fast parents. Most bullying takes place in front of peers but away from authority. Bullies bank on a code of silence from bystanders who should speak up but don’t. So when it comes to bullying, there aren’t many “innocent bystanders.”

Last September, in Utah, stand-up coach Matt Labrum and his staff suspended all 80 players on the Union High School football team for their off-field antics, as well.

Labrum believes football helps create great men. As the founder of an anti-bullying organization, The Protectors, I wish I could agree.

Of all the complaints we receive about sports programs and bullying, no other sport comes even close to the horrendous and sometimes criminal behavior associated not just with football players, but with coaches as well.

A mother from Ellwood City, Pa., reported how several high school football players forced her 13-year-old son to drink urine out of a plastic soda bottle.

Roxana Spady of Columbus, Neb., sued Columbus Public Schools. She says her son was physically assaulted and held while a team member defecated in a dormitory toilet and then dunked her son’s head in it.

Even flag football is messed up. Four Walker Middle School players in Tampa, Fla., faced criminal charges, including third-degree felony battery. Two received 5 years probation for sodomizing the younger player with hockey and broom sticks.

A California pastor remembers how high school players pulled his pants and underwear down to his ankles and shoved Icy Hot up his rectum with their fingers and a wooden tongue depressor. He says they did it multiple times and threatened to beat and murder him if he told anyone.

Football culture harbors bullying, a fact illuminated by the damning Wells Report commissioned by the NFL, which led to the firing of bully player Richie Incognito, coach Jim Turner, and head trainer Kevin O’Neill.

Here’s why football is more messed up than other high school sports: Bullying follows power, and football programs are the most powerful entity on most school campuses.

This power delivers privilege, entitlement and above-the-law thinking. It’s Enron with swollen biceps and acne. Also, bullying thrives in larger groups, and football has a larger roster than other sports.

This attitude that harms football culture has a poster boy, former Miami Dolphins guard Richie Incognito, who in the Wells Report exhibits classic bullying mentality: hubris, lack of remorse,obstruction of justice, blaming the victim and unwillingness to acknowledge wrongdoing.

The disgraced player with one of the dirtiest records in the NFL surely learned how to get away with bullying well before college and going pro.

I help numerous schools fight bullying each year. “If you really want to decrease bullying,” I tell them, “start with your football coaches,” who sometimes are also the school’s athletic directors, giving them even more power and cover for their transgressions.

If these coaches possess the right moral fiber and have had anti-bullying training, then schools have real advocates. If not, one or more could be harming that school right now.

Ironically, football also has the power to lead our schools away from bullying, which is the No. 1 form of child abuse in the nation. Better football players, urged by better coaches, are taking the cachet of athleticism seriously and using their prominence to influence others.

Take quarterback Carson Jones from Queen Creek, Arizona, for example. He befriended fellow student Chy Johnson, who was born with a birth defect, had trash thrown at her, was called “stupid” and was pushed down in her school’s hallways. Carson “saved me,” Johnson told a reporter.

Like the football player I spoke with in Plano, Texas, who saw his teammates regularly tormenting a kid. He calmly sat next to the kid, and the bullying stopped.

These are the players with the right stuff that coach Labrum believes makes real men. I agree with him there.

The NFL is gaining hard-fought yardage against its bullying culture. But why is high school football so blindsided? There are dozens, if not hundreds, of broken programs just like the one in New Jersey. They, too, should be shut down and rebuilt by real coaches with the red-blooded values of respect, freedom and dignity for all.

Paul Coughlin is an expert witness regarding bullying and the law, a former newspaper editor and is the author of numerous books, including Raising Bully-Proof Kids. He is the Founder of The Protectors: Freedom From Bullying-Courage, Character & Leadership for Life, which provides a comprehensive and community-wide solution to adolescent bullying in schools, summer camps, faith-based organizations, and other places where bullying can be prevalent.

History reminds us that through the portal of individual injustice and abuse strangely flows the opportunity to let freedom ring. The NFL, with its reputation for no-nonsense reform on the battlefield, finds itself on the eve of such a hallowed moment taking place on America’s much larger battlefield for the health and well-being of our children: The fight against systematic abuse we euphemistically call bullying.

Enter the NFL’s reluctant, if not accidental, Rosa Parks: Dolphin’s offensive tackle Jonathan Martin.

Weary Rosa Parks, that icon of the Civil Rights Movement who refused to relinquish her seat on that segregated bus so many years ago, became a then-reluctant reformer against systematic abuse and humiliation.

Unlike Parks though, Martin, a Stanford graduate, left his seat and the Dolphins, reportedly after two years of abuse and assault, culminating in a move straight out of the bully playbook: When the target [Martin] sits down to eat at the team’s lunch table, the rest of us will get up in a public display of contempt intended to isolate and humiliate him. Reports say Martin stormed out and didn’t return.

His alleged ringleader bully could not have a more perfect name, since bullies are adept at walking socially inappropriate and criminal lines: Richie Incognito.

Respected coach Tony Dungy reportedly put him on his “DNDC” list: “Do Not Hire Because of Character.” Incognito, a 9-year-pro, was considered one of the NFL’s dirtiest players when he was with the St. Louis Rams. He may well be the NFL’s Bull Connor, too.

Reports say Incognito is considered a “leader,” within the team [Bull Connor was a leader, a Commissioner of Public Safety]. This also fits the bully profile since many are leaders – in the wrong direction.

Incognito reportedly sent texts and left voicemail messages for his biracial teammate that were racially charged [“half-n*****], threatened to defecate in Martin’s mouth, and track down his family and harm them.

This isn’t good-natured teasing where both people are laughing and where people come together in a spirit of fraternity. It is taunting, harassment and illegal, if proven.

By leaving the organization, Martin, a two-year starting player, forced it to contend with an age-old problem within sports, especially football, a program that we get more complaints about than all other high school sports programs combined.

Like Parks, Martin may well be a reluctant reformer who has shown America’s youth that to be a target doesn’t make you “weak” [starting tackle] or “stupid” [Stanford graduate]. By leaving a bullying hot spot, he shows us that such behavior makes us wise, brave and dignified.

Will the NFL show us similar virtue and lead us against what many believe is the leading form of child abuse in the nation, the only kind the most beleaguered among us are told to “just ignore”?

Because in the end, sports aren’t about sports. They are a fusing of our hopes and aspirations, our dreams and apprehensions. In their most noble expression, sports are the inner us, our collective need as incurably social beings to cheer for a common hero, an extension of our own heroic capacity, latent as it may be. We need help getting it out. Sports helps this happen.

Ironic, isn’t it, how the sport most hampered by accusations of abuse and psychological assault is also strangely the sport that can lead us as a nation to a freer, bullying-less future?

We know this to be true given its cultural horsepower. We feel it is so when we witness such adulation and athletic prowess. But will this governing body have the courage and guts to make it so through bold freedom-from-bullying initiatives that break past prejudice, ignorance, contempt and other building blocks of systematic abuse and injustice that bullying requires to exist and thrive?

That’s the real story here, and it’s the real victory an entire nation longs to celebrate and cheer.

Paul Coughlin is an expert witness regarding bullying and the law, a former newspaper editor and is the author of numerous books, including Raising Bully-Proof Kids. He is the Founder of The Protectors: Freedom From Bullying-Courage, Character & Leadership for Life, which provides a comprehensive and community-wide solution to adolescent bullying in schools, summer camps, faith-based organizations, and other places where bullying can be prevalent.

Buchanan admits that the win “wasn’t good for anybody…The score could have very easily been 150 to nothing.”

I have been in Buchanan’s sweaty sneakers.

Also a high school coach, I’ve won games by more than 15 points–in soccer. He’s right. It’s no good for anyone.

Like Buchanan, I could have made the score far worse. I, too, have pulled my starters early in the game like I did this Tuesday and we still scored 9 goals.

I’ve even played with 4 less players, quietly pulling them off the pitch so not to embarrass the other team any more. And we still kept scoring.

I know this drill. And I also know what bullying is and isn’t.

By framing what happened as bullying, we learn two important lessons on the chalk board of life: Most don’t know its definition, and it’s well past time we find another word to describe this intentional form of abuse and assault.

Though definitions can vary, most agree that adolescent bullying is the deployment of superior power (can be physical, verbal, social and even economic) to intentionally harm (not just hurt) an individual (not team) over a period of time and for no good reason.

It’s victimization without provocation, and it usually includes humiliation, threat of further abuse, isolation and some form of terror through power is wedded to fear.

These terms must be applied interpersonally (think person(s) on person), not corporately (think team). Targets are abused and assaulted on a personal level. Their very identity is impugned and often damaged.

Bullies want targets to question their value as human beings, which didn’t happen here. Reports show that the winning team didn’t talk smack.

They didn’t demean the other team as individuals. Rather, they put on a clinic with superior skill and athleticism.

Other teams should be learning from this coach instead of accusing him of some of the worst behavior imaginable.

The losing team (and parents) may have felt humiliation (it would have been worse if Buchanan told his team not to score), but it’s not the kind of intentional humiliation that damages on a soul level.

Also, the winning team didn’t intend to socially marginalize the other team, another hallmark of bullying. The winning team didn’t wed power to psychological fear, anxiety and terror, the way bullies do.

Knee-jerk reactions like this reveal that to most, bullying really means any event that makes me feel bummed-out sometimes, a kind of emotional owie in a culture gifted in creating an ever-growing list of victimhood.

It’s more than time to forbid this word from appearing on the sports page. It’s time to get rid of it completely.

With what?

Bullying is a specific form of abuse that is fueled primarily by hate and contempt. It’s assault upon a person’s psyche, a diminishment of their core identity to the point where a person may even want to die.

Assault is a better term. Perhaps even good old-fashioned “Hating” or a new word, “Contempting.”

The mood in Buchanan’s post-game locker room was funeral-like. In doing what they were trained to do through superior personnel, coaching or both, it was apparent that this team didn’t feel good about what they had accomplished.

My, I’ve been there as well. But it wasn’t because they assaulted the other team, expressing contempt and disdain.

Contrast this to how bullies feel after they attack. They do not feel a mingling of remorse and regret. Studies show that they feel electrified, glee and even pride for their “accomplishment.” They take pleasure in another’s pain.

I just gave you a simplified definition of sadism.

Paul Coughlin is an expert witness regarding bullying and the law, a former newspaper editor and is the author of numerous books, including Raising Bully-Proof Kids. He is the Founder of The Protectors: Freedom From Bullying-Courage, Character & Leadership for Life, which provides a comprehensive and community-wide solution to adolescent bullying in schools, summer camps, faith-based organizations, and other places where bullying can be prevalent.

The openly gay founder of the “It Gets Better” anti-bullying campaign made news earlier this month with controversial comments at a high school journalism conference in Seattle, where he urged participants to “ignore the bull—- in the Bible” that condemns homosexuality and branded the book a “radically pro-slavery document.” Several students walked out, prompting Savage to call them “pansy-a–ed.”

Savage has since apologized for using the term in reference to the students who left the auditorium, but the incident was the latest example of the 47-year-old syndicated sex columnist’s vitriol against Christians and conservatives.

– Last year, he told HBO’s Bill Maher he wished all Republicans were dead and invited presidential candidate Herman Cain to perform a sex act on him.

– He wrote about volunteering for Gary Bauer’s 2008 presidential campaign, saying that while sick with the flu, he licked doorknobs in campaign offices and handed Bauer a pen coated with his viral saliva. He later said he was joking.

– Savage wrote a column in which he attempted to make Rick Santorum’s last name a synonym for a gay sex act.

– Savage in 2009 ridiculed the Rev. Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church by defining “saddlebacking” as “the phenomenon of Christian teens engaging in unprotected anal sex in order to preserve their virginities.”

– Savage fought against Mississippi legislation banning the sale of sex toys by urging his readers to send used ones to a journalist whose expose led to the arrest of an adult video store owner.

Other anti-bullying advocates said Savage’s attacks show the very behavior he claims to abhor.

“What I preach is about respect and dignity, and he violated the very platform we are trying to promote and move forward,” Edie Raether, a parenting coach and author of “Stop Bullying Now,” told FoxNews.com. “There’s no question he was acting like a bully. It creates a feeling of hypocrisy.”

Paul Coughlin, founder of The Protectors, an international anti-bullying nonprofit group with faith-based and values-based programs, said Savage’s latest broadside, delivered at a journalism conference sponsored by the National Scholastic Press Association and the Journalism Education Association, only hurt his cause.

“His comments are so out of kilter and they really do work against his ultimate interest: to diminish bullying,” said Coughlin. “He really is working against the ultimate goal at this point. I don’t think we really have a national spokesperson for the movement, and he should not be it unless he changes his ways.”

Savage said Sunday that he did not mean to insult all Christians, and he said he regretted insulting students.

“My use of “pansy-a–ed” was insulting, it was name-calling, and it was wrong,” he said. “And I apologize for saying it.”

The White House has embraced the “It Gets Better” project, with President Obama recording a video in October 2010, for the campaign in which he calls for dispelling “this myth that bullying is just a normal rite of passage.” Last year, the Obamas hosted an anti-bullying conference affiliated with the campaign..

Savage, whose campaign was launched after a 15-year-old high school student committed suicide after being bullied over his sexual orientation and amid other tragedies involving gay teens, has a valid message, said Amanda Nickerson, director of the University of Buffalo’s Alberti Center for the Prevention of Bullying Abuse and School Violence.

“But I think a better way to do it is to show that you’re a model for what you’re advocating for – and that is treating all people with respect,” Nickerson said. “I don’t think it was wise what he did, but I think he can recover from it and move forward.”

Meanwhile, Rick Tuttle, a teacher at California’s Sutter Union High School who attended the lecture with several students, told Fox News that he had high hopes for Savage’s remarks.

“I thought there was a value going to this conference, which I thought was going to be about anti-bullying,” Tuttle said. “But what we got was a vulgar, profanity-laced attack on Christians and some student actually asked if they could leave.

“This is what we teach kids to do when they’re being bullied – walk away,” Tuttle continued. “And that’s what they did.”