Thursday, March 19, 2015

The Hanging Judge of Sedom and his Kangaroo Court

I posted an article (Dorothy Rabinowtiz) about false convictions for child abuse yesterday. The question is why convictions on absurd claims, unsupported by the evidence are obtained and why the charges are made in the first place?  Dorothy Rabinowitz - Wall Street Journal Reporter and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for writing about this topic notes the following
[She] lays some of the blame, in passing, on “advanced political opinion,” which has created an aura of piety around claims of violation made by women and children. On this view, as Rabinowitz writes, to side with the falsely accused would have been “to undermine the battle against child abuse; it was to betray children and all other victims of sexual predators.” Even to raise questions about these cases would have been tantamount, in the opinion of one of the Amiraults’ tormentors, to victimizing the children all over again.

This explanation readily applies to the defense of false rape charges - such as those reported in Rolling Stone Magazine - where the reporter chose not to even ask the accused about the charges. It was enough if a coed charged a fellow student of rape to make the charges true. Questioning whether a claim of rape is true is betraying all rape victims. This seems to be basis of Federal Title IX regulations.

It also explains the bizarre spectacle of certain blogs - that defend accusations and rumors and even suspicions of sexual abuse - refusing to let the absence of supporting evidence about the veracity of these claims to discredit them.Of course all those who merely questioned the validity of the allegation were simply discredited for doing so.

We have seen how they will take the side of the accuser - even when the authorities that they initially praised and relied upon to validate these accusations have reversed themselves and retracted their defense. To deal with the dissonance of continuing to support the charges when the basis for the support has been removed - they conclude that these distinguished authorities are corrupt or lack the moral strength to say what they believe and obviously must have been pressured to retract their support. The possibility that the accusations were mistaken or misunderstood doesn't seem an option. The possibility that the retraction is a sign of moral integrity is not a consideration.

Instead of acknowledging that careful evaluation of the evidence has shown that the accusations had no basis - these individuals invent negative explanations about their formerly highly regarded authorities such as institutional bias. In other words men of community authority will eventually do what they have to defend community institutions such as schools.  They claim without evidence that the facts must have been suppressed to save jobs. In fact any explanation will do - as long as the accusations of sexual violence are kept alive.

As Rabinowitz noted, it seems that these hanging judges feel that to question the accusations is tantamount to questioning the whole enterprise of protecting the abused and a betrayal of all victims of sexual violence. Thus they view that their denial of the conflicting evidence and their continued support of the false accusations is the correct moral stance required of all moral individuals. Slandering the falsely accused and anyone who supports them - in spite of the lack of evidence - is viewed as courageous and just. In fact anyone who fails to support their vision of things is accused of moral cowardice or hypocrisy or selling out. The hanging judge is convinced that he is the only one with moral backbone.

5 comments :

  1. May I riff on this theme?

    To recognize the charges are untrue in some cases of alleged molestation would be tantamount to acknowledging that the accusers were unable to present a clear, logical, reasoned presentation of the evidence. This would pull away the curtain from the social work and mental health Wizards who often depend on the perception of their collective infallibility to exert their power. In other words, to intimate that these "professionals" can err in judging the veracity of the accusers would send a whole segment of the public into a tizzy. Those people who have sacrificed their intellects on the altar of the latest fad in pop psychology would actually have to start thinking for themselves.

    "We can't allow that," grunt the politically correct overlords as they suspend justice for the accused. "Better a few innocent people sit in prison than to shatter the illusion that we are omniscient and omnipotent."

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  2. This is basically what happened in Nachlaot. A fact finding committee was established run by Rav Porush.

    http://nachlaotchildabuse.blogspot.com/2012/06/english-translation-of-letters-written.html

    excerpt from the letter

    As a sample of the method of my work I
    took three names whom the victims and their parents pointed to as participants
    in the acts of crime that were done in the neighborhood. The victims and their
    parents knew to point out days and hours of the acts as well as the location of
    the what was done. And the writer of these lines worked from all directions to
    "verify" the claims of the victims. To my happiness, I found proofs and clear
    testimony that on those days and hours the "attackers" were in another place. I
    passed on the results to the relevant factors, and to my great sorrow instead
    of the matter making the parents happy that Baruch Hashem their suspicions were
    false and it was possible to breathe freely, these parents stopped co-operating
    with the writer of these lines, and turned their arrows in a direction which is
    not a direction and without permission from the larger committee, and without
    permission from the writer of these lines who serves as the representative of
    the committee.





    The results were not slow to come, the
    desecration of Hashem by transferring the matter to the media and the Internet
    beyond all proportion, people without any yoke of Heaven did not hold back from
    insulting people without investigations and inquiries to Halachic authorities or
    Batei HaDin (Rabbinic Courthouses). This and even moreso they allowed themselves
    to cause sons to be sent far away from their parents and husbands from their
    wives, and who knows if they don't have a hand and a foot in the death of the
    neighbor...

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  3. You do realize that those "certain blogs" will not even realize that you are talking about them. They ares so convinced that it is their holy mission to eradicate abuse in the Frum community, that if there has to be an example made in a situation where some funny things went on but no clear guilt of staff is evident, then let the chips fall where they may!

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  4. https://frumfollies.wordpress.com/2015/03/17/deciphering-the-latest-joint-rabbinical-court-ruling-on-the-meisels-seminaries-scandal/

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  5. Thank you for the link.

    The translation there has this:

    "We are talking about incidents that occurred during the schools years of 5770-5774 [Fall ’09- Summer ‘14]. Incidents before that period are not known. The incidents happened in the first years of Pninim, and from 5772 (the year Binas Beis Yaakov opened) and on, specifically in Binas. {see footnote 2} We are talking about a handful of incidents each year. {See footnote 3}"

    A hand has five fingers. Thus,
    (a handful of incidents each year) = (5 documented incidents/year)

    The years are (1) 5770/1, (2) 5772, (3) 5773, and (4) 5774. A total of 4 years.

    I am going to assume that for every documented incident in the years the Bais Din investigated, there was one undocumented incident.

    Thus, total incidents for each year were [(5 documented incidents/year) x 2]= 10 total incidents/year

    (10 total incidents/year) x (4 years) = 40 incidents total.

    ReplyDelete

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