Francis Carr Begbie
Occidental Observer
December 11, 2014
You would need a heart of stone not to laugh at the humiliating predicament of Rolling Stone magazine. The hipster bible’s lurid account of a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house has spectacularly blown up in its face and the magazine has been forced to issue an excruciating apology to its readers.
The story, by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, seems to have been written without the most basic journalistic checks and safeguards. There was no police investigation or third-party witnesses. The “suspects” were never approached for their side of the story, and now there are openly voiced doubts as to whether any rape took place at all.
Bloggers such as Steve Sailer and Richard Bradley ruthlessly pulled the original story apart. The affair has become a perfect case study of leftist journalism modus operandi in that where the facts clash with the narrative, it is the facts that have to give way.
It is also an instructive in media ruthlessness; for the magazine has chosen to shift responsibility for the debacle on the hapless woman herself with the words that, because of “discrepancies” in the story, its “trust” in her “was misplaced” — a cynical way to treat an obviously vulnerable young person who, whatever happened to her, is clearly still in distress.
But there is another dimension which has only so far been mentioned by Jewish convert blogger Luke Ford — that is the undertow of seething Jewish ethnic resentment that permeates the entire affair.
This can be heard in the initial squawks of indignation from Rubin Erdely’s stoutest defenders — Jewish female journalists. Jezebel’s Anna Merlan initially dismissed Richard Bradley as an idiot and seemed to think gang rape was too foul for ethics. “Uurgh, it’s about ethics in gang rape journalism as well now?” She grudgingly back-pedalled later.
New York Magazine ‘s Kat Stoeffel was similarly indignant that anyone would question the veracity of the affair.
The New York Times was initially supportive of the Rolling Stone story via its reporter Jennifer Steinhauer and happy to take it all at face value. To validate Rubin Erdely’s due diligence, the Times went to two Journalism professors, Helen Benedict and Marc Cooper — both Jewish — who seem to have seen nothing wrong in Rubin Erdely’s reliance of the entire story on the word of one person.
Only Slate’s Hanna Rosen added a note of caution, on a podcast, and that long after the story began to unravel.
But most of all this anti-White animus can be seen clearly in the previous writings of Sabrina Rubin Erdely herself, who has been described as “militantly Jewish” by VDare.com.
Much of her Rubin Erdley’s previous writing has been dedicated to the cult of victimhood. Her worldview seems to encompass the usual bizarre left-wing cosmology in which women and minorities are constantly beset by White hatefulness in the shape of racist cops, Nazi drunks, predatory priests and many other sources of White oppression.
One of the most controversial of her previous stories was from 2011 about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. On this occasion, a defender of the Catholic Church hit back with a blistering reply. In this rebuttal the author Bill Donohue shows that, although hindered by the restrictions on frankness on these matters, he knows exactly what is going on.
He begins:
The sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church provides grist for the mill to those who harbor an animus against it, so a certain amount of cheap shots are to be expected. But what was printed in the September 15 edition of Rolling Stone was not the typical below-the-belt attack: it represents a new low in yellow journalism.
The author of “The Catholic Church’s Secret Sex-Crime Files,” Sabrina Rubin Erdely… knows how to smear, and knows how to exploit stereotypes. As we will see, she is also dishonest.
Ms Rubin Erdely, he says, is a bigot who has brought journalism to a new low. He accuses her of dishonest reporting. He takes apart her selective and biased use of facts. He points out that “As with any form of prejudice, there are staples that are commonly employed by bigoted writers. Anti-Catholics, for instance, like to play on the stereotype that the Catholic Church operates in secret, as a top-down organization, run by Rome. True to form, not including the title of Erdely’s piece, the term “secret” appears 16 times in her article.” He accuses her of trying to rope the pope into an international conspiracy.
He is surely quite reasonable when he makes this point. For suggestions of secretiveness and cabal-like conspiracizing and institutional cover-ups by a priesthood, are totally beyond the pale when applied to certain other religions.
Charitably, he writes, “Erdely’s description of the priesthood is not a reflection of her Jewishness—Jews have written excellent works on the Catholic Church—it is a reflection of her stupidity.”
Despite this, Mr Donohue lands a few swipes at Jewish behaviour in analogous circumstances. He mentions how New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg lied to the public about the real reason for the discreet removal of his deputy (it was for beating his wife). He points out that many in the Orthodox Jewish community prefer to deal with such issues internally.
Indeed, the principle of mesira dictates that Jews are not to inform on other Jews, including in matters relating to sexual abuse which has been rife in Orthodox Jewish communities. It’s noteworthy that sexual abuse within Jewish communities has been more or less off limits to the mainstream media and certainly not a topic that Ms. Rubin Erdely would cover. For example, almost two years ago Taki pointed out that the practice of mesira includes the New York Times:
Speaking of little boys, leave it to The New York Times to find a front-page story unfit to print because it wasn’t anti-Catholic: The Brooklyn DA recently arrested an astounding 85 Jewish Orthodox men on charges of child sex abuse. Back in 1985 a Hasidic “therapist” was indicted for abusing five boys, but police suspected he abused more than a hundred. Avrohom Mondrowitz fled to Israel, where he remains to this day a free man. Those nice guys who shoot rock-throwing Palestinian children refuse to extradite him. Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes now has to tread carefully. Fifty rabbis have signed a public announcement in Yiddish denouncing the Hasidic family who went to the cops. They asked—now get this—for any believer to kill the family that informed “on fellow Jews.” So what will happen to the 85 perverts? All I know is the Times has not published a word, whereas when the Catholic Church sex scandal broke, it led the news in the front page for months. There is something very evil when rabbis who hate the non-Jewish world can dictate to an abused child’s parents whether or not to talk to the mostly non-Jewish fuzz. If some parent were to go and firebomb the Times, we might see it appear on the back pages.
Toward the end of Donahue’s exculpatory essay, he makes a very serious insinuation indeed as to some of the motives at play. Readers of The Culture of Critique can be under no illusion as to the scenario he is outlining — organised Jewish anti-White malice gleefully smearing the Church out of pure racial hatred. Here we move from journalism to a Lynne Abraham, the District Attorney for Philadelphia, but the sentiments are the same.
Finally there is the matter of the District Attorney who started the grand jury investigations in the first place, Lynne Abraham. Erdely mentions her role, but only in the most positive terms. Here is what the reader was not told.
Abraham launched her investigations into wrongdoing in the Philadelphia Archdiocese ten years ago. From the very beginning, she knew full well that she would come up empty: the matters she probed fell outside the statute of limitations. So why press the issue? Her goal was to indict in the court of public opinion, allowing uncontested grand jury testimonies to affect the reputation of the Catholic Church. Everything she did was fodder for a new round of hearings and condemnations.
What is not generally known is that it was absolutely unethical for Abraham to focus her exclusive attention on the Catholic Church, acting as if no other secular or religious organization had any track record of concealing the sexual abuse of minors. Why was it unethical? Because that was not her charge. On March 31, 2011, I sent a letter in the overnight mail to Abraham, the text of which appears below:
“In the Grand Jury report of September 26, 2001 (First Judicial District, Criminal Trial Division), it says that the Grand Jury was charged ‘to investigate the sexual abuse of minors by individuals associated with religious organizations and denominations.’ You were the District Attorney at that time.
“Could you identify which ‘religious organizations and denominations’ you pursued, other than the Roman Catholic Church? It is important to the process that we ascertain accurate information.”
Abraham never replied. Is there any wonder why?
There has been wrongdoing—too much wrongdoing—by members of the Catholic clergy. Reporting on it is not a problem; selectively reporting on it is. Worse still are malicious distortions of the kind found in Erdely’s diatribe.
Rolling Stone should stick to what it does best, reporting on music and the entertainment business, and leave issues like religion to those who are better suited to address it. Serious journalism is the work of serious journalists. It should be clear by now that Sabrina Rubin Erdely is not among them.” (“Rolling Stone gets ugly: Vile hit on Philly archdiocese“)
Journalism and prosecutorial discretion as ethnic warfare that cannot tell its name.
Despite their lack of ethics and their ethnic biases, journalists like Erdely have a powerful influence because they have access to the mainstream media. Let’s hope that Ms. Rubin Erdely’s career cannot be salvaged. But don’t bet on it.