Vox Day links to a Time article
More than 800 men have joined a movement called “Abused in Scouting,” started by a group of lawyers who worried that the Boy Scouts of America were planning to file for bankruptcy, cutting short the timeline for victims to bring sex abuse claims against the organization in court. Those attorneys filed a lawsuit Monday on behalf of one ex-Scout identified as “S.D.,” who said he was assaulted hundreds of times as a Boy Scout in Pennsylvania in the 1970s. The suit demands $50,000 in damages from both the Boy Scouts organization and the alleged abuser.
The extent of the Boy Scouts’ sex abuse problem first surfaced in 2010 when a judge ordered the organization to release its so-called “Perversion Files,” which listed complaints of abuse in the Scouts. In January, a child abuse expert hired by the Boy Scouts to analyze the files testified that she found 12,254 boys had reported experiencing sexual abuse at the hands of at least 7,800 alleged assailants between 1944 and 2016.
Now, hundreds more men are claiming they were abused by men who do not appear in the published “Perversion Files.” “It’s the largest pedophile ring on earth,” Tim Kosnoff, one of the lawyers representing alleged victims, said during a press conference on Tuesday. “The numbers we’re talking about now dwarf what we’ve seen in the Catholic Church cases.”
It would seem that they’re following the same swarming attack strategy that has been so successful against the Catholic Church. Each accusation against an organization lowers the threshold of credulity for the next accuser, so the conmen pile onto one organization by their thousands. A commitment to fight sexual abuse in one’s ranks is lethal, because it singles you out as an easy mark. Of course, I am assuming that most of the accusations against scoutmasters are false, just as most accusations against priests are false; credulity at this point is irresponsibly naive. Like with the Catholic Church, one starts the ball rolling by casting an absurdly long temporal net, all the way back to World War Fucking II, accusations so far back that the institution cannot possibly defend itself. Especially important is to make sure the 1970’s are covered, because there really was a lot of adults having sex with adolescents that decade.
As I have said before, any organization that is half a century or more old and interacts with children is vulnerable to such attack. Americans’ susceptibility to moral panics over pedophilia, and our absurdly late age of consent so that adults having sex with teenagers can be called “pedophiles”, makes it almost impossible to defend against. For now, the Catholic Church, with its presumption of guilt against its priests and decades-long demonization by external and internal media, is still the accused of choice for the aspiring abuse survivor, but we now see that similar things will happen to other organizations.
Now that it’s not just us sub-human Catholics, can we talk about unfairness? Why should today’s boys lose scouting opportunities because of something that may or may not have happened in the 70s?
Once again, we have a homosexual scandal (in this case, entirely so), and yet the moral status of homosexuals remains stratospheric. Clearly the public’s potential to generalize only follows certain allowed paths.
If this sort of thing spreads, I suppose the outcome would be that no one would dare belong to an organization more than ten years old. A liberal’s dream. Making the world anew indeed.
At Unz
In March 2017 Israeli police arrested 22 ultra-Orthodox Jews for sex crimes against minors and women. In April 2019 Haaretz admitted that “There’s a Hole in the System. Israel Became a Haven for Suspected Jewish Sex Offenders.” The Israeli paper reported that “65 suspected sexual offenders [are] allegedly seeking refuge in Israel.”
…
Malka Leifer was formerly the principal of an orthodox Jewish girls school in Melbourne and has been charged with as many as 74 assaults against minors. The extradition battle over Malka Leifer, who fled Melbourne in 2008 with the help of some in the local ultra-Orthodox community, has dragged on for several years, frustrating her accusers.
In 2015 Michael Lesher, an orthodox Jewish attorney, published a book titled “Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities.” In the introduction Lesher writes that his book isn’t “about sexual abuse per se but on the dismal history of how far too many of those cases have been assiduously concealed both from the public and from the police: how influential rabbis and community leaders have sided with the alleged abusers against their victims; how victims and witnesses of sexual abuse have been pressured, even threatened, not to turn to secular law enforcement for help; how autonomous Jewish ‘patrols,’ displacing the role of official police in some large and heavily religious Jewish neighbourhoods, have played an inglorious part in the history of cover-ups; … how some Jewish (orthodox) communities have even succeeded in manipulating law enforcement officials to protect suspected abusers.”
We’ve grown used to accusations of cover-ups. I doubt that Orthodox Jews are particularly prone to sexual misconduct, but given what’s happening to the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts, can you blame them for wanting to protect themselves? I know it’s counterintuitive, but most groups are not enthusiastic when someone announces that he plans to drag their name through the mud and legally seize their assets.
The destruction of Orthodox Jewry, or even just the ultra-Orthodox, would be a loss to the human race. Fortunately, the Orthodox Jews agree. I read on Wikipedia that the Haredi population in the US is doubling every 20 years. The Orthodox future is looking bright.
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