7 February 2014

"Hi, my name is Woody." Men's underwear in American novelty type stores are sold with that tag. Which leads me to the subject at hand, Woody Allen, who I'm sure had no "stake" in that novelty.

 

I don't like Woody Allen's films and I find the persona of Woody Allen, as presented through most of his films, as truly annoying. However, the allegations of sexual abuse currently being made against him are the same ones made over ten years ago by his angry ex-wife, Mia Farrow, and her impressionable young daughter during a hotly contested divorce case. And they were found by a New York Court to be inadequate to warrant further investigation, which in street speak is to say they were baseless and likely lies, even if Farrow's money carried less clout in a New York court than Allen's. The new and unchanged allegations against Allen are noteworthy only in their being little different in tone and quality from so many false accusations made over the past thirty years against men by young females and young males claiming to have been sexually abused.

 

The real scandal is that such accusations are regularly believed by a credulous public and a sensationalist loving media. Why aren't those accusations, when found to be untrue as they too often are, labeled as "libelous" and prosecuted as loudly as the fraudulent cases against the accused originally were? A similar question, though, could be asked about a related issue: Why are not the purveyors of sham Holocaust survivor stories in dozens of  books and films not prosecuted for fraud and sued by the nations whose names are tarred by their lies? In all fairness, it cannot only be the Jewish "nation" that is defamed by false libels.

 

But that is another, if related issue, to the one involving a Woody who, not coincidentally, is one of the many purveyors of American fictions, which we dare not call lies. For a perceptive observer would notice that his often times real life storylines fit somewhere in the middle between those of the sweet myth of personal innocence, which lies at the bottom of American's sense of exceptionalism, and the pornographic industry's well oiled fantasies of personal power, which lurk in the dark corners of American business and military competitiveness.

 

Tens of thousands of men, including two I personally know, have had their lives destroyed by false sexual abuse accusations over the past decades and had no recourse to a semblance of a fair public hearing in a court of justice as even accused murderers are given. I have never once seen in the American mainstream press any article defending the accused male once the piously hurting accusers go on the attack abetted by their victim of the month type supporters. Everyone gets to feel good and righteous about themselves and no mainstream article dares to question their faith in one side of the unknowable truth.

 

Until now. Naturally enough, such an article comes from the Jewish press, the only real force in influencing not only American foreign policy, but also cultural self awareness.  The Jewish Forward online edition has published two of them (the most interesting being this one:  http://forward.com/articles/192265/public-accusation-against-woody-allen-has-ugly-whi/#ixzz2sf8Rgt5L) stating the obvious that should have been shouted from the hilltops long ago: The accused must be given the presumption of innocence according to law; and the way the media and the public jump on the hate wagon attacking the accused resembles that of a lynch mob. We simply can not know with any certainty, outside of untampered medical and DNA testing, who is lying and who is telling the truth in cases of interpersonal relationships. And lets be honest - sexual abuse and rape both fit in that category. Now let's listen to the accuser's stories and compare them dispassionately and compassionately to the those of the accused.

 

Jewish Power, in its good form as exhibited by the Forward article, might be what is needed to bring some sanity into the sexual abuse discussion, and some real justice for both the accusers and the accused. Especially when those accused, including celebrities, priests, rabbis and educational institutions are conceived of by the accusers and their attorneys as being money bags for a big payoff. In this case, though, the Forward is defending a much loved celebrity who is, most importantly, a member of the tribe. It even hints at his victimhood, a ploy typically used by the pious accusers and now being turned not too subtly against them.  If this is what it will take, though, to empower Goyim journalists into being more objective in their reporting on sex abuse allegations, then put me in the Amen corner of Jewish media power.

From The Jewish Daily Forward

Public Accusation Against Woody Allen Has Ugly Whiff of a Lynch Mob

What If Child Abuse Claim Is Untrue?

By Joshua Furst

In the weeks since Mia Farrow took to Twitter to voice her disdain for the lifetime achievement award Woody Allen was given at this year’s Golden Globes, everyone and his sister has flooded the Internet with an opinion about Allen, Farrow’s daughter Dylan and what may or may not have transpired between them twenty-two years ago when she was seven years old and he and her mother were embroiled in a bitter and very public custody battle.

The events in question were thoroughly investigated back in 1992 when Farrow first accused Allen of molesting Dylan. Both sides presented evidence to prove their cases. Both sides poked holes in each other’s evidence. A judge found the evidence against Allen to be inconclusive. The story’s way too complicated to go into in depth here. Look it up. The whole thing was carried out in the context of Allen having left Farrow (or cheated on her, depending on the bias) for her adult daughter Soon Yi Previn, and covered extensively by the media.

Now, in light of Allen’s award and Farrow’s tweet (as well as some tweets from her son Ronan) the press and the public have decided to retry the case in the court of public opinion.

As one would expect when issues of child abuse are involved, much of this chatter has throbbed with intense emotion, almost all of it directed at Allen. We live in times where the mere rumor of a person’s child molesting is enough to turn that person into a pariah. “Sex offenders” are the bogeymen of our time. Very few people have dared to publicly defend Allen. The one article that has prominently done so, written by an associate of Allen’s in the Daily Beast, has been widely circulated and derided as an example of “rape culture,” “white male privilege” and “blaming the victim.”

Not long after that article was published, Nicholas Kristof, who acknowledges being a friend of Mia Farrow, gave Dylan a forum to make her case on his New York Times blog. In an open letter to Allen, she describes in detail her memory of being alone with him in the attic of her mother’s home. She expresses what feels like genuine pain. She calls out people who have worked with Allen in the years since this story first appeared and implies that they should be ashamed of themselves. She insinuates that anyone who likes Allen’s films is as morally compromised as she believes he is.

But she doesn’t present any new evidence. (For the trial she testified to what happened, in a video made by her mother that in the end hurt her legal case more than it helped it.) Instead she relies on the emotional impact her having come forward to speak her truth will have on the reader.

The very act of accusing, when done in the public sphere, signifies an aggressive claim to power. It has the force of righteous indignation on its side. “J’accuse,” sings the child, crippled with rage, and we all come piling on to join in the chorus, because what makes one feel holier than standing in judgment of someone who always seemed a little weird anyway.

Sometimes, like when Emile Zola shamed the French government into pardoning Alfred Dreyfus, the accusation is proven true and sometimes, like in the McMartin Preschool trials, it’s not. When there’s no proof, we let our biases decide the verdict. And of course, we all agree, child molestation is a bad thing. But so is a lynch mob.

Piety and righteousness are no assurance of truth or rightness. And when we as a society decide that we must have our sacrifice, tarred and feathered and hanging in the town square, we become the thing we’re fighting against.
I’m not taking sides. I have no idea what happened in that attic. I’m just saying that, as this narrative continues to build, I can’t help but think of Shylock, of Leo Frank. I’m saying that maybe the volume should be turned down a little.

Because, if the accusations against Allen are not true, he becomes as much a victim as his accuser. And we, the public, become the victimizer.

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/192265/public-accusation-against-woody-allen-has-ugly-whi/#ixzz2sf8Rgt5L