Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Contributor delivers Coup de Grace to the NYT

The woman woke up one morning and discovered she had a bunch of jumbled ideas in her head that were making the Jews look extremely bad on the international stage, and making the Arabs look really good in their own countries, and to some extent in Europe too.

The woman thought she could cook up all that material in such a way as to pooh pooh the international stories that were telling of Jewish serial rapists committing horrible sexual crimes. She thought she could do this by conflating those stories with a single trivial event about a tenuous case alleging that rape was committed in France by a third generation Swiss born Muslim. She put all that on paper in such a way as to dismiss the Jewish case while making the Arabs look bad. When done with the writing, she could think of no one that would publish her garbage but the New York Times (NYT), and that's where she sent the article.

The woman goes by the Jewish French name, Sylvie Kauffmann. She worked for French publications, and picked up the habit of contributing the occasional piece to the New York Times. This time, she contributed: “A Toxic Mix: Sex, Religion and Hypocrisy,” an article that the NYT published on November 13, 2017. The following is the jumbled material that was crisscrossing the woman's brain when she woke up on that fateful morning.

Story number one: In America, the story of Harvey Weinstein's serial rape of women was mushrooming into a picture where a plethora of Jewish men were exposed as having raped young women or forced them to submit to their sexual advances. It happened everywhere in American societies – from Hollywood to the media world to the Congress to Corporate America, you name it. The stories were of older Jewish men that had acquired the power to make or destroy the life and career of the upstart that would rebuff their advances.

Story number two: Almost concurrent with that big event was the story of a Swiss cleric that happened to be a Muslim. He was being sued by two Muslim women in France, one of them alleging that he raped her once, though she does not deny spending time alone with him not because she had to or because she was a subordinate working for him in any capacity, but because she wanted to be with him. He denies the rape allegation. No trial has taken place. And of course, no verdict has yet been rendered.

Story number three: Aside from all that and separate from it, a wonderful social reformation had started in the Arab world several years previous to these events. The effect of the reformation was still reverberating in the Arab world because Arab women wrote books about it, and made movies about the sexual mores of a conservative society that was beginning to liberalize.

Rather than tell the three stories separately, Sylvie Kauffmann interwove them to make her contrivance sound as if the multiple serial rapes of young women by older Jewish men were a trivial event whereas the allegation leveled against the Swiss man was a momentous one. The writer tried to accomplish this much by starting her article with the Weinstein story, and quickly flipping to that of the Swiss man. She then meshed this discussion with the topic of the Arab women who were telling not of rape but of a welcome social revolution that was taking place in their neck of the woods.

Did Kauffmann succeed in fooling her readers, or did she deliver a deathblow to the New York Times for carrying her article?

Aside from the obvious use of writing techniques to confuse the readers and mislead them about the nature of the Jewish bestiality by conflating it with the high-minded Arab effort to modernize, Sylvie Kauffmann did a poor job managing the chronological order of the three stories.

Her intent being to belittle the significance of the Jewish crimes, Kauffmann started the article with: “If you thought it was challenging for women to accuse Weinstein...” She went on to say it was harder for two Muslim women to accuse a Muslim cleric, but they did it anyway because they were “emboldened” by Hollywood's #MeToo wave.

Not only did the women accuse the cleric, they saw their lawyers who listened to their stories and went on to file lawsuits … all that before the start of the Hollywood wave that emboldened the women in the first place. What a feat! Scientists gave up trying to make the effect precede what caused it, but Sylvie Kauffmann seems to have found a way to do it. Einstein must be smiling in his grave.

That's how Kauffmann started her article. By the time she got to the end, she was telling the story of Arab women who wrote books and made movies about the social revolution that was sweeping their countries.

Unable to say that these women wrote books and made movies in less than a month, Kauffmann admitted that they had accomplished all that several years previous. What she did not do, however, is be honest enough to say that the French women who sued the cleric were inspired by the movement that had taken place in the Arab world and not by the Hollywood wave.

But why did Kauffmann neglect to do that? She did what she did because her intent was not to tell the true story of Arab achievement; it was to create a structure of lies that would sustain her saying: Don't dwell on Jewish crimes. Imagine Arab crimes, instead, and convince yourself they are worse than Jewish crimes.

The woman failed to accomplish that goal, and in her failure succeeded at delivering a coup de grace to the credibility of the New York Times as a world class newspaper.