 |
It began, innocently enough, with a straight-forward headline on the JWB blogsite, which many of us visit to see what Jewish official has been accused of what prurience the night before. It was slim picking, a NYT story (Owner of School Bus Fleet Is Held for Forging Stickers) which JWB re-titled in his irrepressible fashion: The Rabbi Joseph H. Lookstein Upper School of Ramaz High School discovers the school buses it was using had forged registration & inspection stickers.
Now, you may not know who JWB is, but if you’ve been anywhere near a Jewish blog site in the past few months since the site’s inauguration, you must have heard something about its prurient interest in all things evil, usually things evil committed by Jews, and, more often than not, in evil things committed by Jews with their wee wee. As he often puts it, his aim is to cultivate a spirit of “accountability and transparency within our institutions and leadership,” presumably by shaming them on a daily basis in multiple ways, both honest and otherwise, and, as befits a crusader for accountability, while remaining clad in total anonymity. In fact, on occasion he challenges his targets to be brave and come out of their own shelter, sniveling cowards that they are.
His outrageous fingerpointing doesn’t go unchallenged, naturally. But in the cacophonous debate over the Victims Movement (adult women who claim the same legal privileges as minors regarding responsibility for their sexual behavior), for every attack against JWB’s myriad inequities there are two or three protectors rushing to drown the attacker with miles of copy and paste text, slurs, goading, provocative challenges (What if your own wife did it with a clergyman?), and similar unhappy things.
But today’s posting was different. Possibly because the subject of JWB’s attack wasn’t a favorite hate-target for any existing constituency, the poor blower was under constant berating by a string of enemies who wielded a variety of sharp weapons. And since no one came to the blower’s defense, the attacks were having a cumulative effect.
At 6:19 AM (JWB is not very good with technical stuff, so his blogging clock is always off-kilter), Anonymous said, "Once again JWB is trying to establish 'guilt by association' to direct negative attention to any Orthodox Jew or Jewish organization. The fact that 20+ of the most elite private schools in NYC use a private bus company that engaged in misconduct has nothing to do with the schools themselves, since it is clear that the schools had no way of knowing that the bus company was using forged documents... JWB is a fraud who likes nothing more than to demean any Orthodox Jew. What a scumbag.”
At 6:37 AM, a prusemably different Anonymous said, "Why would you put the Ramaz name on some headline about problems with a bus company? Are you bored?
Do you have nothing to do but try and demean the name of a school? Disgusting."
Jewishwhistleblower answered the attacks (his habit is to copy and paste an accusatory paragraph at a time, then answer them with the calm style of a patient pedagogue, except on those occasions when he blows a fuse instead of a whistle): "Wrong. I'm pointing out that a prominent school was defrauded by an unscrupulous bus company and the need for others as a result to take steps to ensure the safety of Jewish students is ensured. I have put no direct blame on Ramaz here, despite your usual false assertions to the contrary." It’s a good argument, but it flies in the face of the reality of how JWB’s website functions.
While most bloggers publish their entries and reader comments are relegated to the end of each entry, JWB publishes only headlines and uses the first comment (and commonly several successive ones) as the body of his article. As a result, what most of his readers see is only the headline associating Rabbi Lookstein with fraud. And a short visit to the site reveals that this is, indeed, an intentional technique, as many of the entries consist of an outrageous, often insulting headline (the word Pervert is used a lot) followed by miles upon miles of boring excerpts from legal documents no one with even a semblance of a life reads. So it’s all in the headline, which JWB’s attackers feel, justifiably, are needlessly nasty and frequently untrue.
At 7:19 AM came the first funny entry (they take longer to generate), as yeshivaguy said, "I know about an even bigger Ramaz scandal, as follows: A 43-yr.-old, man, who attended Ramaz for six months of his junior year in high school, recently rode on a city bus whose driver's first cousin was accused of sexual molestation. For shame! Where's the school's accountability?"
JWB is often accused of anti-Semitism, and at 7:30 AM came the first shot in that direction, when an Anonymous said, "Isn't it obvious already to everyone that this low-life is an anti-semite that despises Rabbis. Whenever he sees the word Rabbi his blood boils. This is nothing about Ramaz. They, if anything, were a victim, but this virulent anti-Semite, JWB, got caught up with the word Rabbi and therefore this post. How pathetic!"
At 8:56 AM, Anonymous delivered the killer blow to the Blower. The debate had been raging on JWB's and other sites, as to the effect all this fingerpointing might have on the goyim. Turns out the goyim have been watching the Blow show... "JWB has a clear agenda of attracting negative attention to Orthodox Jews and Orthodox institutions, often based on flimsy rumors and innuendo. Look no further than his post about the Ramaz Yeshiva bus "scandal" to see how far he will stretch in a feeble attempt to shame any Orthodox Jew.
"It should come as no surprise that JWB's blog is admired by racist and anti-Semitic websites.
"The 'Badlands' is a white-supremacist and anti-Semitic site. That site lists JWB's link right alongside a short list of other premier white-supremacist and anti-Semitic links such as: Mark Godfrey's Ontomia, The Refugee Camp, National Vanguard, The White Picket Fence, Little Geneva, and has blog categories such as, For Fear of the Jews, The Holomocaust (sic), Jews Hate Christianity, etc. Birds of a feather..."
To be honest, a search of Google did not yield direct quotes from JWB on any White Power site. But that may only be a matter of time. In truth, how would you react to a lineup of headlines such as the one presented on the JWB right now:
And the list just goes on and on and. Would you be getting an uneasy feeling that some day soon somebody is going to use this language to do us in? Does it remind you of some German publications from not-so-long ago?
Well, all of JWB's attackers thought so. And for once he was all alone without the anti-Tendler or the other loud voices to support him. So he took a beating. The best he could come up with on being listed on Badlands was: "I cannot prevent others from linking to this blog."
With that, of course, he played right into the hands of another Anonymous who said, rather victoriously: "True. But if you were not so numb, you might realize that your zealous efforts to slam Orthodox Jews and organizations (based on very weak evidence, if any) is frighteningly similar to racist and anti-Semitic beliefs."
Game and Match.