The Left's Blind Spot with Julian Assange
Katha Pollitt is a contributor to The Nation.
Here's what I've learned so far from the furor over the rape allegations against Julian Assange: when it comes to rape, the left still doesn't get it.
The problem is not that many WikiLeaks supporters question the zeal with which Swedish authorities are pursuing Assange. Maybe it's true that an ordinary guy, faced with similar accusations, would have been allowed to slip away quietly once he left Sweden rather than become the subject of an Interpol red notice. (Maybe not, though. The eleven Swedes on Interpol's public red list include people wanted for fraud and other non-spectacular crimes.
Much has been made of the fact that only one of these, an alleged child molester, is charged with a sex crime. But the vast majority of wanted people are privately listed, so actually there's no way of knowing if Assange's case is exceptional.) Given that US politicians, from Joe Biden to Sarah Palin, have called for Assange's head, it isn't paranoid to suspect that he is being singled out in order to extradite him to the United States. But it could also be that Sweden is following up because prosecutors get mad when world-class celebrities flee the country and then thumb their noses at them-cf. Roman Polanski.
What's disturbing is the way some WikiLeaks admirers have misrepresented the allegations, attacked the women and made light of date rape. It's been known for some time that Assange was accused of using his body weight to force sex on one woman, ignoring her demand that he use a condom, and penetrating the other woman while she slept, also without a condom despite her wishes; but writer after writer has treated the whole thing as a big joke.
It was "sex by surprise"-some arcane Swedish thing-wrote Dave Lindorff on Truthout. Plus, Assange didn't tell the second woman about the first and didn't return her phone call. Hell hath no fury like a groupie scorned. Appearing on Keith Olbermann's show after he put up $20,000 to help bail Assange out of a British jail, Swedish rape law expert Michael Moore called the case "a bunch of hooey": "the condom broke during consensual sex." Olbermann made matters worse when he retweeted Bianca Jagger's tweet linking to a post on Mark Crispin Miller's blog claiming that Assange accuser "Miss A" had "interacted" in Cuba with an anti-Castro women's group supported by terrorist and former CIA agent Luis Posada Carriles, and had published anti-Castro "diatribes" in a Swedish magazine. You would think the left would be more sensitive to charges of guilt by association-since when did marching in a demonstration mean you sign on to everything its supporters support? By those lights, everyone who went to an ANSWER-sponsored march against the Iraq War thinks North Korea is a Marxist paradise.
And everyone who believes and promotes the "information" that "Miss A" is a CIA "honeytrap" is an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier. Because the original source for that story is one Israel Shamir, writing in Counterpunch and vigorously defended by Counterpunch editor and Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn, who also belittles the accusations as "unsafe sex and failure to phone his date the following day." I spent a few hours on www.israelshamir.net [1] and learned that: "the Jews" foisted capitalism, advertising and consumerism on harmonious and modest Christian Europe; were behind Stalin's famine in Ukraine; control the banks, the media and many governments; and that "Palestine is not the ultimate goal of the Jews; the world is."
There are numerous guest articles by Holocaust deniers, aka "historical revisionists." We have now produced on the left an echo chamber like that on the far right, where the scurrilous charges of marginal fanatics are disseminated through electronic media and end up, cleansed of their original associations, as respectable opinion.
The heroic Sady Doyle, a blogger at Tiger Beatdown, gets lots of credit for starting a Twitter campaign that forced Moore and Olbermann to-sort of-back off their sexist chortling. But it's too late: the "revelations" that Sweden has laws against condomless sex and that "Miss A" is a CIA "honeytrap" are all over the left blogosphere. And it isn't just men who are spreading it. On The Huffington Post, Naomi Wolf posted a satirical letter to Interpol, aka the "World's Dating Police," repeating the broken-condom falsehood and adding that Assange's crimes include "texting and tweeting in the taxi...while on a date and, disgustingly enough, 'reading stories about himself online' in the cab."
Is this the same Naomi Wolf who wrote a 2004 New York magazine cover story accusing Harold Bloom of putting his hand on her thigh twenty years previously? Wolf argues that the accusations against Assange demean the seriousness of rape. In fact, Swedish law does distinguish among degrees of rape, with Assange being accused on one count of the least grave kind. In a much-cited letter to the Guardian, Katrin Axelsson of Women Against Rape argued that Sweden's low rape conviction rate proved that Assange was being set up-in 2006, she claimed, only six people were convicted out of 4,000 reported. Not so. "I don't know where they got those figures," Amnesty International's Katarina Bergehed told me by phone from Sweden. "In 2006 there were 3,074 rapes and 227 convictions." (Sweden tracks rape by individual acts, not by number of victims, so its rape rate is lower than it looks.)
Bergehed should know: she wrote the Swedish section of the Amnesty report on sex crimes in the Nordic countries that Assange supporters cite as proving that Sweden is the worst place in Europe for rape victims. One reason the Swedish rape conviction rate is low is that, thanks to thirty years of feminist progress, the law defines sexual violence and coercion broadly, but as in other countries, police and juries often do not. The same seems to be true of large swaths of the American left.
WikiLeaks is revealing information citizens need to know-it's a good thing. Assange may or may not have committed sex crimes according to Swedish law. Why is it so hard to hold those two ideas at once?
By Katha Pollitt
Reprinted with permission from The Nation
The Nation Here's what I've learned so far from the furor over the rape allegations against Julian Assange: when it comes to rape, the left still doesn't get it.
The problem is not that many WikiLeaks supporters question the zeal with which Swedish authorities are pursuing Assange. Maybe it's true that an ordinary guy, faced with similar accusations, would have been allowed to slip away quietly once he left Sweden rather than become the subject of an Interpol red notice. (Maybe not, though. The eleven Swedes on Interpol's public red list include people wanted for fraud and other non-spectacular crimes.
Much has been made of the fact that only one of these, an alleged child molester, is charged with a sex crime. But the vast majority of wanted people are privately listed, so actually there's no way of knowing if Assange's case is exceptional.) Given that US politicians, from Joe Biden to Sarah Palin, have called for Assange's head, it isn't paranoid to suspect that he is being singled out in order to extradite him to the United States. But it could also be that Sweden is following up because prosecutors get mad when world-class celebrities flee the country and then thumb their noses at them-cf. Roman Polanski.
What's disturbing is the way some WikiLeaks admirers have misrepresented the allegations, attacked the women and made light of date rape. It's been known for some time that Assange was accused of using his body weight to force sex on one woman, ignoring her demand that he use a condom, and penetrating the other woman while she slept, also without a condom despite her wishes; but writer after writer has treated the whole thing as a big joke.
It was "sex by surprise"-some arcane Swedish thing-wrote Dave Lindorff on Truthout. Plus, Assange didn't tell the second woman about the first and didn't return her phone call. Hell hath no fury like a groupie scorned. Appearing on Keith Olbermann's show after he put up $20,000 to help bail Assange out of a British jail, Swedish rape law expert Michael Moore called the case "a bunch of hooey": "the condom broke during consensual sex." Olbermann made matters worse when he retweeted Bianca Jagger's tweet linking to a post on Mark Crispin Miller's blog claiming that Assange accuser "Miss A" had "interacted" in Cuba with an anti-Castro women's group supported by terrorist and former CIA agent Luis Posada Carriles, and had published anti-Castro "diatribes" in a Swedish magazine. You would think the left would be more sensitive to charges of guilt by association-since when did marching in a demonstration mean you sign on to everything its supporters support? By those lights, everyone who went to an ANSWER-sponsored march against the Iraq War thinks North Korea is a Marxist paradise.
And everyone who believes and promotes the "information" that "Miss A" is a CIA "honeytrap" is an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier. Because the original source for that story is one Israel Shamir, writing in Counterpunch and vigorously defended by Counterpunch editor and Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn, who also belittles the accusations as "unsafe sex and failure to phone his date the following day." I spent a few hours on www.israelshamir.net [1] and learned that: "the Jews" foisted capitalism, advertising and consumerism on harmonious and modest Christian Europe; were behind Stalin's famine in Ukraine; control the banks, the media and many governments; and that "Palestine is not the ultimate goal of the Jews; the world is."
There are numerous guest articles by Holocaust deniers, aka "historical revisionists." We have now produced on the left an echo chamber like that on the far right, where the scurrilous charges of marginal fanatics are disseminated through electronic media and end up, cleansed of their original associations, as respectable opinion.
The heroic Sady Doyle, a blogger at Tiger Beatdown, gets lots of credit for starting a Twitter campaign that forced Moore and Olbermann to-sort of-back off their sexist chortling. But it's too late: the "revelations" that Sweden has laws against condomless sex and that "Miss A" is a CIA "honeytrap" are all over the left blogosphere. And it isn't just men who are spreading it. On The Huffington Post, Naomi Wolf posted a satirical letter to Interpol, aka the "World's Dating Police," repeating the broken-condom falsehood and adding that Assange's crimes include "texting and tweeting in the taxi...while on a date and, disgustingly enough, 'reading stories about himself online' in the cab."
Is this the same Naomi Wolf who wrote a 2004 New York magazine cover story accusing Harold Bloom of putting his hand on her thigh twenty years previously? Wolf argues that the accusations against Assange demean the seriousness of rape. In fact, Swedish law does distinguish among degrees of rape, with Assange being accused on one count of the least grave kind. In a much-cited letter to the Guardian, Katrin Axelsson of Women Against Rape argued that Sweden's low rape conviction rate proved that Assange was being set up-in 2006, she claimed, only six people were convicted out of 4,000 reported. Not so. "I don't know where they got those figures," Amnesty International's Katarina Bergehed told me by phone from Sweden. "In 2006 there were 3,074 rapes and 227 convictions." (Sweden tracks rape by individual acts, not by number of victims, so its rape rate is lower than it looks.)
Bergehed should know: she wrote the Swedish section of the Amnesty report on sex crimes in the Nordic countries that Assange supporters cite as proving that Sweden is the worst place in Europe for rape victims. One reason the Swedish rape conviction rate is low is that, thanks to thirty years of feminist progress, the law defines sexual violence and coercion broadly, but as in other countries, police and juries often do not. The same seems to be true of large swaths of the American left.
WikiLeaks is revealing information citizens need to know-it's a good thing. Assange may or may not have committed sex crimes according to Swedish law. Why is it so hard to hold those two ideas at once?
By Katha Pollitt
Reprinted with permission from The Nation
When one thinks of the many disgusting, violent, brutally disfiguring, ofttimes repeated rapes of women and girls across the US that will never be prosecuted with more conservative elements blaming the victims (who are sometimes children) this is oped bearbaiting at its worst.
If he is guilty I hope he is sentenced in the full weight of the law . However his personal conduct or morality bares no relationship to the findings of the Wikileaks.
Unlike evil capitalism, which supposes people are unique and have property rights.
I am a Southern Liberal and far from finding Mr. Assange's behavior excusable and the accusations of date rape are applicable in my limited understanding of these laws - particularly Swedish law. Nor do I find that a boys-will-be-boys defense as a sustainable argument by anyone.
The thing I found amazing was that it was completely avoidable, "A made a series of calls to him asking him to persuade Assange to take an STD test to reassure Miss W, and that Assange refused. Miss A then warned if Assange did not take a test, Miss W would go to the police. Assange had rejected this as blackmail, Harold told police" ..." Harold told police, Assange agreed to take a test, but the clinics had closed for the weekend. Miss A phoned Harold to say that she and Miss W had been to the police, who had told them that they couldn't simply tell Assange to take a test that their statements must be passed to the prosecutor. That night, the story leaked to the Swedish newspaper Expressen." It is and remains a self-inflicted wound by a callused individual who thinks himself greater than his followers. No hero.
There is a big difference between Wikileaks and the Diem Cable.
The latter was a forgery.
Under orders from Nixon, Chuck Colson fabricated that document to make it appear that Kennedy masterminded the murder of an American ally!
If it had been genuine; why didn't Lodge keep a copy?
It would be like Republicans having Maliki murdered and framing Obama for the murder!
As to the rape charge. Warren Jeffs is currently behind bars because of his sex crimes.
Politically correct marriages being taught to us by Mormon Mitt Romney?
Chuck Colson, Newt Gingrich, Nixon, Agnew, Jeffs and Romney role models?
Clifford Spencer
You do nobody ANY service by posting your ignorant, rhetorical trash Katha Pollitt.
And, in case your are too stupid to have figured this out yet, your bimbo, idiotic, idol Sarah Palin has not been a "politician" for nearly 2 years now you blithering imbecile.
Following parent's divorce, he and mother moved to Wales at age 13. "He had trouble fitting in at school in what former acquaintances have described as a troubled childhood". He dropped out of school at 16, returned to USA, worked at a pizza parlor, enlisted in Army at 18 and then committed this act. "Before being arrested, Manning had been twice reprimanded, once for assaulting a fellow soldier, and was demoted from Specialist to Private First Class".
Soldier Bradley Manning had access to weapons. Recently Army psychiatrist Maj Nidal Hasan of Fort Hood, went KRAZY, killed 12 and wounded 31. Had army put Hasan in solitary confinement, those deaths would have been prevented. It's safer to have Bradley along with Assange in solitary.