Monday, November 28, 2011

Fighting the Internet - no holds barred & any twisting of truth is permitted!


Disclaimer: I agree that there are severe dangers of the Internet. I do, however, believe that discussion of the issue should be honest and deal with the full picture of reality. The following is an example of cherry picking to make for the worse case scenario.

Binah magazine's recent edition (page 36 Nov. 21, 2011) dedicated to convincing its readers of the evils of the Internet has a lead of story of the tragic story of a "good, clean-cut guy with an mba" who was destroyed by Internet access. However contrary to Binah’s self-serving presentation,  the story is not about a good guy destroyed. Rather it is about an Orthodox Jewish pervert who was caught by cops monitoring the chat rooms. What was his crime? 

The “clean-cut” victim of internet writes: 
Somehow, I carried on the appearance that everything was okay, until I was arrested this past January for chatting with young women who were really undercover officers posing as minors. (I never paid any attention to details since in the world of the internet, everybody makes stuff up, including me.) things began to fall apart quickly. I lost my job, and the next month I was extradited to another state where charges were filed against me… I am currently facing over 24 felony counts in two counts. I was released on $80,000 bail with a GPS monitor on my ankle. You can't imagine what suffering this is. Please help me do teshuvah. Help me warn others not to fall into this trap. The internet is like a cancer. I was a good, clean-cut guy with an MBA from one of America's best-known colleges of business. I passed my CPA on the first try. I had my choice of great jobs. It's all blown away. I'm now jobless and penniless, and we're soon expecting child number four. I can't explain what has happened, as it all seems like a blur, but I was living two lives... And what I thought was a secret life has now become an open book..”
In other words he was having sexually explicit conversations with a number of different minors. His actual lament is that he was caught because of the internet - not that the internet made him do something perverted. One does not get busted for communicating with a minor on the internet about politics or any other normal topic. He is a pervert who is being portrayed by Binah as a victim. Binah is in effect claiming that this pervert would have led a pure life of Torah & mitzos – except for the internet. This is outrageous!

An analogous story would be about a “clean-cut” Talmid Chachom who loved Torah – but he met his downfall because he became a rebbe in yeshiva and he just couldn’t control his lust for sex with children. Therefore this teaches us that we should ban yeshivos and day camps where these type of "innocent" people are tempted to sin.

14 comments :

  1. I see what you are saying, but it may well have been the case that if he never had access to the Internet he would have never made sexual advances toward other women.

    Internet addiction, porn addiction, inappropriate contacts in chat rooms -- these are surely all very dangerous things that we should take very seriously. Banning all Internet use would prevent them. But in today's world it makes more sense to allow Internet, as long as you're not using it in a room by yourself.

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  2. Without the internet, this frum fellow in all likelihood would not have had the tools to commit a crime or chat with minor girls.

    So the rabbi is correct.

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  3. The source appears to be this 2009 posting. http://lazerbrody.typepad.com/lazer_beams/2009/07/ralphs-story.html

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  4. One thing the internet has done is make feasible for perverts the ability to live out their dreams.
    It's hard to sit and write letters to underage girls. How would you find them in the first place? It's embarrassing to walk up to them in public and flirt with them. The internet, on the other hand, serves them up in large numbers and without any need to disclose one's identity. It's that easy access which is truly troubling.

    On the other hand:
    > I'm now jobless and penniless, and we're soon expecting child number four.
    So he's in kollel?

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  5. Garnel,
    Highly inappropriate humor


    Michoel

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  6. I don't know about you people, but to me the Internet means perpetual access to Hebrewbooks.org, he.wikisource.com, responsa.co.il, mechon-mamre.org, and discussion areas like Avodah or following this and other blogs. Aside from yutorah.org, and kmtt, my favorite sources of audio shiurim, etc, etc, etc...

    If you want to talk about the shmutz on the internet, fine.

    But you're not going to convince someone for whom the internet enables dozens of hours of Torah weekly that we need to assur the internet, that the internet is itself shmutz. It requires a fear of the unknown for that depiction to be plausible.

    The potential of this medium is no less powerful; the price being paid by following such a ban is not ignorable.

    And that's aside from the metzius being that it is decreasingly feasible to follow it anyway...

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  7. Rav Micha, I agree with your position 100% but let me offer a counter-argument that a kollel guy offered me a few years ago.
    I pointed out to him that the printing press produces both seforim and porno mags.
    He pointed out that in order to buy the porno mags one has to go into a store in public and buy them. One has to walk up to the counter, look the teenager behind the till in the face and buy the magazine. Fear of humiliation would dissaude such a person from acquiring the magazine.
    With the internet, the fear is removed. A man can sit in the privacy of his home and access all the same material without any fear of humiliation (until his wife checks the history logs).
    His point was that while there is much positive that comes out of the internet, the price to be paid is far too high.

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  8. new book on abuse

    http://www.urimpublications.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=UP&Product_Code=Abuse&Category_Code=aaa

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  9. WADR to your brilliant essay about the role of belief in daas torah in dividing communities, I think you're pointing to the classical communal line.

    The idealized mod-O Jew will encounter the new, look for how it could be incorporated into a holy lifestyle, and use it accordingly. Any problems that then arise are dealt with later. (Of course, what to do after one is addicted to bitul zeman in front of a TV...)

    The chareidi stereotype will encounter the new, see its dangers, and avoid it. His world is more limited and therefore his potential reach is smaller. But the world is safer and remaining holy is easier.

    Personally, I questioned both approaches:

    Both are relatively remedial ways of addressing personal challenge. Methods usable for setting communal policy or for someone who doesn’t really know himself. However, in a community of people who strive to know themselves and judge each situation accordingly, there is no need to rely on such blanket statements. ...

    Modern Orthodoxy sadly collapses into Orthodoxy-Lite for so many of those who affiliate with that community because there is no such introspection. Without that self-awareness, the dangerous gets embraced long enough for the risks to blind the victim to themselves before anyone even thinks to ask the question of mitigating them.

    Alternatively, I could say to a yeshivish person that what they need is a different kind of yeshivish, one in which tiqun hamidos tools are used to know when and how to protect oneself from today’s degenerating society without missing out on its opportunities. That the currently pursued alternative, retreating into fortresses, is a position for the weak. And weakening the masses engenders the need for further retreat ad infinitum. But the resulting “yeshivish” would be something that is too new to simply fit within the current movement’s umbrella.

    And in fact, both this new Modern Orthodoxy and new Yeshivish would be identical....

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  10. Rav Micha, one could also note the Issacher-Zevulun paradigm. If we were all meant to sit and learn, to be one homogeneous group, there would not have been 12 different tribes, certainly not one with a specific aptitude for Torah and another partnered with it with an aptitude for business and travel.
    Despite what some say about me, I am not against the concept of kollel, for example, just the concept of wide-open-anyone-can-join-and-stay-for-life kollel. A nation needs its intellectual (and in our case: spiritual) elite to ensure that the basis of our national existence remains at the highest level. But not everyone can be part of that elite, just as not everyone in general society can be a PhD student in neurophysics or even advanced basket weaving. Some people can handle the temptations of the modern world without it affecting their kedusha. One could make the argument that, in fact, their kedusha is the superior because it has resisted the outside allure. Others cannot and maintain a high level of purity by avoiding the outside world although one could argue that it's not such a great feat since there was no challenge to achieving it.
    As in all things, there must be a balance or the group goes sliding off the edge into the darkness beyond.

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  11. don't defend hypocritesNovember 29, 2011 at 10:05 AM

    To say the truth, I too was disturbed when I read the story in the Binah. Somehow this young man, who is a pervert, found a way to present himself as an ordinary upstanding citizen who "nebech" fell prey to the horrible internet. This is simply not true. The average frum person serfing the web is in danger regarding seeing inappropriate stuff, which I agree is bad enough, but it isn't the same as preying on innocent children.
    In addition there clearly seems to be a lack of remorse regarding the harm he did to these innocent children. Rather he laments the fact that now he has no job and his life is ruined. I found it chilling that he fails to lament the fact that he stooped so low to the point of harming innocent children.
    I just hope in the future Binnah would be a bit more careful not to give space for perverts like this young man to present themselves as nice upstanding individuals, which they are unfortunatly far from being.
    It's time for our community to take a "no tolerance" stand to actions of Giluy Araous. After all, as Rabbi Mattisyahu Salamon stated at the Agudah Convention, "the internet is assur because of Gily Aroaous." It always disturbs me why when it comes to speaking out against people actually acting out Giluy Aroaus, especially with children, we fail to protest sifficiantly.
    Its sad to say, but for some odd reason, the goy seems to be doing better at this then we are.

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  12. Garnel:

    Yisachar was primarily known for its brave soldiers, see Divrei Hayamim 1 ch 7.

    This reputation is curiously left out of modern day interpretation, especially by Roshei Yeshiva and meshulochim.

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  13. This person has a serious negative drive. Pedophiles and people with negative drives generally find outlets - in some ways only communicating rather than moving on to physical interaction is a positive thing.

    Note he didn't choose to go pay for interaction, nor did he choose to have a girlfriend or spouse. He could have if he simply needed outlets.

    Perhaps if he didn't have the internet he would have become (G-d forbid) a teacher in a girls school where 10 years later we would be reading about abuse.

    The internet indeed offers ridiculously easy access to highly inappropriate material. But even on the internet things involving children are illegal and are not sought out by people with normal inclinations.

    This person does not have a normal drive that got over charged by accessing material, he has a drive that is illicit by even secular standards. And that has nothing to do with the internet.

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  14. The story in Binah is likely completely made up, the only reason we consider it as truth is due to the absence of remorse from the predator which makes it very believable.

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