NY Republicans name Jewish outreach director– flack for rally for alleged child-rapist

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The NY Republican State Committee yesterday announced that its Jewish outreach director will be Yossi Gestetner, an Orthodox Jew and blogger. “During the last seven years, Mr. Gestetner has been a resilient voice for Conservative values and Republican ideals.”

The Guardian reported on a rally in the Orthodox community for an alleged child rapist in May:

[Nechemya] Weberman stands accused of the repeated sexual abuse of a teenage girl he was counselling. But in the minds of many who joined last night’s rally, he has already been condemned by a mainstream media hostile to their community…

“People came out tonight to support the American ideal of innocent till proven guilty,” said Yossi Gestetner, a Satmar Hasid who was appointed official press contact by the rally’s organisers the day before the event when news of it reached the media. “Many people in the community are fed up that this whole case gets tried in the court of public opinion not the court of law. People feel under siege.”

Failed Messiah characterizes Gestetner’s service to that rally in this manner:

Gestetner also defended posters depicting an alleged victim of rape and pedophilia as a missile about to strike and destroy the haredi community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn; defended more than 1000 hasidim who came to a fundraisisng event to support the girl’s alleged rapist, and sneeringly dismissed any obligation he or his community has to be as respectful to that alleged victim as they are to her alleged attacker – a hasidic rabbi and unlicensed therapist.

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RE: “NY Republicans name Jewish outreach director (Yossi
Gestetner, an Orthodox Jew and blogger)– flack for rally for alleged child-rapist” ~ Weiss

MY SNARK: Gestetner sounds like a fairly typical Republican!

SEE THE ARTICLE: “Romney, Torture, and Teens”, by Maia Szalavitz, Reason.com, 6/27/07
The former governor’s connections to abusive “tough love” camps

(excerpt) When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said he’d support doubling the size of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, he was trying to show voters that he’d be tough on terror. Two of his [Romney’s] top fundraisers, however, have long supported using tactics that have been likened to torture for troubled teenagers.
As ‘The Hill’ noted last week, 133 plaintiffs filed a civil suit against Romney’s Utah finance co-chair, Robert Lichfield, and his various business entities involved in residential treatment programs for adolescents. The umbrella group for his organization is the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS, sometimes known as WWASP) and Lichfield is its founder and is on its board of directors.
The suit alleges that teens were locked in outdoor dog cages, exercised to exhaustion, deprived of food and sleep, exposed to extreme temperatures without adequate clothing or water, severely beaten, emotionally brutalized, and sexually abused and humiliated. Some were even made to eat their own vomit.
But the link to teen abuse goes far higher up in the Romney campaign. Romney’s national finance co-chair is a man named Mel Sembler. A long time friend of the Bushes, Sembler was campaign finance chair for the Republican party during the first election of George W. Bush, and a major fundraiser for his father.
Like Lichfield, Sembler also founded a nationwide network of treatment programs for troubled youth. Known as Straight Inc., from 1976 to 1993, it variously operated nine programs in seven states. At all of Straight’s facilities, state investigators and/or civil lawsuits documented scores of abuses including teens being beaten, deprived of food and sleep for days, restrained by fellow youth for hours, bound, sexually humiliated, abused and spat upon. . .

ENTIRE ARTICLE – http://reason.com/archives/2007/06/27/romney-torture-and-teens

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NEW YORK — The abuse went on for nearly three years before the schoolgirl told anyone that her spiritual adviser was molesting her while he was supposed to be mentoring her about her religion, authorities said.

But in Brooklyn’s ultra-orthodox Jewish community, 53-year-old Nechemya Weberman has been embraced and defended as wrongly accused. The girl has been called a slut and a troublemaker, her family threatened and spat at on the street.

The rallying around Weberman, who goes on trial this month, and ostracizing of his accuser and her family reflects long-held beliefs in this insular community that problems should be dealt with from within and that elders have far more authority than the young. It also brought to light allegations that the district attorney was too cozy with powerful rabbis, a charge he vehemently denies.

CBS NEWS:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501363_162-57450886/orthodox-nyc-counselor-on-trial-in-sex-abuse-case/

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There is nothing about “defend[ing] posters depicting an alleged victim of rape and pedophilia as a missile” at the link to that effect, although the author does claim toward the end that they were “posted throught (sic) Williamsburg.” Nor does Gestetner “sneeringly dismiss” anything, although the same cannot be said of Failed Messiah.

I find myself sharing more ground with the former than the latter, who hyperventilates: “You and your community are under siege, Yossi, because you derserve to be.” Gestetner sticks with a straightforward “innocent until proven guilty” line that I find both perfectly reasonable and far more palatable than FM’s breathless panic.

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I dont think’ Jewish’ is the key word in the cretin here as much as this is typical of the republican party today….they really scrap the bottom of the barrel of every group in their supporters.
But I think Gestetner is not so much for innocent till proven guilty, as he is for keeping haredi cult from outside non haredi law and supervision.

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