“Tolerism” of Evil by Hollywood including Women
Hollywood figures from Bill Cosby to Harvey Weinstein, from Kevin Spacey to Dustin Hoffman are now facing allegations, and in some cases criminal or civil lawsuits (or, in Cosby’s case a conviction), about conduct to young women that ranged from inappropriate touching and comments to actual rape. In all the cases, one asks why these abusers were not called out long before they were. Why was Hollywood in effect guarding the dirty little secret of the “casting room couch”? Who knew what about the abuse and who should have spoken out long before the “Me Too” movement created a community of women empowering each other to make their claims against certain abusers?
Howard Rotberg writes: “In my book, Tolerism: The Ideology Revealed, I describe more than just tolerance of abusers and anti-Semites: I write of an ideology of excessive tolerance of those who themselves are intolerant and illiberal and who, if they take power, would likely end all tolerance. Tolerism, I argue is an excessive tolerance, in fact a leniency, for the intolerant and unsupportable views that threaten our very freedoms.”
A Jewish Canadian conservative writer like me saw a big problem in the clear tolerance of abuse by many in Hollywood. Some years ago, I specifically documented how some of the most powerful women in Hollywood shielded from criticism a most egregious assault by a Hollywood icon. I am not the first to write about how women protected powerful men, such as Bill Clinton.
In my various writings, I try to examine the ideologies that permit certain abuses in an America that otherwise has been a beacon of liberal values. For Jews, the left’s championing of the immigration of anti-Semitic immigrants who come from a culture of rape and anti-Semitism is more than distressing.
Perhaps with all the political correctness around us, we have failed to study the ideologies that attract the left-liberals in the Democratic Party, in mainstream media, entertainment, in universities, and among government and NGO workers. I found myself marginalized by my study and exposure of their ideologies as they relate to everything from attitudes to women to acceptance of Islamist groups demanding that we sacrifice our cherished individual rights whenever one of their groups feels “offended” by our criticisms of their culture or a defense of our culture.
For the last ten years, I have been studying what I term an ideology of excessive tolerance that is especially prevalent among the cultural and moral relativists of the Left, which includes of course probably 80% of the entertainment industry. I call it the ideology of Tolerism. I wrote many pages about the rather obscene anti-Semitism that emanates from certain Hollywooders, Mel Gibson, of course, but also Steven Spielberg, when he chose anti-Israel ideologue Tony Kirshner to write the screenplay for “Munich”.
In my book, Tolerism: The Ideology Revealed, I describe more than just tolerance of abusers and anti-Semites: I write of an ideology of excessive tolerance of those who themselves are intolerant and illiberal and who, if they take power, would likely end all tolerance. Tolerism, I argue is an excessive tolerance, in fact a leniency, for the intolerant and unsupportable views that threaten our very freedoms. It tolerates the slow ascendancy of Islamist values of terrorism, breach of human rights, and attempted reversals of the wonderful liberties and advances made in western societies, where church and state have been successfully separated, and an enormous degree of freedom reigns.
In my sequel, The Ideological Path to Submission … and what we can do about it, I trace the ideological pathway resulting from tolerance and explore certain ideologies that have emanated from Tolerism and pose a danger of possible submission to the anti-liberal values of the Islamists. I look at such ideologies as Inclusive Diversity, Empathy, Denialism, Masochism, Islamophilia, Trumpophobia, Cultural Relativism, Postmodernism, and Multiculturalism and the psychological factors that conduce to a flight from the anxieties of freedom to a submission to the enemy. I invite Muslims, who wish to share Western freedoms, to support reformers and join the essential duty to reject the Islamists who seek Sharia Law and a world-wide Caliphate in lands where they immigrate.
With this background then, here is what I wrote in my 2009 book:
Howard Rotberg writes: In my sequel, The Ideological Path to Submission … and what we can do about it, I trace the ideological pathway resulting from tolerance and explore certain ideologies that have emanated from Tolerism and pose a danger of possible submission to the anti-liberal values of the Islamists.
One could hardly make up a story that so symbolizes tolerist immorality as this:
A Hollywood director, under the pretense of a photographic shoot, gives drugs and alcohol to a thirteen year old girl and then rapes her vaginally and anally. He makes a plea bargain resulting in all but one of the various charges laid against him to be dropped, but before he can be sentenced, he runs away from the United States and moves to France, which does not honour U.S. extradition requests.
When, over 30 years later, the Americans finally get him in Switzerland, and start extradition proceedings, many directors and actors from all over the world, including America, oppose the arrest. The French government is infuriated.
Excuses of every kind are made on his behalf. It seems probable that before the aborted sentencing the Judge may have improperly discussed the case with another prosecutor. But some months’ previous to the arrest, the director had his American lawyers move to re-open the case on account of alleged prosecutorial misconduct. The American Judge is somewhat sympathetic to the legal arguments (America having such a fair justice system that procedural unfairness can excuse even a heinous crime); but the Judge says, quite rightly, that if the fugitive from justice wants to appear in his Court and make the arguments, he can, but not if he continues to be a fugitive and abscond from American Justice.
This director is a Polish-French national, and talented director, named Roman Polanski. It turns out that he has had many tragedies in his life, which might well be taken into account in his sentencing or confirmation of plea bargain, but M. Polanski, never stuck around for the sentencing. Many Hollywood and foreign directors and actors sign a petition that charges be dropped. It seems that they are particularly incensed that he was arrested on his way to a Swiss Film Awards gala, as if the film industry should have something like diplomatic immunity.
Polanski was initially charged with rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, and furnishing a controlled substance (methaqualone) to a minor. These charges were dismissed under the terms of his plea bargain, and he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of engaging in unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.
The Telegraph’s Michael Deacon has reminded us of an extraordinary interview Polanski gave to the novelist Martin Amis in 1979, the year after Polanski went on the run.
The interview originally appeared in Tatler and is collected in Martin Amis’ book, Visiting Mrs. Nabakov..
Here’s a section of the first quote it contains from Polanski.
“If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”
My reaction is that Mr. Polanski, certainly at the time of the crime and his guilty plea, and at the time of the above quote, was a danger to society, and certainly was the proper subject of the power of the state. Now, whether or not the victim has forgiven him, or whether in fact he paid a civil settlement, the fact remains that a rapist of a thirteen-year old (who did not consent, and even if she had, the law deems the consent to be invalid in the case of this perpetrator who was 44 at the time) cannot use his successful flight from the jurisdiction to argue that all is forgiven. In fact, the flight from justice, and the demonstration of contempt for the justice system, should require a more severe penalty.
In case one wonders whether the Hollywood elites are closer to moral relativism or American ideals of justice, just note what The Heritage Foundation wrote in its website The Foundry about actress Whoopi Goldberg, who defended Polanski on her television show, The View:
“Yesterday, Whoopi Goldberg decided America needs two definitions of rape. First there is the rape of women that is tolerated by the left because it is committed by someone creative. And then there is everything else. When asked about Roman Polanski’s arrest and potential extradition to the United States following his 31 years spent as a fugitive in Europe, Whoopi said on her program The View: ‘I know it wasn’t rape-rape,’ and went on to say, ‘We’re a different kind of society. We see things differently. The world sees 13 year olds and 14 year olds in the rest of Europe… not everybody agrees with the way we see things…’ and finally, ‘Would I want my 14-year-old having sex with somebody? Not necessarily, no.’ Not necessarily? Where can we nominate Whoopi for mother of the year?”
Debra Winger, an American actress, who was the jury president of the Zurich Film Festival which Polanski was to attend when he was arrested, huffed that the American and Swiss cooperation to arrest the fugitive child rapist was a “Phillistine collusion.” Merriam Webster defines “Phillistine” as “a person who is guided by materialism and is usually disdainful of intellectual or artistic values”. So, the Hollywood elites, paid spectacularly and possessing more material goods than just about any other sector, feel that the American justice system is “Phillistine” – in other words, it is does not possess the artistic sophistication that one can find in Switzerland and France (and Hollywood), presumably. Ms. Winger makes the really dangerous assumption that artistic values trump justice. This is an argument worthy of the artists and intellectuals who supported the Nazis. As Europe deals with an increasingly polarized citizenry containing ever increasing illiberals from the fascist and Islamic right and the extremist left, it is sad that Hollywood tolerists are looking up to Europe and down at the philistine American justice system.
Aside from the Hollywood types, the French Tolerists took all this very badly, as well: Bernard Kouchner, France’s foreign minister protested Polanski’s arrest. And note the language used:
“This affair (the arrest) is frankly a bit sinister. This is not nice at all.”
Sinister connotes evil. So, to the French foreign minister, the arrest of a child molester is evil, the pursuit of justice is evil, and tolerance of the criminal, if he is an artist or other member of the French elite, is good. Such is the sorry state of French pseudo-sophistication: if the subject of the arrest was a plumber or salesman, no problem, but a director gets a different standard of justice. That is not sophistication to me; that is an example of Justice corrupted by Tolerism.
And since when did the French, with their less than stellar history during the last world war, acquire the right to judge the American justice system as to whether it should be “nice” or not? This is the same country which had a previous foreign minister refer to Israel as a “shitty little country” at a dinner party, and the French were incensed not by this intemperate remark, but that the hostess of the dinner would have the gall to mention it to the press.
And the French culture minister, Frederic Mitterrand shows another dimension of the French confusion over values. He stated, “In the same way there is a generous America, there is also a scary America, that has just shown its face.”
So, an insistence on Justice is “scary”; tolerance is “generous”. Unfortunately, for France, if, as some predict, it falls to Islam in another thirty to fifty years, it will have neither a fair Justice system (upholding equal rights for women, children, foreigners, non-Muslims, and gays) nor tolerance. Portraying the Americans as sinister, and the French and Swedes as examples of tolerance we should emulate (as they lose control of “no go” zones, is a sign that Tolerism and self-hatred are advancing at an ever faster pace. It boggles the mind.
The point is, then, that the misplaced tolerance of Polanski by Whoopi Goldberg and Debra Winger was just one example of how entertainment figures lack the most basic understanding of American traditional values, and are ready, for fame and money and power, to use the concept of tolerance to enable evil and erosion of justice and liberty. The “me too” movement must be understood to be a first sign of rejection of tolerism, but when it comes to the war by the Islamists and Leftists against western civilization values, there is a much bigger problem to address.
By: Howard Rotberg
Howard Rotberg is the founding president of Canada’s only conservative and pro-Israel publishing house, Mantua Books – www.mantuabooks.com; He is the author of the pro-Israel novel set during the Second Intifada, The Second Catastrophe: A Novel about a Book and its Author, the book about contemporary ideologies stressing tolerance over justice and liberty, Tolerism: The Ideology Revealed, and its recently released sequel, The Ideological Path to Submission… and what we can do about it. All Mantua books are available from Amazon.com.
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