Bill Donohue addresses accused priests and rabbis:
Today, the New York Times has a story on a Bridgeport priest who was arrested, Msgr. Kevin Wallin; it is the second story on him. So far this year, two New York rabbis have been arrested, each meriting one story in the Times: Rabbi Yoel Malik was arrested on January 31, and Rabbi Nathan David Rabinowich was arrested on February 14. (Only the print editions are being counted.)
- Msgr. Wallin was arrested for drugs.
- Rabbi Malik was arrested for sexually abusing three teenage boys. He was charged with 12 counts of sexual abuse, 4 counts of criminal sexual contact, 11 counts of endangering the welfare of a child, and a single charge of forcible touching.
- Rabbi Rabinowich was charged with four sexual offenses, including the attempted rape of a 14-year-old girl.
The total number of words in the Times story on the priest is 3496 (today’s front-page story merited 2745 words). The total number of words on the two rabbis combined is 828 (the stories appeared on pages 22 and 25, respectively). It’s not just the Times that gives rabbis a pass: the New York Daily News had two stories on Malik (only mentioning him by name in one!); the New York Post ran one story on him; the Daily News ran one story on Rabinowich; and the Post had none.
Wallin has multiple problems (he is a cross-dressing drug addict and, like Malik, he is a practicing homosexual). But he is not a child rapist. So why the heightened interest in him, and the relative disinterest in the rabbis? It obviously doesn’t turn on the nature of the offense.
Malik’s arrest came less than two weeks after another member of his ultra-Orthodox Jewish group, an unlicensed therapist, was sentenced to 103 years in prison for sexually abusing a young woman from the time she was 12. By the way, a rabbi who publicly criticized this rapist had a cup of bleach thrown at him, burning his eyes and face. It never made the front page of any newspaper.
