(I wrote this email to Professor Paul Craig Roberts on 7/17/2019 and received no reply. Below is the exact text of the letter except for a small amount of line editing. Anybody who feels broadly the same way I do about this issue is more than welcome to mirror this letter on their website.)
Professor Roberts:
I have followed your work for close to a decade and I feel that I have learned a lot from you over the years. However, over the last few years or so, I feel that your writing has become increasingly tendentious, and principally for that reason, I do not follow it as closely as I used to.
A few days ago, I was looking through your recent blog posts, trying to catch up a bit, and I was struck by a rather strange aspect of them. Finally, I thought to bring it up with you and see what explanation you would offer. Here is the central issue:
First of all, you seem (as always) to have a very strong understanding that the “Muslims as terrorists” meme is a hoax. Obviously, 9/11 is the centerpiece of that, but every other major terrorist attack attributed to Muslims also seems to be some sort of false flag or hoax. On that issue, you have consistently been a strong voice on the side of truth. In that vein, I see this recent post and this one.
However, you do not have a corresponding grasp that the “Muslims as rapists” meme that they (broadly the same people surely) rolled out afterwards. If sites like Breitbart and Infowars and the rest are to be believed (they aren’t!) women in Germany and Sweden cannot walk down the street nowadays for fear of these “Muslim savages” raping them.
Meanwhile, the official crime statistics are available for Germany, for example, and it seems that crime levels in Germany are currently at multi-decade lows. Well, one has to choose whom to believe, I guess. Either the appropriate ministry of the German government is telling the truth or Breitbart and the rest of Islamophobia Inc. are. Ergo, either articles such as the following are broadly true:
Germany’s crime rate fell to lowest level in decades in 2018
Crime in Germany at lowest level since reunification
Or these ones are:
Who is to blame for the rape epidemic that is sweeping across Europe?
Don’t Let Merkel’s Rape Crisis Happen Here
Now, it seems quite obvious to me that it is the German and Swedish governments that are, at least broadly speaking, the ones telling the truth. However, judging from this recent blog post or this one, you have drawn the opposite conclusion.
Well, I think you really do need to rethink this. For starters, maybe you should consider the following question:
Would you expect recently arrived refugees to Europe, who have gotten to Germany (or Sweden or wherever) at great risk and expense to have a high crime rate?
I mean, seriously, just think about that. It seems just to be common sense to me that people who have recently arrived and applied for asylum would have quite a low crime rate for the obvious reason that they do not want to mess up their chances of being allowed to remain in the country.
A couple of years ago, I mentioned this whole narrative of the “Muslim rape epidemic” to a Spanish friend of mine, who actually is half German. His mother is German and he grew up speaking German with her at home. He told me later that he had broached the topic to various Germans he had met, people holidaying in Spain, who lived in various parts of Germany. According to my friend, these people invariably just looked at him like he was crazy. They assured him that their cities or towns in Germany were completely safe, as always, and had never heard of any such “rape epidemic”. In short, they really just did not know what on earth he was talking about!
Well, hey, what do they know? They just live in Germany!
Obviously, to know that there is a rape epidemic going on in Germany, you have to read Breitbart and Infowars and other publications in that vein.
But, seriously, I am pretty certain that the German and Swedish governments are simply telling the truth when they say that this “Muslim rape epidemic” narrative is a fiction. It is consistent with other observed reality. Have you heard of the U.S. State Department warning Americans not to travel to Germany or Sweden because there is a “Muslim rape epidemic” taking place there? I haven’t. I know people who go to Germany quite regularly on business and such, and know the country quite well, and nobody has ever expressed the slightest concern about running into any “Muslim rape gangs”. The whole problem only seems to exist in a certain sort of wing-nut echo chamber.
Well, finally, I don’t know how to sugar-coat this, Professor Roberts. It is really quite clear that you have been had. This whole “Muslims as rapists” problem is just a hoax really, just like the “Muslims as terrorists” narrative is.
Now, in closing, I do have to make one point, which, given your background in statistical inference and such, should be easy for you to grasp.
I am NOT saying that no refugees have ever committed a crime. When you have a group comprising hundreds of thousands or millions of people, obviously, some of those people commit crimes. If you took a million random white Germans or Swedes, a few would be criminals. So, by this sort of law of large numbers, it stands to reason that there are a few genuine cases. However, it is also striking how many of these things, on examination, turn out to be hoaxes.
For example, the notorious case of the 13 year old girl who was kidnapped and gang raped by whatever “Muslim savages” turned out to be a hoax. See: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/31/teenage-girl-made-up-migrant-claim-that-caused-uproar-in-germany
In one of your recent blog posts, you write:
When young white girls 10 years old are gang-raped by the migrants, it is “racist” to complain.
You did not provide a link, but I had to think it was that (now debunked) case of the 13-year-old girl who pretty clearly made up the story. Interestingly, somehow a few years were shaved off the girl’s age and it is now a 10-year-old girl who got gang-raped… Whatever… It does not seem to have happened.
The most notorious case reported from Cologne 2015 New Year’s Eve later turned out to be a hoax. See: https://www.rt.com/news/353911-cologne-woman-rape-allegations/
Regardless, the above two stories were all over the place for a good while. As best I understand from systematically researching it, it is very dubious that anything really happened on that New Year’s Eve in Cologne. It was basically a bunch of random stuff that happens on any significant public festivals in major German cities — New Year’s Eve, Carnival, Oktoberfest, and such. And the typical stuff that happens during such public festivals was blown up into some big story, and tied into all this synthetic hysteria about Muslim refugees raping women all over the place.
I have a distinct memory that I wrote you about this issue before. And I distinctly remember writing you to tell you that the story you mirror here did not happen. It is an absolute certainty that this is a made-up story. In fact, I contributed an article on the Unz Review in which I shared my findings on that.
But, in closing, to get back to the main point, I feel compelled to ask you:
Why is it that you are able to see through the “Muslims as terrorists” nonsense yet are seemingly helpless against the “Muslims as rapists” propaganda?
It is a crucial question because, quite frankly, I am pretty certain that you do huge damage to your own credibility this way, in particular by repeating these kinds of malicious stories without proper fact checking. In my own case, I can certainly say that this problem has caused me to largely stop reading your blog. I doubt that I am the only such case.
Best Regards and Greetings from Spain,
Jonathan Revusky
P.S. Now, finally, I spent a certain amount of time composing this message to you and I would appreciate acknowledgement that you received it and read it. If there is no acknowledgment of it, I guess what I’ll do is that I’ll just put up this letter on my website (or perhaps a more polished version of the text) and point out that you never did acknowledge it, and then anybody can draw whatever conclusion they want from that.
P.P.S. I likely will post it in any case, but I feel you should be given a right to react beforehand.