Sex – ILANA MERCER

O.J.-Like Evidence Convicts Noxious Knox

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Oblivious to the cameras ─ or perhaps for them ─ Amanda Knox (22) and Raffaele Sollecito (25) exchanged a slow, sensual kiss in full view of world media. Not far from where the two kissed lay the body of Meredith Kercher, the English girl with whom Knox had shared student accommodation in Perugia, Italy. Her throat slit, Meredith had expired in slow agony.

The kinky canoodling of Knox and her paramour outside the house of horrors conjured the climactic moment in the film noir “The Comfort of Strangers.”

Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren play an older couple (Robert and Caroline) who live in a palazzo in Venice. They gain the trust of the vacationing Mary and Colin (played by the late Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett), a young English couple. As Colin sips a cocktail with Robert at the latter’s Venetian residence, Robert suddenly and swiftly (as planned) moves to cut Colin’s throat. He then steps over his gurgling victim and the gushing blood to engage in frenzied sex with his eager wife Caroline.

The two have fulfilled a shared fantasy.

“Some time during the night,” by the Times of London’s telling, “the couple had returned to the cottage and faked a burglary in the room of another housemate. But as the police picked through the broken glass they were told that nothing had been stolen. They would have left it at that had not the housemate asked insistently why the door to Kercher’s room was locked shut. Eventually, it was knocked down. Kercher lay virtually naked on the floor, her two cotton tops rolled up above her chest. Oddly, her body was partly covered by a beige quilt” [the telltale signature of a female perpetrator, as a behavioral analyst would subsequently explain].

Knox, Sollecito and Rudy Guede, a local drifter born in the Ivory Coast and known to Knox, were convicted of the murder and sexual assault of Kercher. CNN, Fox News, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, on and on ─ all have united in advocating for Amanda, “An Innocent Abroad.”

Going against the grain of American-style boosterism, Barbie Nadeau of Newsweek stuck with “journalism” to detail the ample evidence against the pair, downplayed or downright suppressed in the American media. For one, “Neither suspect [had] a credible alibi for the night of the murder, and both told a variety of lies about that night.” Knox changed her alibi, not once or twice, but several times. In the process, she accused Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese bar owner, of the crime. Based on the convincing yarn Knox spun, Lumumba spent time in jail before being released.

After Knox had cast her pal Lumumba aside, she tried to implicate her lover of two weeks, venturing: “I think it is possible Raffaele went to Meredith’s house, raped her, then killed her and then when he got home, while I was sleeping, he pressed my fingerprints on the knife.

“[C]redible witnesses had shattered Sollecito’s alibi for the night of the murder. Sollecito says he was home that night working on his computer, but specialists … testified that his computer was dormant for an eight-hour period the night of Kercher’s murder.”

“Theatrics aside,” wrote Newsweek’s Nadeau, “the Amanda Knox trial comes down to forensics. … Among the most damning evidence against Sollecito is his DNA on the metal clasp of the bra that was cut from Kercher after she died.”

Also revealed with Luminol was a bloody footprint at the crime scene that matched Sollecito’s. “Key forensic evidence against Knox includes her footprint in blood in the hallway outside Kercher’s room. There [were] also mixed traces of Knox’s DNA and Kercher’s blood on the fixtures in the bathroom the girls shared. And a knife was found in Sollecito’s apartment with Knox’s DNA on the handle and … Kercher’s DNA in a groove on the blade.”

Like the original “Dream Team,” defense attorneys for Knox, “who at one time admitted to being at home when the murder took place,” alleged contamination (even though the crime scene was sealed off in-between searches), character assassination and insufficient amounts of DNA (it’s the type of DNA that matters, not the amount).

Knox’s vocal and voluminous supporters stateside yelped anti-Americanism and a general Italian backwardness. Amanda had been deprived of due process, they said. In American (positive) law, procedural violations can get evidence of guilt — a bloodied knife or a smoking gun — barred from being presented at trial. More often than not, such procedural defaults are used to suppress immutable physical facts, thus serving to subvert the spirit of the (natural) law and justice.

After attempting in vain to implicate Lumumba and the hapless Sollecito, Knox went on to scream police brutality, claiming she had been coerced into incriminating admissions. Knox was asked to identify the female officer whom she accused of slapping her during the interrogation, upon which she fell silent.

When the guilty verdict came down, a procession of fulminating female talkers soon convened on CNN to rubbish Italy’s legal system: The evidence (cited above) was weak, or practically non-existent. The prosecutor and the Italian jury were provincial bumpkins incapable of properly appreciating a high-spirited American. And so on and so forth.

In Italy, “if you’re accused, you’re as good as guilty,” asserted Judy Bachrach of Vanity (un)Fair. Bachrach was joined in ugly displays of American chauvinism by the likes of Lisa Bloom (spawned by ambulance-chasing attorney Gloria Allred) and the scary Stacey Honowitz. The two soon backed down somewhat, Bloom later admitting, on Anderson Cooper 360°, that indeed Knox’s confession, her “damaging behavior” following the murder, as well as the blood evidence, would be enough to bring down a conviction in our hallowed legal system.

The Knox clan has since recruited a veritable media mafia to put the Italian judicial system on trial for railroading their cherub. Agitating for Amanda are Secretary Hilary Clinton, Senator Maria Cantwell (WA), King County Superior Court Judge Michael Heavey, ubiquitous tele-attorney Anne Bremner, public relations advisor David Marriott, and “48 Hours” correspondent Peter Van Sant, who has abandoned impartiality for outright advocacy.

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FOREIGN AIDS

Ilana Mercer — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 00:00:00 +0000

If I didn’t know better, I’d say that William Jefferson Clinton was well qualified to be a poster boy for the dangers of AIDS, and that the 42nd president of the United States’ op-ed in the New York Times, marking World AIDS Day, was in line with his new duties. Alas, as a former AIDS counselor in South Africa, I know something about Mr. Clinton’s chances of infection: The former president’s risks are quite low, his sexual philandering notwithstanding.

If he wasn’t writing in his capacity as an advocate against risky sexual behavior, what’s Mr. Clinton’s angle? Now that educational efforts are proving ineffective in halting infection rates in the Third World, The Village Idiots are shifting the goalposts. Whereas our “moral duty” was once discharged by supplying Third Worlders with condoms and educational prophylaxis, it must now extend to making treatment available to every sufferer—or so Clinton says. Like his wife, Clinton galvanizes the royal “We” revealingly to support his theories of collective ownership and culpability (and hence more foreign aid).

The foremost authority on foreign aid, the late Lord P. T. Bauer, pointed out that a responsible demand for aid mustn’t avoid examining those “… popular attitudes and behaviours [sic] in the poor societies” which cause and perpetuate the misery.

Professional confiscators and colossi of ignorance like Clinton and U2 lead singer Bono would rather justify their activities with the false claim that human misfortune is a result of external contingencies that can be fixed by social planners like themselves. They hammer home the wicked lie that the wealthy—individuals and nations—thrive at the expense of the poor and essentially deserve to be relieved of their possessions.

Never mind that rich nations were streaks ahead of sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia well before colonization. Countries like Australia and Switzerland were rich absent any meaningful ties to the undeveloped world. As Bauer proves, this was the result of the West’s human resources, not its exploitation of the backward world.

Bono certainly doesn’t come clean. While he points an accusing—and untalented—finger at the West, the self-righteous activist praises Africans for being a “rare and spirited people,” concealing that if the spirit didn’t move them in some pretty wild ways, rates of infection in Southern Africa would not have reached 20 to 33.7 percent of the adult population.

Africans are having unprotected sex irrespective of the mortal dangers of AIDS, a phenomenon economists might explain with reference to time preference rates. This is the degree to which different people—and peoples—will discount the future in favor of immediate gratification. The number of people infected especially in Southern Africa bespeaks a high time preference: the consistent risking of the future for momentary benefits.

Nowhere do Bono and Clinton mention the endemic sexual violence in Africa—it too plays a considerable role in spreading AIDS. In South Africa, a woman is raped every few minutes. My African female clients told me that if they wanted to avoid being brutalized, they didn’t dare ask an African man to wear a condom. But I clean forgot: Violence in Africa, once attributed by liberals to the legacy of colonial meddling, is now conveniently put down to a lack of Western intervention.

Indeed, Bono never thinks to hang his empty head in shame as he proceeds to both slander and stiff Westerners by using his political pull. Goes without saying that in the process, Bono also fails to mention what Bauer so cogently referred to as the conduct of the recipient governments. This too is the proper object of scrutiny in the question of aid.

“Expulsion and slaughter of productive minorities” is certainly a factor in the increasing economic deterioration in South Africa and more so in Zimbabwe. Life for the productive white minority is perilous. Once wealth creators leave or are targeted by crime and oppressive economic policies, not least nationalization of their land, economic conditions worsen for all, especially the poor. I’ve a feeling, though, that Bono would have no sympathy for the Jews of Germany during World War II or the Chinese of Malaysia—somehow, it’s hard to imagine he or Clinton mustering compassion for groups that are, or were, persecuted by governments because of their self-sufficiency.

All in all, such boneheadedness stands to benefit from a lesson in ethics. And Bauer, who disputed the notion that “foreign aid is … the discharge of a moral duty to help the poor,” delivered it:

“Foreign aid is taxpayer’s money compulsorily collected; it is outside the area of volition and choice. Indeed, contributors not only have no choice but quite generally do not even know they are contributing. It is sometimes urged that in a democracy taxpayers do have a choice, which restores the moral element to foreign aid. This objection is superficial. The taxpayer has to contribute to foreign aid whether he likes it or not and whether he has voted in its favor or against it.”

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On Sexual Bombast And Bliss

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 26 May 2000 05:26:06 +0000

A surefire way to be labeled a desiccated dogmatist is to express some reservations about the way matters sexual are discussed in our public forums. One would sooner admit to being a member of the Hollow Earth Society than confess to being something of a prude. No surprise then that, as a bit of a prude, I never cease to recoil at the explicitness aspired to in the daily discourse diet. From “Friends” to “Fraser” to “Sex and the City,” it is de rigueur for these true-to-life characters to dilate on their sexual proclivities and practices with the same ease once reserved for discussing a lesser carnal refreshment like afternoon tea.

Turn to the printed media and you have the award-winning Christie Blatchford of the National Post briefing her readers at every opportunity on how priapically deprived she is. Evidently as desperate, Ann Kingston, Blatchford’s colleague, does not finesse her words either. Ms. Kingston went into raptures over the advent of a kind of mechanical female Viagra. The Eros System, she promised cringe-style, was sure to get women in the mood “to mambo”. Ms. Kingston’s excitement was tempered only by indignation over the fact that the device did not make front-page news (Hallelujah), for which predictably she blamed no other than the pale, patriarchal, penis people.

All told, even more repelling than the prurience was Ms. Kingston’s inability to interpret for her readers the statistical insignificance of the data behind the marketing gush: the glowing results which promised, according to this columnist, to make the device the unrequited woman’s contraption of choice were derived from a six-woman-strong sample!

The Vagina Monologues (I kid you not) is a stage performance now all the rage in the U.S. While Eve Ensler, the playwright responsible for these soliloquies from down under has been summarily dismissed by cultural critic Camille Paglia as possessing of “a dreary, pedestrian, unliterary mind,” Ensler has yet to be laughed off the cultural stage. Au contraire: from the podium on which she is perched, Ensler claims that the survival of women as females hangs on her dialogue with “this much mumbled-about body part”. It seems she is taken perfectly seriously, despite being very plainly in the mental buff.

Honestly, does shouting aloud about body parts and processes move us to a new level of awareness? If anything, I venture that this sort of self-aggrandizing obsession is bound to increase the prevalence of sexual dysfunction. Besides which the said enclave is not a “mumbled about body part”–it is much revered. Men, it has been observed, struggle to emerge therefrom and spend the rest of their days trying to resubmerge therein, admittedly, a reality more filled with bathos than pathos.

Granted that the mesmerizing power women have over men is lost on females like playwright Ensler, does she of the asinine genital-speak not realize that some things are best left veiled and mysterious? Women of her ilk are first to shout about the objectification of their sex, but are complicit in ensuring that the act itself suffers the very same fate: sex is being reified; made an object, a fashionable accessory, a part of a healthy life-style, or the bulwark of some imaginary emancipation.

In an orifice, I suggest, women like Ms. Ensler have found a suitable interlocutor.

From Viktor E. Frankl, leader of the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, comes real insight into achieving sexual bliss. The concept of “hyper-intention” originated by Frankl explains why those who buy into the sexual bombast, the public posturing, and the exhibitionism, may be left high and dry. Essentially, this means that, try as they may, individuals who make achieving sexual gratification “the object of intention and attention” are doomed to fail. In the achingly beautiful book Man’s Search For Meaning, Frankl explains that “pleasure is, and must remain, a side effect or by-product” of a relationship. It will evade those who make it a goal in itself. “Sex is justified, even sanctified, as soon as, but only as long as, it is a vehicle of love,” writes Frankl.

All these sexual loudmouths front and center, including our withered, national, sex tele-educators, deflect from the partnership that should come with sexual satisfaction, and diminish, denude and reduce the act to no more than friction.

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