ABC Australia Siding with the Bigots

May 9, 2019

Gaven Morris
Editor ABC.net.au

Dear Mr Morris,

Leave it to ABC to cite to notorious religious bigots and racists as their authority on how to attack people working diligently to help children and adults recover their ability to study through L. Ron Hubbard’s Study Technology at Applied Scholastics. How typical of you to attack something that helps people get better.

You liberally quote David Touretzky, a rabid racist, and Tony Ortega, promoter of the child sex trafficking website, Backpage.com, in your attack of a modern and popular religion.

Applied Scholastics is a fully independent, nondenominational organization supported by the Church of Scientology and by Scientologists dedicated to raising educational standards around the world.

Applied Scholastics recognizes that the world will one day rest in the hands of today’s children, and that how well they are equipped to carry this society forward depends on how well they are educated.

Ensuring quality education for today’s students to guarantee a brighter future for all is the mission of Applied Scholastics. Here is the link to their website.

David Touretzkey on the other hand does not seek to help or benefit anyone. His published works are devoted to insulting people of color and those different from him. Below are a sample of his published statements:

• “She [US Congresswoman] is the former ambassador to Micronesia! and she’s black. I should have known. What [sic] are all the really st00000pid congresswomen black?”
• “The black underclass is a very, very sick culture, with terrible internal problems such as high rates of black-on-black murder, teenage pregnancy, educational failure, drug abuse, and so on. AA programs can’t help the black underclass, because those people are so screwed up they’re virtually unemployable….”
• “There’s also a long rant about the sickness of black underclass culture, which again, I completely stand behind.”
• “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran Bomb Ira-a-a-n, because we ca-a-a-n…. the arabs and persians are still crazy f–ks, so what are we gonna do?”
• “F–k the Muslims. … check out the bloody Muslims… jeez what loons.”
• “Man, Hispanics are f—-ed up, which is why they’re still working class. Dipshits.”

Tony Ortega’s career has been pockmarked by made up stories, defense of purveyors of child prostitution, and rabid attacks on religion. Examples abound:

• In one of Ortega’s fabricated stories, he took license with two young girls who in fact had been savagely raped. He asserted they planned to “go to Hollywood” and appear in their own primetime reality show. Ortega penned this bogus article under the name of Antoine Oman. The Hollywood Reporter exposed it as a sham and The Daily Cannibal, a media watchdog, proclaimed: “Tony Ortega takes two teenagers, already brutally raped … and editorially sodomizes them by appropriating their identities, putting lies in their mouths, and pimping them as shameless opportunists who would do anything for a buck.

While at the Voice, Ortega became apologist-in-chief for Backpage.com, an online adult classified service owned then by the newspaper’s parent company, Village Voice Media.

Like Ortega’s article involving real-life raped teenagers, the gravesite story was another sham. The press secretary for then-Missouri Governor Matt Blunt told The Kansas City Star she was “extremely disappointed that a publication purporting to be a news outlet would print a satirical, fantastical article and not identify it as such.” Columbia Journalism Review weighed in, blasting Ortega’s stunt as inexcusable and arrogant.

Having laid waste to the reputations of two publications, Antoine Oman/Cesar Oman/Tony Ortega headed to the Village Voice where in 2007 he was made editor-in-chief.

The Voice was seeking to stem the pumping arteries of lost circulation and revenue, problems that—no surprise—Ortega did not handle.

While at the Voice, Ortega became apologist-in-chief for Backpage.com, an online adult classified service owned then by the newspaper’s parent company, Village Voice Media.

Attorneys general in virtually every state condemned Backpage.com as the primary trafficker of online prostitution, pimping and exploitation of teenage girls and runaways.

“Where Pimps Peddle Their Goods” read the headline of a scathing column about Backpage.com by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof:

“Behind the tens of thousands of Backpage ads investigated by law enforcement, there are victims with stories much like ’Alissa,’ who over a two-year period ’was sold to johns seven days a week, 365 days a year,’ was transferred like chattel from pimp to pimp for roughly $10,000 per transaction, and had her jaw and ribs broken when she tried to escape.”

Ortega, never one to care about human misery, became Backpage.com’s rabid defender, launching into a CNN reporter for her exposé of Backpage.com’s child prostitution, accusing the network of “junkscience” and “mass paranoia,” and criticizing the broadcast as a “sensationalistic piece” that was “manipulative” and part of “a semireligious crusade.”

I recommend you select the sources for your piece with at least a modicum of research.

A good start is to watch some of the programming on Scientology.tv.