Why it’s a good thing Deborah Mahmoudieh never became a lawyer

By and large we tend to skim past Deborah Mahmoudieh’s frothing-at-the-mouth shriek-fests, as she almost never has anything more interesting to say than “WHY IS NOBODY LISTENING TO ME!!!??!” If you’ve ever tried to cope with a three-year-old in the midst of a frenzied tantrum, you’ll understand when we say there’s really only so much one can take before the thought of earplugs becomes very appealing.

Yesterday’s rant wasn’t really all that much different from Debs’ usual fare, but we thought it worth a look, if only to appreciate her utterly deluded weaving together of disparate facts and factoids (factoid: thing that superficially resembles a fact but is actually complete bollocks) into what she seems to think is an airtight “lawfully legal” argument.

So let’s see if we grasp the essence of Debs’ argument:

Some time ago, prior to the Hampstead SRA hoax becoming public, RD was hired to do a voice-over for a fundraising campaign for a Haitian orphanage. According to Debs, this is highly suspicious, since the allegations his children were later forced to make included child trafficking and murder.

Let’s break this down, shall we?

Haiti is country that has been wracked by poverty for many, many years. With high birth rates and 80% of the country living in dire poverty, many parents are tempted to give their children to richer families as “restaveks”, a Creole word which means “stay-with”. These children are promised a better life and education, but frequently this doesn’t happen. Instead, they become household slaves, working long hours under deplorable conditions. According to the U.S. State Department’s “Trafficking in Persons Report 2014“, most of Haiti’s trafficked children are domestic slaves, who are dismissed when then grow up; they then often turn to prostitution, begging, or petty crime to survive.

As with the restaveks, children in Haiti’s orphanages are also often given up by still-living parents. They have been separated from their parents due to poverty, disability, discrimination and a lack of services in the community. Parents often give up their children because they believe they are sending them to a better life, where they will receive health care, education, and enough food. These orphanages aren’t always the havens the parents imagine, which is why some turn to fundraising activities outside of Haiti.

Orphanages full of children who have living parents are clearly not the best solution for children. Arguably, it makes much more sense to donate money to agencies which help keep families united in the community. However, it can be difficult to sell this proposition to overseas donors, who believe they are helping the poorest of the poor when they donate to orphanages.

That’s where the fundraising campaign about which Debs is so exercised comes in.

And frankly, while orphanages are a less-than-ideal solution for the situation we’ve outlined above, these fundraising campaigns are commonplace. The fact that this particular orphanage hired RD as a voice-over actor for that particular campaign is not nefarious in the slightest, unless you are a Hoaxtead mobster who sees fantastical ritual abusers behind every tree.

As commenter Sir Henry Rawlinson said,

Voice-Over artists are normally selected after a video has been made, often via an agency. They’re picked on the basis of the tone of their voice matching the look and message of the video; that’s all – possibly price plays a role. One job might be a charity appeal, the next one selling carpets… These days the V/O often doesn’t even meet or know the producers; it’s all done remotely. The reason for that video being withdrawn is simply that it had ‘expired’ and served its purpose; replaced with something else as the campaign moved on IIRC?

So RD read a script which was attached to an appeal for funds for an orphanage in Haiti.

Later, his ex-partner claimed that her former partner had been the “boss” of a mythical “death cult” (later changed to “Satanic death cult”, and still later changed to “state-sponsored trauma-based mind control cult”). One of the activities of this so-called cult (whatever it was) was alleged to have been transportation of babies from foreign countries by delivery services such as TNT and DHL. To our knowledge, Haiti was never mentioned in the children’s initial claims, but who cares?

To Debs, the combination of “read script for orphanage” and “was falsely accused of child murder” constitutes conclusive (and no doubt “lawful”) evidence that everything the children initially alleged  was true. Never mind that there was never any evidence, or that the children withdrew their allegations as soon as they were out of the clutches of their mother and her abusive boyfriend.

So far as Debs is concerned, the fact that someone did a voice-over gig for an orphanage in a poverty-stricken country, and several years later was falsely accused of being the leader of a murderous, cannibalistic cult, is clear-cut evidence of that person’s guilt.

She’s also got her girdle in a knot about the fact that the fundraising campaign, which began shortly after the Haiti earthquake in 2010, is no longer active, and the video has been withdrawn. Here’s a fascinating but true fact for Debs: the point of any campaign is that it will have a beginning, a middle, and an end. That’s how fundraising (and other forms of advertising) works. Material becomes dated (the Haiti earthquake is no longer in the news, for example), and new campaigns are begun.

Oh, but Debs is convinced that because a bunch of loonies in the U.S.A. made false allegations connecting a bunch of other people to child trafficking in Haiti (which, as explained above, might or might not have anything to do with orphanages), her allegations about Hampstead must be true.

Quite aside from the fact that Pizzagate has been roundly debunked and abandoned by many of those who formerly promoted it, the fact that some people make a false allegation does not mean that other people are guilty of anything. If our neighbour down the street is found to be dealing drugs or stealing cars, that is not adequate (or even lawful!) proof that we are doing the same.

Since Debs is so dedicated to the concept of “lawful evidence”, we think it’s time she learned something important about how actual evidence works.

Circumstantial evidence is evidence which relies upon inference to connect it to a conclusion of fact. In other words, a person’s fingerprint might be found at a crime scene, but that does not necessarily mean that the person committed the crime, or even that they were present at the time the crime was committed. It is possible to explain circumstantial evidence via two or more scenarios. In other words, it is not definitive proof of anything.

Not that Debs is really looking for the truth. She is grasping at straws, looking for anything that could be used to infer that the thing she most wants to believe in—that children were being raped and murdered wholesale in a school in Hampstead—is true. Why she wants so badly to believe in this is really anybody’s guess.