Is he devious or oblivious?

The following is presented as a service to those of you who may be adverse to reading very long posts such as the one I published yesterday.

He deserves credit for chutzpah, I'll give him that. Tucked into a post about how his own frum blog is honest, while the Jew-hating media is not, Yaakov Menken manages to:

(1) mischaracterizes the Valis verdict;
(2) misrepresent his own efforts to defend Valis;
(3) distort the sentencing judge's opinion; and
(4) violate at least one Torah law.

(1)How he mischarecterizes the Valis verdict
Menken: The father, needless to say, was cleared of all charges related to abuse.
This is false. Three doctors testified that the child's injuries were inflicted. Valis was not "cleared." He was convicted and sentenced to six years in jail.

(2)How he misrepresents his own efforts to defend Valis
Menken: Of course, I had not “spread baseless, and ultimately damaging ideas,” [about the medical examiner and the police] but merely said that the police report should not be taken as fact before the trial.
This claim is debatable, but quite hard to square with the first post he wrote about Valis, a post titled "The Amona Police Ride Again." It's also fair to ask why we were subjected to several posts about alleged police errors, errors that ultimately did nothing to discredit the findings of the three doctors, if he was not trying to destroy the credibility of Jerusalem's Jewish police force. Likewise, calling the death an "accident" when the medical evidence clearly said otherwise, was another way of saying that the legitimate authorities are corrupt, and impossible to trust. Such an argument is dangerous to public safety, and in this particular case, fatal to Jewish unity. When you encourage people to distrust the police, you encourage lawlessness and vigilantism, and you encourage victims to leave crimes unreported. Additionally, his decision to frame the case as "Bungling Corrupt Secular Thugs vs A Neighborhood of Pious God-fearing Charedim" did nothing but fuel the fires of paranoia, and create unnecessary divisions within the family of Israel.

(3) How he distorts the sentencing judges opinion
Menken: Judge Hannah Ben-Ami decided to convict him of manslaughter (not murder) because it was “reasonable to believe that there was awareness of the possible fatal outcome” of his actions — which stunned legal observers familiar with the meaning of “innocent until proven guilty.” It’s also, by her own statement, reasonable to believe that the father fell asleep and dropped his son"
This is ridiculous. Given the testimony of the three doctors who reported evidence of violent shaking, and bruises and trauma, Menken's theory is barely plausible, let alone "reasonable." His suggestion that this theory is somehow supported by the conviction defies common sense: There was evidence of abuse and Valis was convicted of manslaughter on that evidence. Manslaughter does not mean he dropped his kid. It means he beat his kid without intending to kill him.

(4) How he violates at least one Torah law.
B. T. Bava Metzia 58b ואם היה בעל תשובה, לא יאמר לו זכור מעשיך הראשונים. I don't mean to cloak myself in a robe of piety - my views on certain theological subjects are well know - but I don't think its unreasonable to expect a blog that often wields the Torah like a cudgel, a blog that proudly considers itself an authoritative voice of "Orthodox Jewish thought and opinion," to live up to its own announced standards.

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