Whitewashing Pedophilia

By Karim Bettache  –  Aug. 9, 2025

Epstein’s “Women”
When Max Blumenthal, an admirable journalist who has built his reputation on exposing Western imperial brutality, repeatedly refers to Jeffrey Epstein’s victims as “women“ rather than the children they were, we witness the power of civilizational conditioning to override even the most critical minds. This is not mere carelessness. It is the manifestation of a deeper psychological mechanism that sanitizes the crimes of our own while amplifying the depravity of the Other.

There is a peculiar alchemy at work in our discourse about sexual violence, one that transforms children into “women” and pedophilia into mere “trafficking” when the perpetrators wear suits instead of fatigues, when they operate from Manhattan penthouses rather than Damascus basements. This linguistic sleight of hand reveals something far more sinister than journalistic imprecision—it exposes the psychological architecture of a civilization that has convinced itself of its own moral superiority even as it systematically protects its most depraved.

Rapists are “The Other”
The pattern is as predictable as it is revealing. Syrian death squads are described in lurid detail, their sexual crimes catalogued with an almost pornographic precision. Libyan militias become symbols of barbarism, their violations of women and children presented as evidence of their fundamental inhumanity. But when “Israeli” forces systematically abuse Palestinian children in detention centers, when Western-backed regimes torture and rape with impunity, when our own elites traffic children for their pleasure, the language shifts. The crimes become abstract, the victims aged up, the horror domesticated into manageable euphemism.

This is not accidental. It is the product of what we might call the civilizational unconscious—a collective psychological defense mechanism that protects our sense of moral superiority by rendering invisible or minimizing the crimes committed in our name or by our heroes. We have been conditioned from birth to see ourselves as the protagonists of history, the bearers of civilization to a savage world. To confront the full horror of what we are, what we have always been, would shatter this foundational mythology.

It is the quiet economy of the self. To belong to a nation, a movement, a profession is to accept a myth of goodness. When that myth is challenged by the banal fact of domestic predation, a psychic emergency erupts. Cognitive dissonance is not abstract—it is felt in the chest. The mind reaches for tools that dull the ache: minimization, ambiguity, the refuge of process. If the harm cannot be denied, it can be diffused. If it cannot be diffused, it can be reframed as tragic but inscrutable. The result is the kind of sentence that sounds responsible while leaving no one responsible.

Systemic Complicity in Child Sexual Abuse
The case of Epstein is particularly instructive because it forces us to confront not merely individual depravity but systemic complicity. Here was a man who operated with impunity for decades, protected by intelligence agencies, celebrated by the media, welcomed into the highest circles of power. His “suicide” in federal custody was so convenient, so perfectly timed, that it became a dark joke. Yet even those who recognize the obvious cover-up, struggle to name what was covered up: the systematic sexual abuse of children by the most powerful people in our society.

The reluctance to use the word “pedophile” when describing Epstein’s clients, the insistence on calling his victims “women” rather than the children or girls they were, serves a crucial psychological function. It allows us to maintain the fiction that whatever happened was somehow less monstrous, more understandable, more forgivable than the crimes we so readily condemn when committed by our designated enemies.

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Our Society is the Most Depraved
This same dynamic plays out in our coverage of “Israeli” crimes against Palestinian children. The sexual torture documented in “Israeli” detention centers, the systematic humiliation and abuse of minors, receives a fraction of the attention devoted to unsubstantiated claims about the Palestinian resistance. When it is reported at all, it is buried in the passive voice, drained of the visceral horror that characterizes our descriptions of similar crimes elsewhere.

The psychological roots of this selective blindness run deep. Edward Said understood that Orientalism was not merely an academic discipline but a way of seeing that divided the world into the civilized and the barbaric, with “us” always occupying the civilized side of the equation. This worldview requires that we minimize our own capacity for evil while maximizing that of others. It demands that we see our crimes as aberrations, their crimes as revelations of essential character.

But there is something even more fundamental at work here—what we might call the narcissism of civilization itself. Having convinced ourselves that we represent the pinnacle of human development, we cannot psychologically afford to acknowledge that our most elite institutions are often the most depraved, that our claims to moral authority rest on foundations of systematic violence and exploitation.

The media, even the independent media that prides itself on challenging power, remains trapped within this civilizational narcissism. It can expose the lies about weapons of mass destruction, it can document the brutality of our foreign wars, it can even acknowledge the corruption of our political system. But when it comes to confronting the sexual depravity of our elites, when it comes to naming pedophilia as pedophilia and children as children, it falters. The psychological cost of such honesty is too high.

Language Matters
This is why the language matters so much. When we call Epstein’s victims “women,” we participate in the very cover-up we claim to oppose. When we fail to describe “Israeli” crimes against Palestinian children with the same visceral language we use for Syrian crimes, we reveal ourselves as propagandists for the very system we pretend to critique.

The truth is that sexual violence, particularly against children, is not the aberrant behavior of isolated monsters but the logical expression of capitalist systems built on domination and exploitation. Those who accumulate vast power over others—whether through wealth, political position, or military force—often develop an appetite for the ultimate exercise of that power: the sexual domination of the most vulnerable.

This is not a uniquely Western phenomenon, but it is a phenomenon that the West has perfected and systematized while convincing itself of its own righteousness. Our failure to confront this reality honestly, our insistence on sanitizing the language used to describe it, reveals not our civilization but our barbarism—a barbarism made all the more sinister by its refusal to acknowledge itself.

Until we can speak plainly about what our elites do to children, until we can apply the same moral standards to ourselves that we apply to our enemies, we remain complicit in the very horrors we claim to oppose. The children Epstein trafficked deserve better than euphemism. The Palestinian children in “Israeli” custody deserve better than silence. And we deserve better than the comfortable lies that allow us to sleep at night while the powerful prey upon the powerless in our name.

 

 

(BettBeat)