Ah, allegedly, the fig leaf of the scoundrel. You can say any old nasty lie about folks you despise, so long as you sign it with “allegedly.”
The way failed messiah Shmaria Rosenberg uses it, for instance, is allegedly outright antisemitic poetry:
The members of a mob of hasidic men who allegedly savagely beat a 22-year-old African-American Brooklyn fashion student earlier this month were all wearing jackets or other clothing with police-style patches and appear to belong to a Shomrim haredi street patrol.
I’ve been called allegedly so many things in my unremarkable career, that I’ve learned to smell alleged rotten news eggs. So, I would like to get a satisfying answer to one question:
Why are there no pictures out there of the brutal Hasidim savagely maligning Patterson?
There can be only three possible reasons:
1. There are no pictures.
2. There are pictures, but the cops confiscated them.
3. There was no attack by Hasidim on Patterson. At least not the way he’s describing it.
Option 2 suggests a conspiracy on the part of the cops to conceal information. That’s heavy. It’s also highly doubtful.
I pray that none of the allegations against the Jews of Williamsburg turn out to be true. And I hope that my trust in the fact that Haredi Jews don’t ambush innocent men to beat them up for the fun of it doesn’t turn out to be yet another bashed assumption.
With so many allegedly antisemitic enemies without and within ready to copy, paste and disseminate alleged news about brutal Hasidim, I shudder at the thought of what might happen if the original report turned out to be true.