The tabloid newspaper that broke the story of Mr. Mosley’s Chelsea session, The News of the World, described it as “a depraved Nazi sadomasochistic orgy,” and said Mr. Mosley had paid the equivalent of $5,000 in cash for the five-hour session.

In a video the paper posted on the Internet but later removed, two of the women wore black-and-white striped robes in the style of prisoners’ uniforms. The video showed Mr. Mosley counting in German — “Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier! Funf!” — as he used a leather strap to lash one of the women.

Okay, so he was caught on tape in a Nazi S/M orgy. Sounds bad, right? But wait. It gets creepier:

The video, which has been removed from the newspaper’s web site, also captures a prostitute commanding Mosley to strip before she inspects his head and genitals for lice, which the paper suggest was “mocking the humiliating ways Jews were treated by SS death camp guards in World War II.” Placed in chains, Mosley leans over a torture bench and whimpers as a dominatrix strikes him with a rod, saying “You’re going to be shown how we treat prisoners in our facility.” Later, when Mosley takes hold of a whip, he states that a blonde inmate “needs more of ze punishment.”

This guy plays both the concentration camp guard and the concentration camp prisoner in the same Nazi-fetish orgy. How sick is that? (And, I have to wonder, how unusual is it, from your run-of-the-mill BDSM point of view, to play both the ‘top’ and the ‘bottom’ characters during the same orgy? Multiply that by ‘Nazi’, and see what happens.) As a Jew, I am completely squicked out. As (I like to think) a mostly decent, rational human being, I am simply in a state of aporia.

Turns out that this Nazi-fetish thing didn’t come completely out of nowhere:

Mosley’s background ensures that he won’t get off that easily. His mother, Diana Mitford, was a celebrity British Nazi sympathizer in the prewar years, while his father, Sir Oswald Mosley, founded and led the British Union of Fascists — a guest of honor at their wedding in 1936, at the Berlin home of Joseph Goebbels, was none other than Adolf Hitler.

Also, Mosley is the president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, the governing body of things like the Grand Prix and Formula One racing. Which depends heavily on car-makers like BMW and Mercedes-Benz for support. Gee, I wonder what their reaction is, given these companies’ histories vis-à-vis Jews and the Holocaust. And how is the esteemed Mr. Mosley responding to this, er, incident? With an apology? Nah, see, you’re still thinking like a reasonable person. He’s employing a device that we Westerners have raised to an art form since Roman times: the lawsuit. From the NYT article:

Mr. Mosley has acknowledged participating in the session. But he has denied that the role-playing had a Nazi motif, and announced Friday that he had filed a lawsuit against the newspaper, claiming “unlimited damages” for invasion of privacy.

In a letter on Saturday to the head of Germany’s motoring federation, he renewed his insistence that the Chelsea session was a private matter, and added, in a reference to the F.I.A.’s role in promoting road safety around the world: “Had I been caught driving excessively fast on a public road or over the alcohol limit, I would have resigned the same day. As it is, the scandal paper obtained by illegal means pictures of something I did in private, which, although unacceptable to some people, was harmless and completely legal.”

The issue isn’t whether he should be prosecuted, because what he did was legal, though distasteful, as he rightly points out. However, in the YouTube era, privacy has been redefined: when the video of you beating women dressed as concentration camp victims—or whatever else it happens to be—goes onto the Internets, there’s simply nothing you can do about it. The issue is whether he should resign, which would be an expression of humility and an acknowledgement of wrongdoing. Unfortunately, I don’t think this guy is smart enough to put two and two together.

He has refused to resign his F.I.A. post, appealing to the federation’s global network of motoring organizations for support. But denunciations have cascaded from much of the racing world, from Jewish groups, and from F.I.A.-affiliated motoring organizations around the world, including the American Automobile Association, which said in a statement on Saturday that Mr. Mosley, as F.I.A. chief, needed to set “the highest standards of ethical behavior” if he was to represent millions of motorists worldwide. It added: “It would be in the best interest of all concerned if he were to step down.”

Perhaps more significantly, calls for his resignation have come from four major car companies, each of which owns or substantially controls grand prix racing teams: BMW, Daimler Benz, Honda and Toyota.

Ugh. I simply don’t know what to say, except why the heck isn’t this story getting more press in North America? Also, why hasn’t this guy resigned? Actually, the answer to that’s an easy one: shamelessness. But I’ll have to leave the solution to the grander problem as an exercise for the reader.

I have two—admittedly snarky and probably unproductive—thoughts: One, this might give Silvio Berlusconi some pause from his recent plotting to retake the government in Italy after Romano Prodi’s resignation. If this pan-European far-right party eventually reaches into the Italian right wing, it might draw away some support from that base. And two, is it possible that the Belgian far-right thinks this will help the country with its ethnic problems? They still can’t form a government: could the answer possibly lie in a reaffirmation of the supremacy of white Christians? They can all still agree on that, right?

But the alterations that the government appears ready to make to Article 301 only go so far, the New York Times reports. Given the conservatism and nationalistic pride of many modern Turks, the government will not abolish the law; they will only ‘weaken’ it to try to reduce frivolous prosecutions under it. Furthermore—and possibly more importantly—the whole corpus of laws restricting free speech are spread over the legal code, and some of them are not even part of it. Liberals in Turkey apparently wanted the government to take some action to clean up this confusing legal patchwork, but the government won’t go there.

As I have noted previously, a nation cannot truly be called a democracy if it restricts the free speech of its citizens. If Turkey has any aspirations to being known as a democracy, in any meaningful sense of the word, it will have to give up these insulting and xenophobic restrictions on questioning the official history of the state. Let’s hope that this weakening of Article 301 is only the first step in a process leading to true freedom of speech in Turkey.