I recall that back in my Wing Chun days, proper etiquette required one to challenge, square off against, and soundly defeat one's fellow martial arts practitioner prior to insulting his/her abilities and/or school.
Admittedly, this was back before the internet achieved its current widespread popularity.
What do you expect? For all of us to go around the country of 250 million people and challenging and defeating every fraud in the martial art industry? And who would prevent newbies from falling into the plumb hands of frauds while all of us are walking the earth like Caine?
Or do you expect not to comment at all about anything in the world until we physically challenged and defeated the subjects of such comments?
If a "martial artist" starts using words like "combat art," "street-effective" and other jargon, the onus is on him to prove it - otherwise he deserves the jeers he gets for "all talk, no action."
It took a chance happenstance to get that fraud, Frank Dux (of "Bloodsports" fame) to actually face a third-rate UFC fighter and get a royal beating out of it (of course, Dux sued the hotel that hosted the event and made out just fine).
I confronted a martial art fraud when I lived in another city once. I urged the university (which hosted him) to require certification for his claims as a martial arts "master" and a "self-defense and grappling instructor" to no avail (he took to wearing a black belt - even though I knew for a fact that he had only a few months of Tae Kwon Do and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu training). This is a guy I, but a mere student in a few systems, toyed with and submitted and knocked around at will during sparring at one of his "classes," leading him to have the security escort me out and bar me from coming near him during his classes (and screaming about what he "can really do to me in a real fight" AFTER security arrived and asked me to leave). He also taught "knife defense" by having his clueless students catch fake blades between palms (!) a la 1970s Ninja movies and taught a flying armbar (!) that he cannot do himself (he had a girl jump onto his arm while he fell on her and pretended get arm-locked, with plenty of padding on the floor of course) as a viable form of street self-defense.
I offered to fight him NHB-style at a local event (or to have him put up a knife defense demonstration while I "attack" him with a magic marker), but he declined, stating that he was "too busy with UFC appearances" (!), which was obviously a ridiculous lie. If my BJJ instructor (who is a Pan-Am medalist) or my Arnis instructor had a chance to figh this guy, it wouldn't even be funny (I'm thinking 10 seconds, max, that'd if he doesn't run like hell). In the end, I simply felt sorry for all the naive students he suckered into attending his classes (many of them impressionable sorority girls who simply did not know better and actually bought into his fake UFC victory stories).
To physically chase down and expose all these frauds would be daunting enough - word of mouth is much easier and cost-effective. Let's put it this way - if you saw an Internet ad of someone who claims to be a Navy SEAL, Delta Force operator and secret CIA-NSA officer who shows pictures of him wearing a Ninja outfit and wearing a dozen fake military decorations, pretending to teach "real military gun combat," would you first challenge him and beat him in a gunfight before you speak up?
Skorzeny
