USA > History > 2010 > Faith (II)

Incidents at Mosque in Tennessee

Spread Fear

August 30, 2010
The New York Times
By ROBBIE BROWN

ATLANTA — After a suspected arson and reports of gunshots at an Islamic center in Tennessee over the weekend, nearby mosques have hired security guards, installed surveillance cameras and requested the presence of federal agents at prayer services.

Muslim leaders in central Tennessee say that frightened worshipers are observing Ramadan in private and that some Muslim parents are wary of sending their children to school after a large fire on Saturday that destroyed property at the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro. Federal authorities suspect that the fire was arson.

The Islamic center has attracted national attention recently because its planned expansion into a larger building in some ways parallels a controversial proposal to build an Islamic center two blocks from the site of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York.

The Murfreesboro center, which has existed for nearly 30 years, suddenly found itself on front pages of newspapers this month and on “The Daily Show.” It became a hot topic in the local Congressional race, with one Republican candidate accusing the center of fostering terrorism and trying to link it to the militant Palestinian group Hamas.

Then, on Saturday, the police say, someone set fire to construction equipment at the site where the Islamic center is planning to move, destroying an earthmover and three other pieces of machinery. And on Sunday, as CNN was filming a news segment about the controversy, someone fired at least five shots near the property.

“We are very concerned about our safety,” said Essam Fathy, head of the center’s planning committee. “Whatever it takes, I’m not going to allow anybody to do something like this again.”

No people were injured in either incident. The cases are being investigated by the police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

In a statement on the center’s Web site, a spokeswoman called the fire an “arson attack” and an “atrocious act of terrorism.”

In Nashville, 30 miles northwest, local imams met with representatives of the United States attorney’s office on Monday to discuss the risk of further anti-Islamic violence. Several mosques have requested police surveillance, they said, especially with the end of Ramadan this year nearly coinciding with the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“We’re worried that these attacks could spill over into Nashville,” said Mwafaq Mohammed, president of the Salahadeen Islamic Center there. “We don’t want people to misunderstand what we’re celebrating around Sept. 11. It would be better to take precautionary measures.”

Another mosque, the Islamic Center of Nashville, has installed indoor and outdoor surveillance cameras, hired round-the-clock security guards and requested that F.B.I. agents be on site during worship services, according to the imam, Mohamed Ahmed.

“Whoever did this, they are terrorists,” Mr. Ahmed said. “What’s the difference between them and Al Qaeda?”

But in other parts of Tennessee, including Chattanooga, Knoxville and Memphis, Muslim leaders reported that they had experienced no hostility and saw no reason to increase security.

Incidents at Mosque in Tennessee Spread Fear, NYT, 30.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/us/31mosque.html

At Lincoln Memorial,

a Call for Religious Rebirth

August 28, 2010
The New York Times
By KATE ZERNIKE and CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON — An enormous and impassioned crowd rallied at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday, summoned by Glenn Beck, a conservative broadcaster who called for a religious rebirth in America at the site where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech 47 years ago to the day.

“Something that is beyond man is happening,” Mr. Beck said in opening the event as the crowd thronged near the memorial grounds. “America today begins to turn back to God.”

It was part religious revival, part history lecture, as Mr. Beck invoked the founding fathers and the “black-robed regiment” of pastors of the Revolutionary War and spoke of American exceptionalism.

The crowd was a mix of groups that have come together under the Tea Party umbrella. Some wore T-shirts from the Campaign for Liberty, the libertarian group that came out of the presidential campaign of Representative Ron Paul, while others wore the gear of their local Tea Party group, or of 9/12 groups, which were founded after a special broadcast Mr. Beck did in March 2009.

But the program was distinctly different from most Tea Party rallies. While Tea Party groups have said they want to focus on fiscal conservatism and not risk alienating people by talking about religion or social issues, the rally on Saturday was overtly religious, filled with gospel music and speeches that were more like sermons.

Mr. Beck imbued his remarks on Saturday and at events the night before with references to God and a need for a religious revival. “For too long, this country has wandered in darkness,” Mr. Beck said Saturday. “This country has spent far too long worrying about scars and thinking about scars and concentrating on scars. Today, we are going to concentrate on the good things in America, the things that we have accomplished, and the things that we can do tomorrow.”

Mr. Beck was followed on stage by Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate and former Alaska governor, who said she was asked, in keeping with the theme of the day, not to focus on politics but to speak as the mother of a soldier.

“Say what you want to say about me, but I raised a combat vet, and you can’t take that away from me,” said Ms. Palin, whose son Track served in Iraq.

But Ms. Palin did not steer entirely clear of politics. In a veiled reference to President Obama and his pledges to fundamentally transform America, she said, “We must not fundamentally transform America as some would want; we must restore America and restore her honor.”

Many in the crowd said they had never been to a Tea Party rally, but they described themselves as avid Glenn Beck fans, and many said they had been motivated to come by faith.

Becky Benson, 56, traveled from Orlando, Fla., because, she said, “we believe in Jesus Christ, and he is our savior.” Jesus, she said, would not have agreed with what she called the redistribution of wealth in the form of the economic stimulus package, bank bailouts and welfare. “You cannot sit and expect someone to hand out to you,” she said. “You don’t spend your way out of debt.”

Mr. Beck’s themes were ones he returns to on his radio and television shows, and people in the crowd echoed his ideas, saying that “progressives” were moving the country toward socialism and that the country must get back to a strict interpretation of the Constitution, which would limit the role of the federal government and do away with entitlement programs.

“The federal government is only to offer us protection from our enemies and help us when we need it,” said Ron Sears, 65, who came on a caravan of three buses from Corbin, Ky. “The states are supposed to control education and everything having to do with their citizens, except when they need federal help.”

Mr. Beck billed the event as the Woodstock of this generation, telling listeners that for decades, people would be asking, “Were you there?”

He had instructed his fans to leave their protest signs at home and to bring their children.

While there were few signs, people carried American flags or yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” banners, which have become mainstays at Tea Party rallies.

The event had the feeling of a large church picnic, with people sitting on lawn chairs and blankets with coolers and strollers.

Officials do not make crowd estimates because they are unreliable and can be controversial, but event organizers put the number of attendees at 500,000; NBC News said it was closer to 300,000, but by any measure it was a large turnout. The crowd stretched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument.

The rally organized by Mr. Beck, a Fox News broadcaster who has been critical of Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats, has come under attack as dishonoring the memory of Dr. King by staging the event on the anniversary of his speech. Critics have suggested that Mr. Beck was trying to energize conservatives for the midterm elections.

Across town, several hundred people packed a football field at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School to stage a rally commemorating Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

“We come here because the dream has not been achieved,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, an organizer of the rally. “We’ve had a lot of progress. But we have a long way to go.”

“They want to disgrace this day,” Mr. Sharpton told the crowd, referring to Mr. Beck’s event.

While the crowd at Dunbar was mostly African-American, the audience at Mr. Beck’s rally was overwhelmingly white, though a number of speakers and performers were black.

Among them was Alveda King, a niece of the civil rights leader, who in a speech said that if Dr. King were alive he would commend the organizers of the event and “would encourage us to lay aside the vicious lies that cause us to think we are members of separate races.”

Mr. Beck made a surprise visit on Friday to a convention held by FreedomWorks, a Tea Party umbrella group, for Tea Party supporters. He received a thunderous welcome from a crowd of about 1,600 in Constitution Hall.

He told the crowd that he had begun planning his march on Washington a year ago, thinking “it was supposed to be political.”

“And then I kind of feel like God dropped a giant sandbag on my head,” he said.

“My role, as I see it, is to wake America up to the backsliding of principles and values and most of all of God,” he said. “We are a country of God. As I look at the problems in our country, quite honestly, I think the hot breath of destruction is breathing on our necks and to fix it politically is a figure that I don’t see anywhere.”


Raymond Hernandez contributed reporting.

    At Lincoln Memorial, a Call for Religious Rebirth, NYT, 28.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/us/politics/29beck.html

In New Orleans,

Black Churches Face

a Long, Slow Return

August 27, 2010
The New York Times
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

NEW ORLEANS — Five minutes past 9:30 a.m. on a Sunday this month, which is to say five minutes past the time the worship service was supposed to start, Shantell Henley pushed open the front door of her pastor’s house in the Lower Ninth Ward. She entered the living room to find a gospel song playing on the stereo, two ceiling fans stirring the sticky air and 25 folding chairs for the congregants waiting empty.

“Am I late?” she asked the pastor, the Rev. Charles W. Duplessis.

“No,” he replied, smiling. “We’re Baptists.”

His joke, though, could not dispel the truth. The problem at Mount Nebo Bible Baptist Church had nothing to do with any Baptist indifference to punctuality and everything to do with Hurricane Katrina, even as its fifth anniversary on Aug. 29 approached.

Having lost his house and his church to the broken levees in the Lower Ninth, Mr. Duplessis had managed by grit and will and fathomless faith to reopen in early 2009, using his rebuilt home to replace the sanctuary he couldn’t afford to replace, the sanctuary that had stood in some grim coincidence on Flood Street.

He installed an electric piano and a computer with a projector. He collected several dozen copies of the Baptist Hymnal. He put out weekly editions of the church bulletin; he put up a lawn sign declaring, “Our Church Is Back!”

What was not back was the bulk of his congregation. Of the 120 members before Hurricane Katrina, only 40 had returned. The rest were still strewn across the map — Alabama, California, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas. And Mr. Duplessis could not in-gather the exiles, as the Bible commands, because most of the Lower Ninth remained a ruin of buckled roads, cracked foundations and swamp grass six feet high.

“It’s church — it’s serving the Lord,” Mr. Duplessis, 59, said in an interview in his house. “If I linger on what I don’t have, I can’t see what I do have.” He paused. “But I know this isn’t where God wants us to be.”

In his plight and his persistence, Mr. Duplessis represents the experience of churches, ministers and congregations throughout the Lower Ninth. While the fifth anniversary of Katrina offers much reason to celebrate New Orleans’s revival, this neighborhood that once thrived with a black working-class of homeowners and churchgoers continues to stand as a desolated disgrace.

As every level of government has failed to restore more than a fraction of former residents to habitable homes, the black churches have tried desperately to return through a combination of sacrifice, insurance and charity. And anyone with an even cursory understanding of African-American life knows that without vibrant churches, the Lower Ninth can never truly rise again.

Where about 75 churches operated before Katrina, barely a dozen have been able to reopen, according to the Rev. Willie Calhoun, a local minister who has closely tracked the process. Even among those churches that have rebuilt, what were once congregations of 150 to 200 now number in the dozens. The monthly intake of tithes and offerings, previously $20,000 or more, has fallen to the low thousands.

“You got those that are still struggling to come back,” said Mr. Calhoun, the assistant pastor of East Jerusalem Baptist Church, “and you got those that came back but the congregations are so small they’re struggling to keep their doors open. And without the churches, you got no community.”

East Jerusalem, for example, has only $55,000 of the $150,000 it needs to replace the church building that was destroyed when the floodwaters propelled a house into it. In an especially perverse touch, which several other congregations have faced, New Orleans officials are requiring the church to buy land for off-street parking, as if the pressing problem of the Lower Ninth is traffic gridlock.

“I remember that film — ‘build it and they will come,’ ” said the Rev. Hall Lanis Kelly Jr., 62, the pastor of East Jerusalem. “I believe in that. The Bible tells us, you plant the seed, God will do the watering. But we sure thought that in two, three years, we’d be back.”

The Rev. Michael Zacharie did get back, rebuilding Beulah Land Baptist Church for nearly $400,000 with a combination of savings, insurance money and a grant from Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian relief organization. On the Sunday in early 2009 when he rededicated the trim red-brick sanctuary, Mr. Zacharie preached to only 50 of the 400 pre-Katrina members. Etched in the church cornerstone were the names of four who had died in the flood.

“We were determined to come back so we could be the light shining in the darkness,” Mr. Zacharie, 54, said in a phone interview. “We want to be there for anyone that needs comfort, counseling, compassion.”

Such balm in Gilead has long been the mission of the Lower Ninth’s black churches. When Mr. Duplessis first inspected the wreckage of Mount Nebo’s building — pews tossed aside like toothpicks, chunks gone from the roof, the rear wall knocked loose — he also learned that several boats had been tied to the steeple. With 20 feet of water around, the second floor of Mount Nebo was, in more ways than one, a sanctuary.

And so he has persevered in his living room. On this particular Sunday, the faithful finally did arrive, a dozen by 10:15 a.m., nearly 25 by 10:35. Mr. Duplessis preached from the Book of Joshua, all about determination. He conducted a baby blessing. And he joined his people in singing lyrics that were almost unbearably freighted with double meaning:

“Storm clouds may rise

Strong winds may blow

But I’ll tell the world wherever I go

That I have found the Savior and he’s sweet, I know.”

    In New Orleans, Black Churches Face a Long, Slow Return, NYT, 27.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/28/us/28religion.html

Islamic Center

Also Challenges a Young Builder

August 26, 2010
The New York Times
By ANNE BARNARD and CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

Sharif el-Gamal is a relative newcomer to the New York City real estate business. He got his broker’s license in 2002. He is developing two condominium projects: turning a building in TriBeCa into six lofts, and planning apartments on what is now a West Side parking lot. He comes from the well-off family of a bank executive, but not from real estate billions.

With a career marked by drive and ambition but still in its early stages, Mr. Gamal, 37, has taken on a colossal challenge. He is the developer planning a Muslim community center on property he owns near ground zero — a $100 million project, he estimates, at the center of the most contentious national debate over Islam, America and freedom of religion in the nine years since 9/11.

It is the kind of project — a 15-story building, open to all, with a theater, educational programs, a swimming pool, a restaurant, a mosque and a 9/11 memorial — that people with experience in Manhattan development say needs years of groundwork, even without controversy.

But although he has cleared the legal hurdles and won approval from the local community board, Mr. Gamal has yet to secure financing, hire an architect, incorporate the nonprofit entity that will run the center, start its fund-raising, recruit its board members, or present formal feasibility studies and business plans to community meetings.

Putting aside sweeping debates over the project’s propriety and meaning, many ask a simpler question: Can Mr. Gamal pull it off?

“I have always marveled at the romantic notion that the average New Yorker has toward development,” said Josh Guberman, who in developing 28 properties in the city has dealt with financing, plumbing, transportation, unions and more. “To be frank, successful development in New York City is not an arena for the novice or inexperienced player.”

Building anything anywhere in recession-era New York is tough; Lower Manhattan is tougher; Mr. Gamal’s project, called Park51, is still more complex.

Mr. Gamal hopes to raise $70 million through tax-exempt bonds, which religiously affiliated nonprofit groups can obtain — but only if they prove that the facilities will benefit the general public, with religious functions separately financed.

He wants to recruit a board of business and civic leaders — Christians, Jews and Muslims — to raise an additional $30 million to $40 million for the nonprofit’s stake in the building. Russell Simmons, the hip-hop mogul, has signed on. But controversy complicates recruiting, and donations will be squeezed by the economy and scrutinized by opponents who wonder if money will come from radical Islamist groups or hostile governments.

Mr. Gamal has told supporters that he will take no money linked to “un-American” values and that donations will be vetted by federal and state authorities and separate boards for the center and the mosque.

Comparable projects like the Jewish Community Center of Manhattan, on the Upper West Side — Mr. Gamal is a member; his daughters learned to swim there — have planned their programming before financing the construction, to show they will have revenue from, say, gym memberships or day care. But Mr. Gamal’s plans are just beginning, and must focus enough on Muslim needs to attract national Muslim support while stressing multifaith outreach to win other donors.

The downtown market is especially tricky, said Julie Menin, chairwoman of the local community board, with commuters during the day and residents at night. Then, too, some New York Muslims feel that $100 million would be better spent on facilities in more heavily Muslim neighborhoods, Aisha al-Adawiya, of the Harlem group Women in Islam, said.

Debby Hirshman, who was the founding executive director of the J.C.C. and is a consultant on a community center to open next year in Battery Park City, said those projects spent 5 to 10 years on community meetings. Ms. Hirshman added, however, that organizations “start in all different ways.”

Mr. Gamal, a stocky man with a faint New York accent and the brash speech of a fraternity brother or a bond trader, says he can do it.

“We are very confident that we will be able to arrange the right mix of borrowing and private investment,” he said in a statement, noting that he has the support of city officials and others involved in downtown redevelopment. “Several financial institutions have expressed interest” in financing the project, he said.

In recent days, Mr. Gamal has reasserted control over the project’s image, stressing that he, not the imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, is in charge, and hiring a new public relations adviser, Lawrence Kopp.

That places new focus on Mr. Gamal. His father, an Egyptian, was a managing director at Chemical Bank. His parents divorced; he lived in Brooklyn until age 9, when his mother, a Polish Catholic, died. He then followed his father to Liberia and to Egypt, where he attended the Schutz American School.

Mr. Gamal returned to the United States for college, studying architecture and economics before dropping out. He was not raised in a religious household, but Islam helped Mr. Gamal out of a troubled youth, Mr. Kopp said. A younger brother, Sammy, is a partner in his company, SoHo Properties; a sister is a Lebanon analyst for the Pentagon.

After a stint waiting tables, Mr. Gamal entered the close-knit New York real estate world, where he is better known as a broker than as a developer. He began buying buildings three years ago.

Mr. Gamal has traveled to the Middle East, as have many New York developers. Gulf oil money is one of their few financing sources in the current market. But Mr. Gamal says his only current investors are from the United States and Israel.

As a broker, Mr. Gamal reliably delivers deals, said Michael Betancourt, an investor whom Mr. Gamal helped buy and rent out two SoHo buildings. “The kid keeps his head down, and he’s a grinder,” Mr. Betancourt said.

As an owner and developer, though, he is just getting started, by New York standards. Public filings show Mr. Gamal bought, starting in 2007, a half-dozen apartment buildings in Harlem and Washington Heights for $1.075 million to $2.8 million. Two have outstanding building violations and owe the city money. He also manages properties in Chelsea and Harlem. He bought his first major office building, 31 West 27th Street, in 2009, for $45.7 million.

Brokers said Mr. Gamal bid on other properties without success. One real estate executive involved in a purchase with Mr. Gamal said he took weeks to get financial documents that buyers typically assemble within hours.

Daniel Parker, who interned on commission at SoHo Properties in 2006, left for a firm that offered a steadier paycheck. But he was impressed with Mr. Gamal’s religious tolerance. Mr. Parker, who is Mormon, said the two talked about their religions and abstinence from drinking. He admired how Mr. Gamal and his brother left work to pray every Friday.

Mr. Gamal attended two Lower Manhattan mosques that were overflowing, and decided to build a mosque and community center, a Muslim version of the J.C.C. In July 2009, Mr. Gamal paid $4.85 million, a bargain price, for the property on Park Place, two blocks from ground zero.

“You could tell,” Mr. Parker said, “he was going to figure out a way to do something big.”


Nicholas Confessore and Jack Begg contributed reporting.

    Islamic Center Also Challenges a Young Builder, NYT, 26.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/nyregion/27build.html

Looking at Islamic Center Debate,

World Sees U.S.

August 25, 2010
The New York Times
By THANASSIS CAMBANIS

For more than two decades, Abdelhamid Shaari has been lobbying a succession of governments in Milan for permission to build a mosque for his congregants — any mosque at all, in any location.

For now, he leads Friday Prayer in a stadium normally used for rock concerts. When sites were proposed for mosques in Padua and Bologna, Italy, a few years ago, opponents from the anti-immigrant Northern League paraded pigs around them. The projects were canceled.

In that light, the furor over the precise location of Park51, the proposed Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan, looks to Mr. Shaari like something to aspire to. “At least in America,” Mr. Shaari said, “there’s a debate.”

Across the world, the bruising struggle over an Islamic center near ground zero has elicited some unexpected reactions.

For many in Europe, where much more bitter struggles have taken place over bans on facial veils in France and minarets in Switzerland, America’s fight over Park51 seems small fry, essentially a zoning spat in a culture war.

But others, especially in countries with nothing similar to the constitutional separation of church and state, find it puzzling that there is any controversy at all. In most Muslim nations, the state not only determines where mosques are built, but what the clerics inside can say.

The one constant expressed, regardless of geography, is that even though many in the United States have framed the future of the community center as a pivotal referendum on the core issues of religion, tolerance and free speech, those outside its borders see the debate as a confirmation of their pre-existing feelings about the country, whether good or bad.

“America hates Islam,” said Mohaimen Jabar, the owner of a clothes shop in Baghdad, Iraq.

“If America loved us, it would help the Palestinians and stop the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said. “It would stop Iran and Israel from distorting the image of Islam.”

Interestingly, leaders in Iran, Afghanistan and even occasionally prickly rivals like China and Russia — both of which have their own tensions in some of their heavily Muslim regions — have refrained from making much of the Park51 debate.

China’s state-run news media has used the story to elaborate on the need for a secular state strong enough to police extremism, a matter near and dear to its own ideology.

American diplomats are selling the controversy as Exhibit A in the case for America as a bastion of free debate and religious tolerance.

But “the harmonious image of the melting pot, of the ability to integrate all immigrant ethnicities is tottering dangerously,” Federico Rampini wrote in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

That was echoed by Pierre Rousselin, a French columnist writing in Le Figaro: “America is discovering that its Constitution and liberal principles don’t protect her from the debates that the practice of Islam stirs up in our countries.”

In Thailand, which has contended with its own Islamic insurgency, an editorial in The Nation worried aloud that America’s handling of the cultural center would affect relations worldwide between Muslims and non-Muslims. “If the era of former President George W. Bush tells us anything, it is that how the U.S. deals with the Muslim world affects us all,” the editorial said.

Far more common, however, was a sort of shrug of the shoulders from clerics and observers accustomed to far more unpleasant debates. While extremists have presented the controversy as proof of American hostility toward Islam, some religious leaders have taken quite a different stance, arguing against placing the center close to ground zero.

Dalil Boubakeur, head of the Grande Mosquée of Paris and one of the most senior Islamic clerics in France, told France-Soir: “There are symbolic places that awaken memories whether you mean to or not. And it isn’t good to awaken memories.”

A senior cleric at Egypt’s Al Azhar, the closest equivalent in the Sunni Islamic world to the Vatican, said that building at the proposed location sounded like bad judgment on the part of American Muslims.

“It will create a permanent link between Islam and 9/11,” said Abdel Moety Bayoumi, a member of the Islamic Research Institute at Al Azhar. “Why should we put ourselves and Islam in a position of blame?”

That is not to say that the language in the United States has not agitated some observers, like Aziz Tarek, who wrote on the Saudi Web site Watan that America was in the grip of “intolerance and racism.”

He referred to Newt Gingrich’s widely reported statement that there should not be a new mosque in Lower Manhattan until Saudi Arabia allows construction of churches or synagogues.

“How can they compare building a mosque in N.Y. with building whatever in Mecca?” Mr. Tarek wrote. “I thought they viewed themselves better than that country of Saudi Arabia with its many human rights violations, as they love to put it.”

One Cambridge University researcher, writing in the Palestinian daily Al Ayyam, said Muslims could win their case for a center near ground zero in a court of law, only to end up losing in the court of public opinion.

“Provoking the other side will eventually create public opinion that will undermine the very laws that the Muslims evoke today,” wrote the researcher, Khaled al-Haroub, adding that many Muslim states do not tolerate Christian or Jewish houses of worship: “We keep increasing our religious demands vis-à-vis the West, while refusing to meet even a few of the demands made by religious minorities living among us.”

Paradoxically, the public reaction has not been heated in Lebanon, a country with 18 recognized religious sects where Muslims and Christians have a long history of occasionally violent coexistence.

If the mosque were built, many Lebanese commentators said, it would increase the influence of the ideal of the secular state. Many Lebanese, however, seemed more interested that Miss U.S.A., Rima Fakih, a Lebanese-American, had suggested that Park51 seek another location, than in the debate itself.

“Let’s be honest, it is kind of weird to build it there,” said Samer Ghandour, 33. “But the U.S. is also incredibly polarized and does not tolerate Islam.”

Mahmoud Haddad, a history professor at the University of Balamand in Lebanon, said that “the Muslim community should take the high moral and political ground” and agree to move the center, even though it has every right to build near ground zero.

“They should show they are more concerned about the general good of all Americans,” said Mr. Haddad, who studied and taught in the United States for two decades. “American society refuses to accept Muslims, even of the Westernized type, and consider them as a potential risk at best.”

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the project leader, has been speaking about his Cordoba Initiative on a two-week tour of the Persian Gulf sponsored by the State Department, although he has gingerly avoided discussing the Park51 location.

“What’s happening in America is very healthy,” said Muhammad Al-Zekri, a Bahraini anthropologist, after spending an evening with the imam.

The United States, he said, was still assimilating historical influences, including Islam, into its inaccurate self-image as a solely Judeo-Christian nation. The construction of Park51, Mr. Zekri believes, will help shape that.

“We pray for the people of New York, for peace,” Mr. Zekri said solemnly. “And if it matters, we apologize for what those people have done on 9/11.”


Thanassis Cambanis reported from Bahrain. Reporting was contributed by Anthony Shadid from Baghdad, Maïa de la Baume from Paris, Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem, Nada Bakri from Lebanon, Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome, Mona El-Naggar from Cairo and Thomas Fuller from Thailand. Li Bibo contributed research from Beijing.

    Looking at Islamic Center Debate, World Sees U.S., NYT, 25.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/world/26islamic.html

Far From Ground Zero,

Obscure Pastor Is Ignored No Longer

August 25, 2010
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — If building an Islamic center near ground zero amounts to the epitome of Muslim insensitivity, as critics of the project have claimed, what should the world make of Terry Jones, the evangelical pastor here who plans to memorialize the Sept. 11 attacks with a bonfire of Korans?

Mr. Jones, 58, a former hotel manager with a red face and a white handlebar mustache, argues that as an American Christian he has a right to burn Islam’s sacred book because “it’s full of lies.” And in another era, he might have been easily ignored, as he was last year when he posted a sign at his church declaring “Islam is of the devil.”

But now the global spotlight has shifted. With the debate in New York putting religious tensions front and center, Mr. Jones has suddenly attracted thousands of fans and critics on Facebook, while around the world he is being presented as a symbol of American anti-Islamic sentiment.

Muslim leaders in several countries, including Egypt and Indonesia, have formally condemned him and his church, the Dove World Outreach Center.

An Islamic group in England has also incorporated his efforts into a YouTube video that encourages Muslims to “rise up and act,” widening a concern that Mr. Jones — though clearly a fringe figure with only 50 members in his church — could spark riots or terrorism.

“Can you imagine what this will do to our image around the world?” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington. “And the additional danger it will add whenever there is an American presence in Iraq or Afghanistan?”

Mr. Jones, in a lengthy interview at his church, said he sincerely hoped that his planned Koran-burning would not lead to violence. He dismissed the idea that it could put American troops at greater risk, and — echoing his sermons — he said that his church was being persecuted.

He said his bank recently demanded immediate repayment of the $140,000 balance on the church mortgage; that his property insurance had been canceled since he announced in late July that he intended to burn copies of the Koran; and that death threats now come in regularly.

“We have to be careful,” he said. He tapped a holster on the right hip of his jean shorts; it held a .40-caliber pistol, which he said he was licensed to carry. “The overall response,” he added, “has been much greater than we expected.”

Mr. Jones who seems to spend much of his time inside a dank, dark office with a poster from the movie “Braveheart” and a picture of former President George W. Bush, appears to be largely oblivious to the potential consequences of his plans. Speaking in short sentences with a matter-of-fact drawl, he said that he could not understand why other Christians, including the nation’s largest evangelical association, had called for him to cancel “International Burn a Koran Day.”

He acknowledged that it had brought in at least $1,000 in donations. But he said that the interviews he had done with around 150 news outlets all over the world were useful mainly because they had helped him “send a message to Islam and the pushers of Shariah law: that it is not what we want.”

Mr. Jones said that nothing in particular had set him off. Asked about his knowledge of the Koran, he said plainly: “I have no experience with it whatsoever. I only know what the Bible says.”

Nonetheless, his position and variations on his tactics have become more common, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Florida in particular has had a rise in anti-Islamic activity. In May, an arsonist set off a pipe bomb at a mosque in Jacksonville in what authorities called an actof domestic terrorism. A mosque and Islamic school south of Miami was vandalized twice last year, the first time with a spray of 51 bullets.

Just as disturbing to Florida’s Muslims, and to many Christians and Jews, is that anti-Islamic rhetoric has begun to enter the mainstream through Republican political candidates.

Some of the opposition predated the controversy about the proposed Islamic center near ground zero. In March, for example, Allen West, a retired Army officer running for Congress in Broward County, told a group of supporters that “Islam is not a religion” but rather “a vicious enemy” that was “infiltrating” the United States. (A campaign spokesman said last week that Mr. West meant to refer to radical Islam, not Islam generally.)

Ron McNeil, a candidate for Congress in the Florida Panhandle, told a group of high school and middle school students last week that Islam’s plan “is to destroy our way of life.” He added: “It’s our place as Christians to stand up for the word of God and what the Bible says.”

Similar sentiments now flow daily into the e-mail inbox of the Dove World Outreach Center. Mr. Jones said that the negative e-mails outnumbered the positive by about 3 to 1, but that strangers had sent 20 copies of the Koran and a church worker produced hundreds of supportive e-mails that had come in over the past three weeks.

A dozen of those messages revealed a wide range of motivations. For a few people — a Christian in Afghanistan, an Iraqi in Massachusetts, a Jew who called his co-religionists in the United States “soft in the head” — direct experience with Islamic extremists seemed to have darkened their views. Others seemed motivated by little more than hate, arguing that Korans should be barbecued with pork, which is banned by Islam.

Mr. Jones’s plan faced a new hurdle last week when the Gainesville Fire Department rejected his request for a burning permit. Mr. Jones said he would go ahead anyway (“it’s just politics”), and he predicted a quite a scene.

Some of his neighbors, like Shirley Turner, a retiree who shivered with disgust when Mr. Jones’s name came up in conversation, are already planning to protest with signs calling for unity. More than a dozen houses of worship, of various faiths, also intend to respond collectively on the weekend of Sept. 11 by “affirming the validity of all sacred books,” said Larry Reimer, pastor of the United Church of Christ.

Some pastors even plan to read from the Koran in their services.

For local Muslims like Saeed Khan, who came here in the 1970s to study for a Ph.D. in biology at the University of Florida, the collective rejection of Mr. Jones represents the America they want to believe in. In an interview at an Islamic center that used to be a Brown Derby restaurant, Dr. Khan said that “Mr. Jones is hijacking Christianity” just as “Al Qaeda hijacked Islam.”

What saddens him most, he said, is the lasting effect on Muslim youth. He now has three grandchildren under age 3 growing up in Gainesville, and he shook his head at the story of a friend’s daughter who woke up in the middle of the night and asked her mother, “Why don’t they like us?”

Still, like many others, he rejected the moment’s swirl of anger. Even if Muslims outside the United States respond to the planned Koran burning with protests, or worse, Mr. Khan said he would spend his Sept. 11 doing the same thing he did last year. He will be downtown, a few miles from Mr. Jones, feeding the homeless.

    Far From Ground Zero, Obscure Pastor Is Ignored No Longer, NYT, 25.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/us/26gainesville.html

Religion-Based Groups

Protest Restrictions in Bill

August 25, 2010
The New York Times
By STEPHANIE STROM

More than 100 religion-based organizations are protesting a provision in pending legislation that would prohibit them from receiving federal money if they consider a job applicant’s religion when hiring.

In a letter sent Wednesday to all members of Congress, the groups contend that the provision would dilute protections they have under the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, as well as under the Constitution.

“Those four lines in the legislation would be a seismic change in bedrock civil rights law for religious organizations,” said Steven McFarland, chief legal counsel at World Vision USA, a Christian aid organization that is leading the protest. “The impact would be huge and severely affect our ability to help children and others in need.”

The provision is in legislation to reauthorize the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which makes grants to nonprofit social service organizations.

While many of the groups signing the letter do not get money from the agency, they say the language of the provision is so broad it will affect other, unrelated sources of federal grants. World Vision, for example, received more than $300 million in cash, goods and services from federal sources last year, while the Salvation Army received almost $400 million from federal, state and local governments.

Nathan Diament, director of public policy at the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, said that although there are few, if any, Orthodox synagogues or schools that run programs financed by the agency, “the issue for all of our institutions is the broader issue of their continued ability under the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act to be able to hire staff that are consistent with their faith and tenets.”

The debate over federal financing of programs operated by nonprofits with religious affiliations — or so-called charitable choice — dates back to the Clinton administration, when it became part of a welfare overhaul. Organizations are not allowed to discriminate against clients based on religion or require, say, attendance at church services as part of service delivery but are able to exercise their religious beliefs in hiring and other aspects of their operations.

The Coalition Against Religious Discrimination, whose members include the American Civil Liberties Union, the Hindu American Foundation and the N.A.A.C.P., has been pushing Congress to eliminate charitable choice altogether for many years, and it said the pending bill did not go far enough.

    Religion-Based Groups Protest Restrictions in Bill, NYT, 25.8.>2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/us/26religion.html

Rider Asks if Cabby Is Muslim,

Then Stabs Him

August 25, 2010
The New York Times
By N. R. KLEINFIELD

It was the first fare of the cabdriver’s shift. A young man hailed him at the corner of Second Avenue and East 24th Street, wanting to go to 42nd and Second. It was 6 p.m. on Tuesday; the traffic was dense.

Once the fare, Michael Enright, a 21-year-old film student who had been recently trailing Marines in Afghanistan, settled in the back, he started asking friendly enough questions: Where was the driver from? Was he Muslim?

The driver, Ahmed H. Sharif, 44, said he was from Bangladesh, and yes he was Muslim.

Mr. Enright said, “Salaam aleikum,” the Arabic greeting “Peace be upon you.”

“How’s your Ramadan going?” Mr. Enright asked, Mr. Sharif said.

He told him it was going fine. Then, he said, Mr. Enright began making fun of the rituals of Ramadan, and Mr. Sharif sensed this cab ride might not be like any other.

“So I stopped talking to him,” Mr. Sharif said. “He stopped talking, too.”

As the cab inched up Third Avenue and reached 39th Street, Mr. Sharif said in a phone interview, Mr. Enright suddenly began cursing at him and shouting “This is the checkpoint” and “I have to bring you down.” He said he told him he had to bring the king of Saudi Arabia to the checkpoint.

“He was talking like he was a soldier,” Mr. Sharif said.

He withdrew a Leatherman knife, Mr. Sharif said, and, reaching through the opening in the plastic divider, slashed Mr. Sharif’s throat. When Mr. Sharif turned, he said, Mr. Enright stabbed him in his face, on his arm and on his thumbs.

Mr. Sharif said he told him: “I beg of you, don’t kill me. I worked so hard, I have a family.”

He said Mr. Enright bolted out of the slowly moving cab. Mr. Sharif then found a police officer who apprehended Mr. Enright. The officer told him, Mr. Sharif said, that Mr. Enright said he had tried to rob him.

Mr. Sharif received more than two dozen stitches at Bellevue Hospital Center and was released. Mr. Enright was given a psychiatric evaluation there.

The Manhattan district attorney charged Mr. Enright with second-degree attempted murder as a hate crime, first-degree assault as a hate crime and criminal possession of a weapon. He was arraigned on Wednesday in Manhattan Criminal Court, appearing in cargo shorts and a polo shirt, and ordered held without bail. If convicted of the top charge, he would face up to 25 years in prison.

“He’s terrified,” said Mr. Enright’s lawyer, Jason A. Martin. “He’s shocked at the allegations. He’s just trying to cope with it right now.”

The violence that erupted during the cab ride came amid a heated and persisting national debate over whether to situate a Muslim community center and mosque two blocks north of ground zero. Upon learning of the attack on the cabdriver, some Muslim groups called for political and religious leaders to quiet tensions.

Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement: “As other American minorities have experienced, hate speech often leads to hate crimes. Sadly, we’ve seen how the deliberate public vilification of Islam can lead some individuals to violence against innocent people.”

In a statement, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said, “This attack runs counter to everything that New Yorkers believe, no matter what God we may pray to.” He said he had spoken to Mr. Sharif and told him “ethnic or religious bias has no place in our city.” He invited him to come to see him at City Hall on Thursday.

The arresting officers said Mr. Enright seemed to be drunk, the police said, and a city official briefed on the investigation said there was an empty bottle of Scotch in his backpack. The police did not do a Breathalyzer test.

Mr. Sharif, however, said Mr. Enright did not appear inebriated to him.

Mr. Sharif, who lives in Jamaica, Queens, with his wife and four children, came to the United States about 25 years ago and was a cook before becoming a cabdriver 15 years ago. He said nothing of this nature had happened to him before. Recently, some passengers asked him about the center planned near ground zero, he recalled, and he replied that he was against it, that there was no need to put it there.

What is known about Mr. Enright presents a complicated picture. An only child, he lives with his mother in Brewster, N.Y., a middle-class suburb about 50 miles north of Manhattan. Neighbors said he was friendly enough and often skateboarded outside his house.

He is a senior, studying film, at School of Visual Arts, on East 23rd Street, near where he hailed the cab.

He was arrested in November on charges of criminal trespass and disorderly conduct. According to the police, he was picked up on Second Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets, where he was acting violently, banging on walls and ringing doorbells. There was also a warrant out for him at the time for another violation, though it was unclear on Wednesday what it was for.

Mr. Enright had been working as an unpaid intern with an Internet media company called tvworldwide.com on a documentary that followed Bravo Company of the First Battalion, Third Marines, known as the Lava Dogs.

An article in The Journal News in March said the film, “Home of the Brave,” was to be Mr. Enright’s senior thesis. The article said that in October, Mr. Enright spent time at Kaneohe Bay in Hawaii filming the Marines as they prepared for deployment to Afghanistan. In April and May, he spent five weeks embedded with them in Afghanistan, according to military officials in Afghanistan. One of the members of the regiment was a friend from Brewster High School, Cpl. Alex Eckner.

In the article, Mr. Enright said that the experiences of Mr. Eckner led him to want to do the film.

Mr. Enright is also a volunteer with Intersections International, an initiative of the Collegiate Churches of New York that promotes justice and faith across religions and cultures. The organization, which covered part of Mr. Enright’s travel expenses to Afghanistan, has been a staunch supporter of the Islamic center near ground zero. Mr. Enright volunteered with the group’s veteran-civilian dialogue project.

Joseph Ward III, the director of communications for Intersections, said that if Mr. Enright had been involved in a hate crime, it ran “counter to everything Intersections stands for” and was shocking.

Mr. Enright, according to the article in The Journal News, was also working as a landscaper at Four Winds Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Katonah, N.Y.

The older brother of Alex Eckner, Wesley Eckner, 27, said in an interview: “It’s crazy to hear this. It sounds completely out of character.”

Wesley Eckner, who served three combat tours with the Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan and is now in college, said that Mr. Enright was “a jolly kid” who liked to “goof around.” Whereas the older Mr. Eckner liked to go with his brother to the gun range to fire vintage World War II rifles, he said, Mr. Enright gravitated to taking photographs and loved movies.

During the time Mr. Enright was in Afghanistan, Mr. Eckner said, things had been quiet with the Marine unit, though it had come under plenty of fire before he arrived.

Yet he recalled a curious call from Mr. Enright not long after he had returned from overseas. He asked Mr. Eckner how he was dealing with readjusting, leading Mr. Eckner to believe he was having some trouble. He found that odd, considering that Mr. Enright had been there for such a short period. He said Mr. Enright had never said anything to them that was anti-Muslim.


Reporting was contributed by John Eligon, Ann Farmer, Michael M. Grynbaum, Andy Newman, Ray Rivera, D. Z. Stone and Karen Zraick.

    Rider Asks if Cabby Is Muslim, Then Stabs Him, NYT, 25.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/nyregion/26cabby.html

NY Mosque Imam:

US Rights in Line With True Islam
 

August 22, 2010
Filed at 10:56 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MANAMA, Bahrain (AP) -- The imam spearheading plans for an Islamic center near the New York site of the Sept. 11 attacks says America's sweeping constitutional rights are more in line with Islamic principles than the limits imposed by some Muslim nations.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf told the Al Wasat newspaper in Bahrain that the freedoms enshrined by the U.S. Constitution also reflect true Muslim values.

A portion of the interview -- to be published Monday -- was seen Sunday by The Associated Press.

Rauf is on a Middle East tour funded by the U.S. State Department.

He has discussed efforts to combat extremism, but has avoided any comments on the rancor over proposals for a mosque and Islamic center near the site of the toppled World Trade Center towers.

    NY Mosque Imam: US Rights in Line With True Islam, NYT, 22.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/08/22/world/AP-NYC-Mosque-Imam.html

For Imam in Muslim Center Furor,

a Hard Balancing Act

August 21, 2010
The New York Times
By ANNE BARNARD

Not everyone in the Cairo lecture hall last February was buying the imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s message. As he talked of reconciliation between America and Middle Eastern Muslims — his voice soft, almost New Agey — some questioners were so suspicious that he felt the need to declare that he was not an American agent.

Muslims need to understand and soothe Americans who fear them, the imam said; they should be conciliatory, not judgmental, toward the West and Israel.

But one young Egyptian asked: Wasn’t the United States financing the speaking tour that had brought the imam to Cairo because his message conveniently echoed United States interests?

“I’m not an agent from any government, even if some of you may not believe it,” the imam replied. “I’m not. I’m a peacemaker.”

That talk, recorded on video six months ago, was part of what now might be called Mr. Abdul Rauf’s prior life, before he became the center of an uproar over his proposal for a Muslim community center two blocks from the World Trade Center. He watched his father, an Egyptian Muslim scholar, pioneer interfaith dialogue in 1960s New York; led a mystical Sufi mosque in Lower Manhattan; and, after the Sept. 11 attacks, became a spokesman for the notion that being American and Muslim is no contradiction — and that a truly American brand of Islam could modernize and moderate the faith worldwide.

In recent weeks, Mr. Abdul Rauf has barely been heard from as a national political debate explodes over his dream project, including, somewhere in its planned 15 stories, a mosque. Opponents have called his project an act of insensitivity, even a monument to terrorism.

In his absence — he is now on another Middle East speaking tour sponsored by the State Department — a host of allegations have been floated: that he supports terrorism; that his father, who worked at the behest of the Egyptian government, was a militant; that his publicly expressed views mask stealth extremism. Some charges, the available record suggests, are unsupported. Some are simplifications of his ideas. In any case, calling him a jihadist appears even less credible than calling him a United States agent.

Growing Up in America

Mr. Abdul Rauf, 61, grew up in multiple worlds. He was raised in a conservative religious home but arrived in America as a teenager in the turbulent 1960s; his father came to New York and later Washington to run growing Islamic centers. His parents were taken hostage not once, but twice, by American Muslim splinter groups. He attended Columbia University, where, during the Six-Day War in 1967 between Israel and Arab states like Egypt, he talked daily with a Jewish classmate, each seeking to understand the other’s perspective.

He consistently denounces violence. Some of his views on the interplay between terrorism and American foreign policy — or his search for commonalities between Islamic law and this country’s Constitution — have proved jarring to some American ears, but still place him as pro-American within the Muslim world. He devotes himself to befriending Christians and Jews — so much, some Muslim Americans say, that he has lost touch with their own concerns.

“To stereotype him as an extremist is just nuts,” said the Very Rev. James P. Morton, the longtime dean of the Church of St. John the Divine, in Manhattan, who has known the family for decades.

Since 9/11, Mr. Abdul Rauf, like almost any Muslim leader with a public profile, has had to navigate the fraught path between those suspicious of Muslims and eager to brand them as violent or disloyal and a Muslim constituency that believes itself more than ever in need of forceful leaders.

One critique of the imam, said Omid Safi, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, was that he had not been outspoken enough on issues “near and dear to many Muslims,” like United States policy on Israel and treatment of Muslims after 9/11, “because of the need that he has had — whether taken upon himself or thrust upon him — to be the ‘American imam,’ to be the ‘New York imam,’ to be the ‘accommodationist imam.’ ”

Akbar Ahmed, chairman of Islamic studies at American University, said Mr. Abdul Rauf’s holistic Sufi practices could make more orthodox Muslims uncomfortable, and his focus on like-minded interfaith leaders made him underestimate the uproar over his plans.

“He hurtles in, to the dead-center eye of the storm simmering around Muslims in America, expecting it to be like at his mosque — we all love each other, we all think happy thoughts,” Mr. Ahmed said.

“Now he has set up, unwittingly, a symbol of this growing tension between America and Muslims: this mosque that Muslims see as a symbol of Islam under attack and the opponents as an insult to America,” he added. “So this mild-mannered guy is in the eye of a storm for which he’s not suited at all. He’s not a political leader of Muslims, yet he now somehow represents the Muslim community.”

Andrew Sinanoglou, who was married by Mr. Abdul Rauf last fall, said he was surprised that the imam had become a contentious figure. His greatest knack, Mr. Sinanoglou said, was making disparate groups comfortable. At the wedding, he brought together Mr. Sinanoglou’s family, descended from Greek Christians thrown out of Asia Minor by Muslims, and his wife’s conservative Muslim father.

“He’s an excellent schmoozer,” Mr. Sinanoglou said of the imam.

Mr. Abdul Rauf was born in Kuwait. His father, Muhammad Abdul Rauf, graduated from Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, the foremost center of mainstream Sunni Muslim learning. He was one of many scholars Egypt sent abroad to staff universities and mosques, a government-approved effort unlikely to have tolerated a militant. He moved his family to England, studying at Cambridge and the University of London; then to Malaysia, where he eventually became the first rector of the International Islamic University of Malaysia.

As a boy, Feisal absorbed his father’s talks with religious scholars from around the world, learning to respect theological debate, said his wife, Daisy Khan. He is also steeped in Malaysian culture, whose ethnic diversity has influenced an Islam different than that of his parents’ homeland.

In 1965, he came to New York. His father ran the Islamic Center of New York; the family lived over its small mosque in a brownstone on West 72nd Street, which served mainly Arabs and African-American converts. Like his son, the older imam announced plans for a community center for a growing Muslim population — the mosque eventually built on East 96th Street. It was financed by Muslim countries and controlled by Muslim diplomats at the United Nations — at the time a fairly noncontroversial proposition. Like his son, he joined interfaith groups, invited by Mr. Morton of St. John the Divine.

Hostage Crisis

Unlike his son, he was conservative in gender relations; he asked his wife, Buthayna, to not drive. But in 1977, he was heading the Islamic Center in Washington when he and Buthayna were taken hostage by a Muslim faction; it was his wife who challenged the gunmen on their lack of knowledge of Islam.

“My husband didn’t open his mouth, but I really gave it to them,” she told The New York Times then.

Meanwhile, the younger Mr. Abdul Rauf studied physics at Columbia. At first, he recalled in interviews last year, it was hard to adjust to American social mores. By 1967, he and a Yale student, Kurt Tolksdorf, had bonded at summer school over their shared taste in women and fast cars. But Mr. Tolksdorf said his friend never subscribed to the “free love” of the era.

When the 1967 war broke out in the Middle East, Mr. Tolksdorf said, Mr. Abdul Rauf reacted calmly when Israeli students tried to pick a fight. A classmate, Alan M. Silberstein, remembers debating each day’s news over lunch.

“He was genuinely trying to understand the interests of American Jews — what Israel’s importance was to me,” he said. “There was a genuine openness.”

In his 20s, Mr. Abdul Rauf dabbled in teaching and real estate, married an American-born woman and had three children. Studying Islam and searching for his place in it, he was asked to lead a Sufi mosque, Masjid al-Farah. It was one of few with a female prayer leader, where women and men sat together at some rituals and some women do not cover their hair. And it was 12 blocks from the World Trade Center.

Divorced, he met his second wife, Ms. Khan, when she came to the mosque looking for a gentler Islam than the politicized version she rejected after Iran’s revolution. Theirs is an equal partnership, whether Mr. Abdul Rauf is shopping and cooking a hearty soup, she said, or running organizations that promote an American-influenced Islam.

A similar idea comes up in the video of his visit to Cairo this year. Mr. Abdul Rauf, with Ms. Khan, unveiled as usual, beside him, tells a questioner not to worry so much about one issue of the moment — Switzerland’s ban on minarets — saying Islam has always adapted to and been influenced by places it spreads to. “Why not have a mosque that looks Swiss?” he joked. “Make a mosque that looks like Swiss cheese. Make a mosque that looks like a Rolex.”

In the 1990s, the couple became fixtures of the interfaith scene, even taking a cruise to Spain and Morocco with prominent rabbis and pastors.

Mr. Abdul Rauf also founded the Shariah Index Project — an effort to formally rate which governments best follow Islamic law. Critics see in it support for Taliban-style Shariah or imposing Islamic law in America.

Shariah, though, like Halakha, or Jewish law, has a spectrum of interpretations. The ratings, Ms. Kahn said, measure how well states uphold Shariah’s core principles like rights to life, dignity and education, not Taliban strong points. The imam has written that some Western states unwittingly apply Shariah better than self-styled Islamic states that kill wantonly, stone women and deny education — to him, violations of Shariah.

After 9/11, Mr. Abdul Rauf was all over the airwaves denouncing terrorism, urging Muslims to confront its presence among them, and saying that killing civilians violated Islam. He wrote a book, “What’s Right With Islam Is What’s Right With America,” asserting the congruence of American democracy and Islam.

That ample public record — interviews, writings, sermons — is now being examined by opponents of the downtown center.

Those opponents repeat often that Mr. Abdul Rauf, in one radio interview, refused to describe the Palestinian group that pioneered suicide bombings against Israel, Hamas, as a terrorist organization. In the lengthy interview, Mr. Abdul Rauf clumsily tries to say that people around the globe define terrorism differently and labeling any group would sap his ability to build bridges. He also says: “Targeting civilians is wrong. It is a sin in our religion,” and, “I am a supporter of the state of Israel.”

“If I were an imam today I would be saying, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ ” said John Esposito, a professor of Islamic studies at Georgetown University. “ ‘Can an imam be critical of any aspect of U.S. foreign policy? Can I weigh in on things that others could weigh in on?’ Or is someone going to say, ‘He’s got to be a radical!’ ”


Reporting was contributed by Thanassis Cambanis and Mona El-Naggar in Cairo, and Kareem Fahim, Sharaf Mowjood and Jack Begg in New York.

    For Imam in Muslim Center Furor, a Hard Balancing Act, NYT, 21.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/nyregion/22imam.html

3 Republicans Criticize

Obama’s Endorsement of Mosque

August 14, 2010
The New York Times
By EDWARD WYATT

WASHINGTON — Three leading Republicans reacted negatively to President Obama’s statements in favor of a mosque and Muslim community center whose construction has been proposed for a building near the site formerly occupied by the World Trade Center.

John Boehner, the Ohio Republican who is the House minority leader, said: ”The decision to build this mosque so close to the site of ground zero is deeply troubling, as is the president’s decision to endorse it.”

“The American people certainly don’t support it,” Mr. Boehner said.

Representative Peter King, a New York Republican, said that while the Muslim community has the right to build the mosque, doing so needlessly offends too many people.

“President Obama is wrong,” Mr. King said. “It is insensitive and uncaring for the Muslim community to build a mosque in the shadow of ground zero. While the Muslim community has the right to build the mosque they are abusing that right by needlessly offending so many people who have suffered so much. The right and moral thing for President Obama to have done was to urge Muslim leaders to respect the families of those who died and move their mosque away from Ground Zero. Unfortunately the president caved into political correctness."

Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, also condemned the proposed mosque and the President’s comments.

“There is nothing surprising in the president’s continued pandering to radical Islam,” he said. “What he said last night is untrue and in accurate. The fact is this is not about religious liberty.”

Mr. Gingrich said the proposed mosque would be a symbol of Muslim “triumphalism” and that building the mosque near the site of the Sept. 11 attacks “would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum.”

“It’s profoundly and terribly wrong,” he said.

    3 Republicans Criticize Obama’s Endorsement of Mosque, NYT, 14.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/us/politics/15reaction.html

Obama Enters Debate

With Mosque Remarks

August 14, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

PANAMA CITY, Fla. — Faced with withering Republican criticism of his defense of the right of Muslims to build a community center and mosque near ground zero, President Obama quickly recalibrated his remarks on Saturday, a sign that he has waded into even more treacherous political waters than the White House had at first realized.

In brief comments during a family trip to the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Obama said he was not endorsing the New York project, but simply trying to uphold the broader principle that government should “treat everybody equally,” regardless of religion.

“I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there,” Mr. Obama said. “I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That’s what our country is about.”

But Mr. Obama’s attempt to clarify his remarks, less than 24 hours after his initial comments at a White House iftar, a Ramadan sunset dinner, pushed the president even deeper into the thorny debate about Islam, national identity and what it means to be an American — a move that is riskier for him than for his predecessors.

From the moment he took the oath of office, using his entire name, Barack Hussein Obama, as he swore to protect and defend the Constitution, Mr. Obama has personified the hopes of many Americans about tolerance and inclusion. He has devoted himself to reaching out to the Muslim world, vowing, as he did in Cairo last year, “a new beginning.”

But his “new beginning” has aroused nervousness in some, especially those who disagree with his counterterrorism policies, or those more comfortable with a vision of America as a white and largely Christian nation, and not the pluralistic melting pot Mr. Obama represents.

The debate over the proposed Islamic center in Manhattan only intensified on Saturday, as the conservative blogosphere lighted up with criticism of Mr. Obama, and leading Republicans — including Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker; Representative John A. Boehner, the House minority leader; and Representative Peter T. King of New York — forcefully rejected the president’s stance.

Mr. Gingrich accused the president of “pandering to radical Islam.” Mr. Boehner said the decision to build a mosque so close to ground zero was “deeply troubling, as is the president’s decision to endorse it.” And Mr. King flatly said the president “is wrong,” adding that Mr. Obama had “caved in to political correctness.”

Indeed, the criticism was so intense that the White House ultimately issued an elaboration on the president’s clarification, insisting that the president was “not backing off in any way” from the comments he made Friday night.

“As a citizen, and as president,” Mr. Obama said then, “I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.”

The local issue of the mosque and the wider issues of Islam and religious freedom are just part of a divisive cultural and political debate that is percolating in various forms during this hotly contested election season. On Capitol Hill, for instance, some Republicans advocate amending the Constitution to bar babies born to illegal immigrants from becoming citizens — a move the president also opposes.

“I think it’s very important, as difficult as some of these issues are, that we stay focused on who we are as a people and what our values are all about,” the president said here on Saturday.

Mr. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, also held annual Ramadan celebrations and frequently took pains to draw a distinction between Al Qaeda and Islam, as Mr. Obama did Friday night. But Mr. Obama, unlike Mr. Bush, has been accused of being a closet Muslim (he is Christian) and faced attacks from the right that he is soft on terrorists.

“For people who already fear the worst from Obama, this only confirms their fears,” said John Feehery, a Republican consultant who spent years as a top party aide on Capitol Hill. “This is not a unifying decision on his part; he chose a side. I understand why he did this, but politically I think it’s a blunder.”

White House aides say Mr. Obama was well aware of the risks. “He understands the politics of it,” David Axelrod, his senior adviser, said in an interview.

Few national Democrats rushed to Mr. Obama’s defense; party leaders, who would much prefer Mr. Obama to talk about jobs, were mostly silent. Two New York Democrats, Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand and Representative Jerrold Nadler, however, did back Mr. Obama. But Alex Sink, the Democratic candidate for governor here, distanced herself, while Gov. Charlie Crist, a Republican-turned-independent, defended the president.

“I think he’s right,” Mr. Crist told reporters during an appearance with the president at a Coast Guard station here.

Mr. Obama has typically weighed in on such delicate matters only when circumstances have forced his hand, as he did during his campaign for president, when he gave a lengthy speech on race in America in response to controversy swirling around his relationship with his fiery former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

Debate about the Islamic center had been brewing for weeks, yet Mr. Obama had studiously sidestepped it.

But the Ramadan dinner seemed to leave the president little choice. Aides said there was never any question about what he would say.

“He felt that he had a responsibility to speak,” Mr. Axelrod said.


Edward Wyatt contributed reporting from Washington.

    Obama Enters Debate With Mosque Remarks, NYT, 14.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/us/politics/15mosque.html

Obama Says Mosque Upholds

Principle of Equal Treatment

August 14, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

PANAMA CITY, Fla. — President Obama said on Saturday that in defending the right of Muslims to build a community center and mosque near Ground Zero he “was not commenting” on “the wisdom” of that particular project, but rather trying to uphold the broader principle that government should “treat everybody equally” regardless of religion.

Mr. Obama, who is visiting the Gulf Coast with his wife and younger daughter for a brief overnight stay, made his comments at the Coast Guard district station here. On Friday night, he used the White House iftar, a sunset dinner celebrating the Muslim holiday of Ramadan, to weigh in on the mosque controversy. In clarifying his remarks, Mr. Obama was apparently seeking to address criticism that he is using his presidential platform to promote a particular project that has aroused the ire of many New Yorkers. And on Saturday at least three prominent Republicans spoke out against Mr. Obama’s stance.

White House officials said earlier in the day that Mr. Obama was not trying to promote the project, but rather sought more broadly to make a statement about freedom of religion and American values. “In this country we treat everybody equally and in accordance with the law, regardless of race, regardless of religion,” Mr. Obama said at the Coast Guard station. “I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That’s what our country is about.

“And I think it’s very important as difficult as some of these issues are that we stay focused on who we are as a people and what our values are all about.”

At the dinner on Friday night, Mr. Obama had proclaimed that “as a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country.”

But the day after the dinner, John Boehner, the Ohio Republican who is the House minority leader, was among those who criticized the president.

“The decision to build this mosque so close to the site of ground zero is deeply troubling, as is the president’s decision to endorse it,” Mr. Boehner said. “The American people certainly don’t support it.”

Representative Peter King, a New York Republican, said that while the Muslim community has the right to build the mosque, doing so needlessly offends too many people.

“President Obama is wrong,” Mr. King said. “It is insensitive and uncaring for the Muslim community to build a mosque in the shadow of ground zero. While the Muslim community has the right to build the mosque they are abusing that right by needlessly offending so many people who have suffered so much. The right and moral thing for President Obama to have done was to urge Muslim leaders to respect the families of those who died and move their mosque away from Ground Zero. Unfortunately the president caved into political correctness."

Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, also condemned the proposed mosque and the President’s comments.

“There is nothing surprising in the president’s continued pandering to radical Islam,” he said. “What he said last night is untrue and in accurate. The fact is this is not about religious liberty.”

Mr. Gingrich said the proposed mosque would be a symbol of Muslim “triumphalism” and that building the mosque near the site of the Sept. 11 attacks “would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum.”

“It’s profoundly and terribly wrong,” he said.

Mr. Obama had spent weeks of avoiding the high-profile battle over the center — his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said last week that the president did not want to “get involved in local decision-making.” But on Friday night, he stepped squarely into the thorny debate.

“I understand the emotions that this issue engenders. Ground zero is, indeed, hallowed ground,” Mr. Obama said. But, he continued: “This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are.”

In hosting the iftar, Mr. Obama was following a White House tradition that, while sporadic, dates to Thomas Jefferson, who held a sunset dinner for the first Muslim ambassador to the United States. President George W. Bush hosted iftars annually.

Aides to Mr. Obama say privately that he has always felt strongly about the proposed community center and mosque, but the White House did not want to weigh in until local authorities made a decision on the proposal, planned for two blocks from the site of the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center.

Last week, New York City removed the final construction hurdle for the project, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg spoke forcefully in favor of it.

The community center proposal has led to a national uproar over Islam, 9/11 and freedom of religion during a hotly contested midterm election season.

In New York, Rick A. Lazio, a Republican candidate for governor and a former member of the House of Representatives, issued a statement responding to Mr. Obama’s remarks, saying that the president was still “not listening to New Yorkers.”

“With over 100 mosques in New York City, this is not an issue of religion, but one of safety and security,” he said.

Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2008, has called the project “an unnecessary provocation” and urged “peace-seeking Muslims” to reject it.

The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish organization, has also opposed the center.

In his remarks, Mr. Obama distinguished between the terrorists who plotted the 9/11 attacks and Islam. “Al Qaeda’s cause is not Islam — it is a gross distortion of Islam,” the president said, adding, “In fact, Al Qaeda has killed more Muslims than people of any other religion, and that list includes innocent Muslims who were killed on 9/11.”

Noting that “Muslim Americans serve with honor in our military,” Mr. Obama said that at next week’s iftar at the Pentagon, “tribute will be paid to three soldiers who gave their lives in Iraq and now rest among the heroes of Arlington National Cemetery.”

Mr. Obama ran for office promising to improve relations with the Muslim world, by taking steps like closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and more generally reaching out. In a speech in Cairo last year, he vowed “a new beginning.”

But Ali Abunimah, an Arab-American journalist and author, said the president has since left many Muslims disappointed.

“There has been no follow-through; Guantánamo is still open and so forth, so all you have left for him to show is in the symbolic field,” Mr. Abunimah said, adding that it was imperative for Mr. Obama to “stand up to Islamophobia.”

Once Mr. Bloomberg spoke out, the president’s course seemed clear, said Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, a public policy institution here.

“Bloomberg’s speech was, I think, the pivotal one, and set the standard for leadership on this issue,” Mr. Clemons said.

Mr. Bloomberg, in a statement, said: “This proposed mosque and community center in Lower Manhattan is as important a test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime, and I applaud President Obama’s clarion defense of the freedom of religion tonight.”

Sharif el-Gamal, the developer on the project, said, “We are deeply moved and tremendously grateful for our president’s words.”

A building on the site of the proposed center is already used for prayers, and some worshipers there on Friday night discussed the president’s remarks.

Mohamed Haroun, an intern at a mechanical engineering firm, said, “What he should have said was: ‘This is a community decision. Constitutionally, they have the right to do it, but it’s a community decision and we should see what the local community wants to do.’ ”


Anne Barnard and M. Amedeo Tumolillo contributed reporting from New York.

    Obama Says Mosque Upholds Principle of Equal Treatment, NYT, 14.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/us/politics/15islamcenter.html

Mayor’s Stance on Muslim Center

Has Deep Roots

August 12, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL BARBARO
 

Michael R. Bloomberg is a former Wall Street mogul with a passion for the rights of a private property owner. He is a Jew whose parents asked their Christian lawyer to buy a house and then sell it back to them to hide their identity in an unwelcoming Massachusetts suburb. And he is a politician who regards his independence as his greatest virtue.

That potent combination of beliefs and history, those closest to Mayor Bloomberg say, has fueled his defense of the proposed Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan — a defense he has mounted with emotion, with strikingly strong language and in the face of polls suggesting that most New Yorkers disagree with him.

“Something about this issue just really hooked into him,” said Howard J. Rubenstein, the powerful public relations executive, who is a friend of Mr. Bloomberg. “It deeply upset him.”

Mr. Bloomberg’s forcefulness has won him new admirers, but also a chorus of both familiar and fresh detractors. Reliable newspaper editorial allies have turned against him. Conservative pundits have mocked him (one called him “self-deluding”). Even some of his closest friends have angrily differed with him.

City Hall officials, who said the mayor had been swamped with angry correspondence, made some of it public.

“You are going to allow the Muslims build a trophy building there on HOLY GROUND,” one e-mail read. It concluded: “You need to be impeached.”

But none of the anger — hard to measure precisely, and amplified by talk radio and cable television — has moved the mayor. Indeed, interviews with his aides, advisers and associates suggest that it has only strengthened his resolve.

And they say the reasons are civic and personal. Mr. Bloomberg, for instance, has come to know the husband and wife who are among the principals behind the proposed center — a multipurpose religious and cultural institution that would be built two blocks from the site of the World Trade Center.

And for years he has, with a mix of care and impatience, been encouraging New Yorkers, including the families of 9/11 victims, to emotionally move beyond the tragedy of nine years ago.

Some of those impressed by the depth of Mr. Bloomberg’s feelings have been struck in part because he had disappointed many when, by their lights, he failed to stand behind the principal of the city’s first Arabic-language public school.

The case of the principal, Debbie Almontaser, began, much as the community center did, with a seemingly uncontroversial plan — a school that would teach Arabic. Soon enough, though, conservative advocates, inflamed by the proposal, branded Ms. Almontaser a “radical” and “jihadist.”

After opponents sought to link her to T-shirts that said “Intifada NYC” and a newspaper suggested she had defended the slogan, the Bloomberg administration forced her to resign in 2007, she said.

A federal employment commission determined that Ms. Almontaser had not been connected to the T-shirts, that the newspaper had misconstrued her words and that the Bloomberg administration “had succumbed to the very bias that creation of the school was intended to dispel.” (The school has survived and is run by a new principal.)

Now, some Muslim leaders in New York express pleasant surprise at his position on the downtown center.

Robina Niaz, executive director of the Muslim social service group Turning Point for Women and Families, said his position in the Almontaser case “was totally the opposite, completely the reverse of this.”

Her sense, she added, was that Mr. Bloomberg “may have gone back and looked at how that was not helpful as a mayor, as a leader — that this was an opportunity to undo some of that.”

On the community center, Mr. Bloomberg’s thinking from the start was informed by what he describes as the basic rights of the people behind it.

“If somebody wants to build a mosque in a place where it’s zoned for it and they can raise the money, then they can do that,” he said. “And it’s not the government’s business.”

Mr. Bloomberg, it turned out, had met with the couple seeking to build the center. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam who would run the center, led a prayer service at Gracie Mansion in 2009 and exchanged warm words with Mr. Bloomberg; his wife, Daisy Khan, had sat next to Mr. Bloomberg’s girlfriend, Diana L. Taylor, during a dinner that followed.

In early summer, as controversy started to swirl around the project, opponents began to raise questions about Islam itself, suggesting that it has tolerated radical elements, and hinted that the planned center could inspire acts of terror in the United States.

Those claims infuriated Mr. Bloomberg, in no small part, those close to him say, because of his own family’s brush with prejudice when his parents shielded their identity from the seller of their house in Medford, Mass., a town where entire neighborhoods were still off limits to Jews.

Mr. Bloomberg’s instinctive discomfort with the nature and tenor of the growing debate about the center moved him to seek the counsel of others he trusted.

A few weeks ago, he approached an adviser on Muslim issues, Fatima A. Shama, a Palestinian-American who is his commissioner of immigrant affairs. He asked what she thought of the project.

Ms. Shama framed the issue in personal terms: she has three sons, she told the mayor, but there is no place in the city for them to share their Muslim faith with their Jewish and Christian friends.

“This could be that place,” Ms. Shama told Mr. Bloomberg.

The future of the center at that moment hinged on a decision by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.

If it voted to prohibit alterations to the building on the site on Park Place, the developer’s plan would come apart.

In mid-July, Mr. Bloomberg made a quiet trip to the site, a forlorn former clothing store two blocks from City Hall. He saw no features that he considered worthy of landmark designation .

“It’s pretty hard to argue it should be preserved the way it is,” he said.

With a decision looming, state and national politicians began to weigh in, attacking the center as an act of aggression against American values.

In a widely watched address, Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker who has worked with the mayor on education reform, criticized the planned center and encouraged Mr. Bloomberg to change his mind.

But Mr. Bloomberg was heartened to hear that some of the families of 9/11 victims supported his position; they told him so a few weeks ago at a fund-raiser for the memorial at the site.

“One hundred percent of them in the room kept saying, ‘Please keep it up, keep it up,’ ” he recounted. “ ‘Our relatives would have wanted this country and this city to follow and actually practice what we preach and what we believe in.’ ”

Mr. Bloomberg became even more determined to speak out after he learned that the Anti-Defamation League, which for weeks has denounced what it saw as bigoted attacks on the Muslim center, abruptly announced its opposition. He was surprised and disappointed.

When asked about the group’s position, the mayor called it “totally out of character with its stated mission.”

In a pointed jab, he added, “I have no idea what possessed them to reach that conclusion.”

He asked his aides to draft a speech that would not only explain his position, but would also forcefully rebut the project’s critics and reframe the debate.

On Aug. 3, a few hours before the speech was to be delivered, his top speechwriter, Francis Barry, showed the mayor the text.

“It’s not nearly strong enough,” Mr. Bloomberg said, Mr. Barry recalled.

The mayor inserted his own language, citing the firefighters and police officers who marched into the trade center on Sept. 11: “In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked, ‘What God do you pray to?’ ‘What beliefs do you hold?’ ”

And he proposed what would become the speech’s defining lines: “We do not honor their lives by denying the very Constitutional rights they died protecting. We honor their lives by defending those rights — and the freedoms that the terrorists attacked.”

His steadfast support for the center, and his denunciation of its outspoken opponents, have put him at odds with some longtime friends, like Michael H. Steinhardt, a financier and philanthropist for Jewish causes.

“I disagree with him, respectfully,” Mr. Steinhardt said. He found the tone of some of the mayor’s remarks, especially the statement that opponents of the project “should be ashamed of themselves,” to be “somewhat puzzling,” Mr. Steinhardt said in an interview.

Nor has it endeared the mayor to a certain number of New Yorkers who have made their disappointment clear in letters and e-mails to City Hall.

One writer said she had been prepared to support a potential Bloomberg presidential campaign. “But not now,” she wrote. “This has totally changed my opinion of the mayor.”

There were also letters of praise. A woman who fled Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11 thanked the mayor for his courage. Another letter-writer called it “his finest moment as mayor.”

Faced with the response, the mayor told aides he would not change his mind, but the aides say he has seemed sensitive to the raw emotions that the issue has aroused — especially toward him.

“I have said it so many times I’m getting tired of it,” Mr. Bloomberg said recently of his support for the center. Then he continued, in something of a lament: “I’m not winning a lot of friends doing so.”

    Mayor’s Stance on Muslim Center Has Deep Roots, NYT, 12.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/13/nyregion/13bloomberg.html

George W. Webber,

Social Activist Minister,

Dies at 90

July 12, 2010
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

The Rev. George W. Webber, a Protestant minister and educator whose quest to make religion more socially relevant led him to remake a major seminary, start storefront churches in East Harlem and begin a program to educate prison inmates as pastors, died Saturday at his home in Maplewood, N.J. He was 90.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said his wife, Helen.

Mr. Webber, known as Bill, abandoned his plans to become a lawyer during lonely night watches as a gunnery officer in the Navy during World War II, his wife said. Instead, he decided to become a minister, even though his wife said that he was not previously pious.

Mr. Webber’s motivation, she said, was “to make things better in the world, to make them right.”

He went on to join a generation of activist clergymen that included William Sloane Coffin Jr., and ministered to the poor, protested war and, in general, put themselves at the center of the searing issues of the time. When Yale presented him an honorary doctorate in 1981, it called him a “prophet for the cause of justice.”

Mr. Webber’s saw his mission of elevating the urban disadvantaged as a way of strengthening mainline Protestantism at a time when many Protestants were migrating to the suburbs. Though other Protestant leaders shared such views, Mr. Webber’s actions were bold — beginning with moving his young family into a low-income housing project in Harlem.

“Bill went further,” Dale T. Irvin, president of New York Theological Seminary, said in an interview. “He knew it was going to take a transformation at the very root of what it was to be Protestant.”

Mr. Webber’s most public role may have been as president of the New York Theological Seminary, a post he held from 1969 to 1983. Beyond restoring a financially tottering institution and doubling enrollment, he recast the traditional missionary school into a training ground for black, Hispanic and female clergy members dedicated to helping “the forgotten.” A successful method was admitting students without college degrees to do graduate work.

“Generations of students and faculties and ministers have followed his model,” Serene Jones, president of Union Theological Seminary, said Monday in an interview.

An enduring initiative has been a program for inmates in New York State at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility to earn master’s degrees in theology. Around 350 men have so far graduated, and many have gone on to careers in churches and social service. Recidivism has been low.

One of 14 men who graduated in 1993, Randel Glover, said at the ceremony, “I’ve come from so very low, and this is very high for me.”

Jose L. Reyes said, “I no longer consider myself the island that I was.”

George William Webber was born in Des Moines on May 2, 1920, to a father who was director of the local Y.M.C.A. and a mother who had a weekly radio show reviewing books. He graduated from Harvard magna cum laude with a history major before joining the Navy in 1942.

After the war, Mr. Webber earned a bachelor of divinity degree from Union and a Ph.D. in philosophy of religion from Columbia University. (He rejected the honorific “Dr.,” threatening to give a failing grade students who used it.)

Mr. Webber became dean of students at Union, and in 1948, founded the East Harlem Protestant Parish in 1948, with two other recent seminary graduates, Don Benedict and Archie Hargraves. The result was the string of storefront churches.

Mr. Irvin said the three drew inspiration from reading the Bible, in an allegorical, not fundamentalist approach. They hoped to make their storefronts forces for change. Mr. Webber used his pulpit to thunder home the point: in a 1950 sermon he asserted that people living in East Harlem were “treated not as persons but as things” by the police, school officials and landlords.

He described his experience in urban ministry in three books: “God’s Colony in Man’s World,” “Congregation in Mission” and “Today’s Church.”

Mr. Webber is survived by his wife of 67 years, the former Helen Barton; his sons John, Tom and Andrew; his daughters Katy Webber and Peggy Scott; 11 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Over the years, Mr. Webber protested the Vietnam War and other American policies and was arrested several times. In 1974, these activities provoked the United States ambassador to Vietnam, Graham A. Martin, to write a four-page letter to Mr. Webber after Mr. Webber led a group of antiwar activists to Vietnam.

Mr. Martin sent pictures of children killed and maimed by rocket attacks from Communist forces. He suggested that they could have been saved if Mr. Webber had heeded the ambassador’s request to intercede with the Vietcong, implying they were his friends.

Mr. Webber replied that he had no influence with the enemy, and that he was shocked by the ambassador’s statement.

    George W. Webber, Social Activist Minister, Dies at 90, NYT, 12.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/us/13webber.html

Rev. William R. Callahan Dies at 78;

Dissident Who Challenged Vatican

July 9, 2010
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

The Rev. William R. Callahan, a Roman Catholic priest and self-described “impossible dreamer” whose vociferous and organized opposition to Vatican policies prompted Jesuit officials to expel him from their order, died on Monday in Washington. He was 78.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said the Quixote Center, an organization that Father Callahan helped found to press for reforms in the church and society. It is independent of the church and based in Brentwood, Md. He lived there.

Like Cervantes’s fictional character who inspired the center’s name, Father Callahan tilted at windmills and never accomplished his major goals, the biggest of which was ordaining women as priests. But his spirited campaigns made him a thorn in the church’s side for a generation.

“Bill tried to be a prophetic voice in the church, a voice crying in the wilderness,” said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.

Father Callahan remained a priest after his expulsion from the Jesuit order, the Society of Jesus, in 1991, but the church barred him from acting as one. Known widely as Bill, he still sometimes used the honorifics “Reverend” and “Father.”

He aggravated church officials during the American tour of Pope John Paul II in 1979 by imploring priests to refuse to help the pope in celebrating Mass. Father Callahan’s hope was that more lay women would then have to be enlisted to assist at the services.

When the pope that year insisted that barring women from becoming priests was not a human rights issue, Father Callahan replied, “Perhaps this is not a human rights issue because women are not human or they do not have rights.”

He told The Washington Post in 1989 that he was simply “following the example of Jesus, who was never willing to shut up.”

In 1971, Father Callahan helped found the Center of Concern, an organization devoted to social justice issues. In 1975 he started Priests for Equality, to work for the ordination of women. He started the Quixote Center in 1976 with Dolly Pomerleau, who became a work partner of his for many years. They married days before he died.

The Quixote Center achieved particular prominence in its support of the leftist government of Nicaragua in the 1980s, a stance directly at odds with that of the Reagan administration. It raised more than $100 million in humanitarian aid for the Nicaraguan government.

Other projects included printing religious books in which language it viewed as sexist, racist and homophobic was expunged. Father Callahan himself wrote “Noisy Contemplation: Deep Prayer for Busy People” (1982), which called God a “merry” sort who viewed humans as entertainment.

In 1979, Jesuit leaders rebuked Father Callahan for his defiance of dogma, and by 1989 his Nicaraguan activities and liberal initiatives in the church, including a ministry for gay Catholics, had set off calls for his expulsion from the Jesuit order. He unsuccessfully fought the action, which he claimed was never explained.

Father Callahan remained active at Quixote and continued to preach to informal gatherings of dissident Catholics.

William Reed Callahan was born on Sept. 5, 1931, in Scituate, Mass. His mother was a Unitarian and his father a Catholic. His mother died when he was 6 months old, and he was raised by paternal grandparents as a Catholic, Ms. Pomerleau said.

He attended the Jesuit-run Boston College High School and after graduating joined the New England Province of the Society of Jesuits in 1948. He had hoped to be an agronomist, but the Jesuits asked him to study physics because they needed physics professors in their universities.

Father Callahan earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Boston College and a Ph.D. in physics from Johns Hopkins University in 1962. While pursuing the degree, he worked for NASA on weather satellites. He then moved to Connecticut to teach physics at Fairfield University, a Jesuit institution. He was ordained as a priest in 1965.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by three brothers, Larry, John and Bob; and three sisters, Polly Alonso, Helen Demers and Christine DeVelis.

Father Callahan mourned the waning of optimism among his generation of Catholic reformers as the church hierarchy grew increasingly conservative. In an interview with The Post in 2006, he said he drew inspiration from Don Quixote.

“He dreams, he has visions, but he’s basically a silly old man,” Father Callahan said.

“When people work on social justice issues, they don’t win much and wind up dropping out. To laugh at oneself from the beginning is essential.”

    Rev. William R. Callahan Dies at 78; Dissident Who Challenged Vatican, NYT, 9.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/us/11callahan.html

You Say God Is Dead?

There’s an App for That

July 2, 2010
The New York Times
By PAUL VITELLO

An explosion of smart-phone software has placed an arsenal of trivia at the fingertips of every corner-bar debater, with talking points on sports, politics and how to kill a zombie. Now it is taking on the least trivial topic of all: God.

Publishers of Christian material have begun producing iPhone applications that can cough up quick comebacks and rhetorical strategies for believers who want to fight back against what they view as a new strain of strident atheism. And a competing crop of apps is arming nonbelievers for battle.

“Say someone calls you narrow-minded because you think Jesus is the only way to God,” says one top-selling application introduced in March by a Christian publishing company. “Your first answer should be: ‘What do you mean by narrow-minded?’ ”

For religious skeptics, the “BibleThumper” iPhone app boasts that it “allows the atheist to keep the most funny and irrational Bible verses right in their pocket” to be “always ready to confront fundamentalist Christians or have a little fun among friends.”

The war of ideas between believers and nonbelievers has been part of the Western tradition at least since Socrates. For the most part, it has been waged by intellectual giants: Augustine, Spinoza, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche.

Yet for good or ill, combatants entering the lists today are mainly everyday people, drawn in part by the popularity of books like Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” and Christopher Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great.” The fierceness of their debate reflects the fractious talk-show culture unintentionally described so aptly in the title of the Glenn Beck best seller “Arguing With Idiots.”

In a dozen new phone applications, whether faith-based or faith-bashing, the prospective debater is given a primer on the basic rules of engagement — how to parry the circular argument, the false dichotomy, the ad hominem attack, the straw man — and then coached on all the likely flashpoints of contention. Why Darwinism is scientifically sound, or not. The differences between intelligent design and creationism, and whether either theory has any merit. The proof that America was, or was not, founded on Christian principles.

Users can scroll from topic to topic to prepare themselves or, in the heat of a dispute, search for the point at hand — and the perfect retort.

Software creators on both sides say they are only trying to help others see the truth. But most applications focus less on scholarly exegesis than on scoring points.

One app, “Fast Facts, Challenges & Tactics” by LifeWay Christian Resources, suggests that in “reasoning with an unbeliever” it is sometimes effective to invoke the “anthropic principle,” which posits, more or less, that the world as we know it is mathematically too improbable to be an accident.

It offers an example: “The Bible’s 66 books were written over a span of 1,500 years by 40 different authors on three different continents who wrote in three different languages. Yet this diverse collection has a unified story line and no contradictions.”

“The Atheist Pocket Debater,” on the other hand, asserts that because miracles like Moses’ parting of the waters are not occurring in modern times, “it is unreasonable to accept that the events happened” at all. “If you take any miracle from the Bible,” it explains, “and tell your co-workers at your job that this recently happened to someone, you will undoubtedly be laughed at.”

These applications and others — like “One-Minute Answers to Skeptics” and “Answers for Catholics” — appear to be selling briskly, if nowhere near as fast as the top sellers among the so-called book apps in their iPhone category: ghost stories, free books and the King James Bible.

Sean McDowell, the editor of “Fast Facts” and some textbooks for Bible students, said he has become increasingly aware of a skill gap between believers and nonbelievers, who he feels tend to be instinctively more savvy at arguing. “Christians who believe, but cannot explain why they believe, become ‘Bible-thumpers’ who seem dogmatic and insecure about their convictions,” he said. “We have to deal with that.”

“Nowadays, atheists are coming to the forefront at every level of society — from the top of academia all the way down to the level of the average Joe,” added Mr. McDowell, a seminary Ph.D. candidate whose phone app was produced by the B&H Publishing Group, one of the country’s largest distributors of Bibles and religious textbooks.

Jason Hagen may be that average guy. A musician and a real estate investor who lives in Queens, Mr. Hagen decided to write the text for “The Atheist Pocket Debater” this year after buying his first iPhone and finding dozens of apps for religious people, but none for nonbelievers like himself.

In creating what became the digital equivalent of a 50,000-word tract, he gleaned material from the recent antifaith books and got the author Michel Shermer’s permission to reprint essays from Mr. Shermer’s monthly magazine, Skeptic. Mr. Hagen pitched his idea to Apple, which referred him to an independent programmer who helped him develop the application; the company pays Mr. Hagen 50 cents for each download of the $1.99 app. He said a few thousand had sold.

What inspired him, he said, was a lifetime of frustration as the son of a fundamentalist Christian preacher in rural Virginia.

“I know what people go through, growing up in the culture I grew up in,” said Mr. Hagen, 39, adding that his father had only recently learned of his true beliefs. “So I tried to give people the tools they need to defend themselves, but at the same time not ridicule anybody. Basically, the people on the other side of the debate are my parents.”

Still, some scholars consider that approach to the debate the least auspicious way of exploring the mystery of existence.

“It turns it into a game,” said Dr. Serene Jones, president of Union Theological Seminary, in Manhattan. “Both sides come to the discussion with fixed ideas, and you have what amounts to a contest between different types of fundamentalism.”

Indeed, the new phone applications seem to promise hours of unrelieved, humorless argument.

“When someone says, ‘There is no truth,’ ” the Fast Facts app advises, “ask them: ‘Is that true? Is it true there is no truth?’ Because if it’s true that there is no truth, then it’s false that ‘there is no truth.’ ”

Mr. Hagen’s atheistic app resonates with the same certitude. If Jacob saw the face of God (in Genesis 32:30), and God said, “No man shall see me and live” (in Exodus 33:20), then “which one is the liar?” he asks.

His conclusion: “If we know the Bible has content that is false, how can we believe any of it?”

Unavailing as such exchanges may seem, they are a fact of life in parts of the country where for some people, taboos against voicing doubt have lifted for the first time.

“I don’t know that there’s more atheists in the country, but there are definitely more people who are openly atheist, especially on college campuses,” said the Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and author of “Atheism Remix: A Christian Confronts the New Atheists.” He said students have asked him how to deal with nonbelievers.

“There is not one student on this campus who doesn’t have at least one person in his circle of family and friends voicing these ideas,” he said.

If smart-phone software can improve the conversation, all to the good, he said. “The app store is our new public commons.”

Michael Beaty, chairman of the philosophy department at Baylor University, a Christian university in Waco, Tex., was not so sure.

“We’d be better off if these people were studying Nietzsche and Kant,” he said.

    You Say God Is Dead? There’s an App for That, NYT, 2.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/03/technology/03atheist.html

'UN' of Faith Groups

Set Roles in Disaster Relief

June 20, 2010
Filed at 2:22 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- For every hurricane, earthquake or flood, there is help: food, bottled water, crews of volunteers nailing shingles to brand new roofs.

Many don't realize that much of it comes from an unlikely hodgepodge of religious groups who put aside their differences and coordinate their efforts as soon as the wind starts blowing.

Southern Baptists cook meals from Texas to Massachusetts. Seventh-day Adventists dispense aid from makeshift warehouses that can be running within eight hours.

Mennonites haul away debris, Buddhists provide financial aid and chaplains with the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team counsel traumatized and grieving victims.

One organizer calls it the ''United Nations of disaster relief.''

    'UN' of Faith Groups Set Roles in Disaster Relief, NYT, 20.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/06/20/us/AP-US-REL-Hurricane-Faithful.html

Prospective Catholic Priests Face Sexuality Hurdles

May 30, 2010
The New York Times
By PAUL VITELLO

Every job interview has its awkward moments, but in recent years, the standard interview for men seeking a life in the Roman Catholic priesthood has made the awkward moment a requirement.

“When was the last time you had sex?” all candidates for the seminary are asked. (The preferred answer: not for three years or more.)

“What kind of sexual experiences have you had?” is another common question. “Do you like pornography?”

Depending on the replies, and the results of standardized psychological tests, the interview may proceed into deeper waters: “Do you like children?” and “Do you like children more than you like people your own age?”

It is part of a soul-baring obstacle course prospective seminarians are forced to run in the aftermath of a sexual abuse crisis that church leaders have decided to confront, in part, by scrubbing their academies of potential molesters, according to church officials and psychologists who screen candidates in New York and the rest of the country.

But many of the questions are also aimed at another, equally sensitive mission: deciding whether gay applicants should be denied admission under complex recent guidelines from the Vatican that do not explicitly bar all gay candidates but would exclude most of them, even some who are celibate.

Scientific studies have found no link between sexual orientation and abuse, and the church is careful to describe its two initiatives as more or less separate. One top adviser to American seminaries characterized them as “two circles that might overlap here and there.”

Still, since the abuse crisis erupted in 2002, curtailing the entry of gay men into the priesthood has become one the church’s highest priorities. And that task has fallen to seminary directors and a cadre of psychologists who say that culling candidates has become an arduous process of testing, interviewing and making decisions — based on social science, church dogma and gut instinct.

“The best way I can put it, it’s not black and white,” said the adviser, the Rev. David Toups, the director of the secretariat of clergy, consecrated life and vocations of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “It’s more like one of those things where it’s hard to define, but ‘I know it when I see it.’ ”

Many church officials have been reluctant to discuss the screening process, and its details differ from diocese to diocese. In the densely populated Diocese of Brooklyn, officials are confident of their results in one respect.

“We have no gay men in our seminary at this time,” said Dr. Robert Palumbo, a psychologist who has screened seminary candidates at the diocese’s Cathedral Seminary Residence in Douglaston, Queens, for 10 years. “I’m pretty sure of it.” Whether that reflects rigorous vetting or the reluctance of gay men to apply, he could not say. “I’m just reporting what is,” he said.

Concern over gay men in the priesthood has simmered in the church for centuries, and has been heightened in recent years by claims from some Catholic scholars that 25 percent to 50 percent of priests in the United States are gay. The church has never conducted its own survey, but other experts have estimated the number to be far smaller.

The sexual abuse scandal has prompted some conservative bishops to lay blame for the crisis on a “homosexual subculture” in the priesthood. While no one has proposed expelling gay priests, the crisis has pitted those traditionalists against other Catholics who attribute the problem to priests, gay and straight, with dysfunctional personalities.

In 2005, the Vatican sidestepped that ideological debate, but seemed to appease conservatives by issuing guidelines that would strictly limit the admission of gay men to Catholic seminaries.

The guidelines, which bolstered existing rules that had been widely unenforced, defined homosexuality in both clear-cut and ambiguous ways: Men who actively “practice homosexuality” should be barred. But seminary rectors were left to discern the meaning of less obvious instructions to reject candidates who “show profoundly deep-rooted homosexual tendencies, or support the so-called gay culture.”

Though some Catholics saw room in that language for admitting celibate gay men, the Vatican followed up in 2008 with a clarification. “It is not enough to be sure that he is capable of abstaining from genital activity,” ruled the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education, which issued the initial guidelines. “It is also necessary to evaluate his sexual orientation.”

Some seminary directors were baffled by the word “orientation,” said Thomas G. Plante, a psychologist and the director of the Spirituality and Health Institute at Santa Clara University, who screens seminary candidates for several dioceses in California and nationwide.

Could a psychologically mature gay person, committed to celibacy, never become a priest? Dr. Plante said several admissions officers asked. Could the church afford to turn away good candidates in the midst of a critical priest shortage?

The Vatican permits every bishop and leader of a religious order to make those decisions, which vary from stricter to more liberal interpretations of the rules. But the methods of reaching them have become increasingly standard, experts say.

Msgr. Stephen Rossetti, a psychologist at Catholic University who has screened seminarians and once headed a treatment center for abusive priests, said the screening could be “very intrusive.” But he added, “We are looking for two basic qualities: the absence of pathology and the presence of health.”

To that end, most candidates are likely to be asked not only about past sexual activities but also about masturbation fantasies, consumption of alcohol, relationships with parents and the causes of romantic breakups. All must take H.I.V. tests and complete written exams like the 567-question Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, which screens for, among other things, depression, paranoia and gender confusion. In another test, candidates must submit sketches of anatomically correct human figures.

In interviews by psychologists — who are usually selected because they are Catholic therapists with religious views matching those of the local church leadership — candidates are also likely to be asked about their strategies for managing sexual desire.

“Do you take cold showers? Do you take long runs?” said Dr. Plante, describing a typical barrage of questions intended both to gather information and to let screeners assess the candidate’s poise and self-awareness — or to observe the tics and eye-avoidance that may signal something else.

In seminaries that seek to hew closely to the Vatican rules, a candidate may be measured by the extent to which he defines himself as gay.

The church views gay sex as a sin and homosexual tendencies as a psychological disorder, but it does not bar chaste gay men from participating in the sacraments. That degree of acceptance does not extend to ordination.

“Whether he is celibate or not, the person who views himself as a ‘homosexual person,’ rather than as a person called to be a spiritual father — that person should not be a priest,” said Father Toups, of the bishops’ conference.

Beyond his assertion that “I know it when I see it,” no one interviewed for this article was able to describe exactly how screeners or seminary directors determine whether someone’s sexual orientation defines him. Some Catholics have expressed fear that such vagueness leads to bias and arbitrariness. Others call it a distraction from the more important objective of finding good, emotionally healthy priests.

“A criterion like this may not ensure that you are getting the best candidates,” said Mark D. Jordan, the R. R. Niebuhr professor at Harvard Divinity School, who has studied homosexuality in the Catholic priesthood. “Though it might get you people who lie or who are so confused they do not really know who they are.”

“And not the least irony here,” he added, “is that these new regulations are being enforced in many cases by seminary directors who are themselves gay.”

It is difficult to gauge reaction to the recent guidelines among seminary students and gay priests. Priests who once defended the work of gay men in the priesthood have become reluctant to speak publicly.

“It is impossible for them to come forward in this atmosphere,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, the executive director of DignityUSA, an advocacy group for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Catholics. “The bishops have scapegoated gay priests because gays are still an acceptable scapegoat in this society, particularly among weekly churchgoers.”

Seminary officials of the Diocese of Brooklyn and the Archdiocese of New York would not permit a reporter to interview seminarians. But the Brooklyn diocese did allow a reporter to talk to its psychologist, Dr. Palumbo, and its director of vocations, the Rev. Kevin J. Sweeney, whose incoming classes of three to five seminarians each year make him one of the more successful vocation directors in the country. Half of the nation’s seminaries have one or two new arrivals each a year, and one-quarter get none, according to a recent church study.

Father Sweeney said the new rules were not the order of battle for a witch hunt. “We do not say that homosexuals are bad people,” he said. “And sure, homosexuals have been good priests.”

“But it has to do with our view of marriage,” he said. “A priest can only give his life to the church in the sense that a man gives his life to a female spouse. A homosexual man cannot have the same relationship. It’s not about condemning anybody. It’s about our world view.”

    Prospective Catholic Priests Face Sexuality Hurdles, NYT, 30.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/nyregion/31gay.html

Harlem Churches in Fight for Survival

May 23, 2010
The New York Times
By TRYMAINE LEE

From the second to last pew at All Souls’ Episcopal Church in Harlem on a recent Sunday morning, Sylvia Lynch, 80, lifted a hand toward the rafters and sang praises through a haze of burnt incense.

Her voice was steady and strong, as was her grip on the cane she leaned on as she stood and sang and peered over the sparsely populated pews, peppered mostly with older women with fancy hats and hair as gray as her own.

“I came up through Sunday school, and I’m still here,” Ms. Lynch said, taking a step into an aisle at the 104-year-old church after the last hymn. “Back then, it was packed. You couldn’t get a seat.”

All Souls’ Church, on St. Nicholas Avenue, and any number of the traditional neighborhood churches in Harlem that had for generations boasted strong memberships — built on and sustained by familial loyalty and neighborhood ties — are now struggling to hold on to their congregations.

The gentrification of Harlem has helped deplete their ranks, as younger residents, black and white, have arrived but not taken up places in their pews. Longtime Harlem families, either cashing in on the real estate boom over the past decade or simply opting to head south for their retirement, have left the neighborhood and its churches. Then there are the deaths, as year by year, whole age bands are chipped away.

Without a sustainable membership, and with no fresh wave of tithe-paying, collection-plate-filling young members, these churches have struggled to keep their doors open, to maintain repairs and to extend their reach in the community.

Some, like All Souls’, cannot afford a full-time minister, let alone operate a soup kitchen or clothes pantry.

“We’re seeing several funerals a year, and the new members aren’t coming in,” said Ann Mayfield, 58, senior warden of the vestry at All Souls’. “Sometimes we feel a sense of powerlessness in carrying out the responsibility we have for the community. It’s absolutely frustrating.”

The great historic churches of Harlem do not seem imperiled, and indeed, with their nonprofit housing and local economic development arms, some have fueled the demographic and economic transformation and resurgence of the neighborhood.

But for some of the smaller churches — which have served as anchors and havens in the shadow of the larger institutions — the fight to survive and stay relevant has been daunting.

“If we don’t have the teenagers and the younger people coming into the church, as the older people pass, who is going to take over?” said Raymond Stevens, 57, a congregant at All Souls’. “It’s an uphill battle. It puts a lot of pressure on the congregation because you have to dig deep into your pockets to keep the church open. Our congregation is older, many are sick, and I really don’t know what the future holds.”

The Little Flower Baptist Church, formerly on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, was forced to close because of dwindling membership and finances. At the Mount Morris Ascension Presbyterian Church on Mount Morris Park West, leaders are struggling to fill the pews and the church’s many programs and services. The pastor at Rescue Baptist Church on West 123rd Street said that his church was not drawing enough income to pay his salary, and that he had to take a second job working at a stand inside Yankee Stadium to make ends meet.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York has also struggled financially, and in recent years it closed St. Thomas the Apostle Church on 118th Street, among others, including Our Lady Queen of Angels on 112th Street in East Harlem.

At All Souls’, regular attendance for Sunday service is about 50, down from hundreds in decades past. When eight children showed up for Sunday school recently, the teacher described the showing as “huge,” as it was nearly quadruple the average class size. About 80 percent of the congregation is made up of “senior citizens,” according to members of the vestry.

When a 105-year-old congregant died recently, she took with her 25 percent of the church’s annual income from offerings. The loss compounded the burden of paying for a part-time receptionist, a custodian, an organist and the priests hired on a per-service basis. Last year, the church used seven priests, a formula that proved much less expensive than the cost of a full-time priest’s salary, housing, benefits and other expenses.

The void in consistent leadership has cost the church in other ways — slowing efforts to recruit new congregants in a changing Harlem, a neighborhood ever more populated by young professionals.

Ministers from churches across Harlem said they had yet to penetrate the walls of the high-price condominiums and the million-dollar refurbished brownstones that now dominate the neighborhood. Some, in truth, expressed little desire to do so. Others said they saw the gentrification of Harlem as an opportunity, but one as yet unrealized.

A number of ministers said that most of the white faces they had seen on Sunday mornings were those of the casually dressed tourists with cameras dangling from their necks looking for the “gospel experience.” They do not pay tithes and rarely leave much in the way of an offering.

All Souls’ Church has also had to cut back on the services it used to provide, like the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings it had hosted for more than 20 years. And while it has managed to maintain its summer day camp in Harlem, the 130-acre campground it owns upstate has gone quiet.

“Every week the treasurer shows me the checks that go out and the income that comes in, and all that we can do is praise God that we are actually able to pay our bills,” Ms. Mayfield said. “But there’s nothing left over.”

A recent treasurer’s report published in one of the church’s weekly programs showed how slim the margin was between its income and expenses. Income from offerings for that week was $2,215.74. Its expenses were $2,159.36. And a change jar at the back of the sanctuary collected $17.01.

“Our funds are limited, but we try to utilize what we have the best way we know how,” said Ms. Lynch, a former member of the vestry.

Snaked somewhere between the joy, warmth and fellowship of the tight-knit, mostly African-American and Caribbean-American congregation were some frustration, a bit of anxiety and a tinge of sorrow regarding the current state of things.

“I cannot allow myself to fear the worst; I just can’t allow myself to,” said Ms. Mayfield, who was baptized at the church as a baby. “I might get a little sense of something that seems like fear, but then I have to snatch it back.”

In July 1932, All Souls’ was the scene of a rebellion, when the all-white vestry announced that the church would be segregated and that black congregants, who made up 75 percent of the congregation, would have to worship in separate services, according to the church and historians.

The Jim Crow services were fought by congregants, who printed leaflets that read, “Self-Respecting People Refuse to be Jim Crowed,” and handed them out during Sunday service, according to a news account that year.

According to historians, the vestry fought back, threatening to fire the rector if he continued to encouraged mixed-race services. The bishop, William T. Manning, eventually interceded and demanded that church services be open to anyone who chose to attend.

Ms. Lynch said she had been a member of the church for 71 years, since she was 9 — back when the church services were standing-room-only affairs.

“I was raised here, was married here, and I raised my children here,” Ms. Lynch said.

In the 1940s and ’50s, the church was vibrant and bustling, she said.

Those were the days of the blue laws, when few businesses were open on Sunday, which meant there were few excuses to skip service. Many homes did not have television. The church was the absolute center of the community, Ms. Lynch said, a place where friends came in packs and families and neighbors mingled, a time when families’ status, to a degree, could be judged by how “churched” they were.

Her mother opened a hair salon in the neighborhood and charged 50 cents a head, and a big chunk of that money went to the church, where some of her customers were undoubtedly members, she said.

“She didn’t make much, but she did everything she could to maintain and build up this church,” she said.

Ms. Lynch took a few more steps from her pew and down the aisle toward the back of the church, passing the change jar just behind the last pew, where a set of stairs led to a basement hall. There, the congregation had gathered for a post-service lunch of assorted meats, fried plantains, greens and macaroni and cheese.

As she stood at the edge of those steps, Ms. Lynch spoke of priests who rose and faded, of rescued street children and of her family and her congregation and the only church she had ever known. “Sometimes it’s heart-wrenching,” she said, stepping from the edge. “But there’s something about this church that we all love.”

    Harlem Churches in Fight for Survival, NYT, 23.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/nyregion/24harlem.html

Moishe Rosen Dies at 78;

Founder of Jews for Jesus

May 21, 2010
The New York Times
By MARGALIT FOX

Moishe Rosen, who was born Jewish, ordained a Baptist minister and went on to found Jews for Jesus, the largest messianic Jewish organization in the world, died Wednesday at his home in San Francisco. He was 78.

The cause was prostate cancer, said Susan Perlman, the associate executive director of Jews for Jesus.

Controversial from its inception, Jews for Jesus was officially founded by Mr. Rosen in San Francisco in 1973. In the decades since, its missionaries have been a familiar presence on street corners in cities around the United States and elsewhere. Mr. Rosen was the group’s first executive director, a post he held until 1996.

The organization’s central tenet is that it is possible simultaneously to be Jewish and to accept Jesus as the Messiah. “We certainly identify ourselves ethnically as Jewish, and with certain aspects of the religion that don’t conflict with our belief in Christ,” Ms. Perlman explained on Friday.

Though Jews for Jesus enrolls no members per se, Ms. Perlman estimated that it has “a constituency” of about 200,000 interested Jews and Christians, a figure she said was based partly on subscriptions to the group’s print and online newsletters.

Jews for Jesus has branches throughout the United States and in 10 foreign countries, among them Germany, France, South Africa, Russia and Israel. It maintains an extensive Web site, which includes instructions on how a Jew can accept Jesus and be saved.

Mr. Rosen’s organization has long engendered turbulent, often vitriolic, debate; it has often had to go to court to secure permission to hand out its literature. The group has been repeatedly condemned by leaders of mainstream Jewish organizations.

“They have every right to follow whatever religious observances or rituals that they choose — that’s America,” Rabbi James Rudin, the senior interreligious affairs adviser of the American Jewish Committee, an international Jewish advocacy group, said in a telephone interview on Friday. However, he said of Mr. Rosen’s organization:

“We have truth in advertising and truth in labeling in the United States. And the people should know that they really are Christian missionaries. I would have had much more respect for him, and for his organization, if they had just come out and said, ‘We are Christian missionaries, trying to convert Jews.’ ”

To his critics, Mr. Rosen responded with the kind of aphoristic wit for which he was known. As he said in an interview with The Fresno Bee in 1994, “If the Jews didn’t need Jesus, why didn’t he come by way of Norway or Ireland?”

Martin Meyer Rosen was born on April 12, 1932, in Kansas City, Mo., to an Orthodox Jewish family. He formally adopted Moishe, the Yiddish name by which he had been known since boyhood, in the early 1970s.

Reared in Denver, Mr. Rosen studied at Colorado University there. In 1950, he married Ceil Starr, his high school sweetheart.

Early in their marriage, Mrs. Rosen, who had also been raised in a Jewish home, began to explore Christianity. In an attempt to refute her newfound beliefs, Mr. Rosen began reading the religious pamphlets she left around the house. Before long, he was enthralled.

The couple converted to Christianity in 1953. Afterward, as Mr. Rosen often said in interviews, his family no longer spoke to him.

Mr. Rosen received his theological training at the Northeastern Bible Institute in Essex Fells, N.J., and was ordained in 1957. In the late 1950s and 1960s, he worked in New York and Los Angeles for the American Board of Missions to the Jews, an evangelistic organization now known as Chosen People Ministries.

Mr. Rosen, who moved to San Francisco in 1970, started what became Jews for Jesus amid the heady countercultural ferment there. To rally the faithful, he took his cue from the city’s political protesters.

“When I came out here, the people doing the best communicating were the antiwar activists,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1996. “All you needed was a guy with a mimeograph machine at 8 a.m., and you could get 5,000 people to People’s Park by the afternoon.”

Besides his wife, Ceil, Mr. Rosen is survived by two daughters, Lyn Rosen Bond, a missionary with the Chicago branch of Jews for Jesus, and Ruth Rosen, a staff writer and editor at the group’s headquarters in San Francisco; a brother, Don Rosen; and two grandchildren.

His books include “Jews for Jesus” (Revell, 1974; with William Proctor); “The Sayings of Chairman Moishe” (Creation Press, 1974); and “Share the New Life With a Jew” (Moody Press, 1976), written with his wife.

Throughout his life, Mr. Rosen continued to observe many Jewish customs. He held seders at Passover, fasted on Yom Kippur and married couples under a huppah, the Jewish wedding canopy, Ms. Perlman said.

She also said Mr. Rosen had left instructions that he wished to be buried in his tallis, the traditional Jewish prayer shawl.

    Moishe Rosen Dies at 78; Founder of Jews for Jesus, NYT, 21.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/us/22rosen.html

Moshe Greenberg,

Biblical Scholar, Is Dead at 81

May 19, 2010
The New York Times
By DENNIS HEVESI

Moshe Greenberg, one of the most influential Jewish biblical scholars of the 20th century, died Saturday at his home in Jerusalem. He was 81.

The death was confirmed by his son Joel.

Professor Greenberg, who in 1994 won the Israel Prize, that nation’s highest civilian honor, taught Bible and Jewish studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1970 to 1996. But his teaching career began at the University of Pennsylvania in 1954 and constituted something of a breakthrough in American academia.

Before then, most American universities held that biblical study was primarily the domain of Christian scholars, said Jonathan D. Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University.

“The concept was that Jews could not be objective about teaching the Bible and that they had shifted to the study of the Talmud,” Professor Sarna said, referring to the post-biblical collection of rabbinic discussions of Jewish law, ethics and customs. “So the appointment of Greenberg to teach Bible at a secular university was a milestone.”

Professor Greenberg brought to the field a willingness to take what is known as the historical-critical approach to Bible study, which assumes that more than one author had a hand in writing the first five and many other books of the Bible.

“Jews were studying it in a traditional pious way,” said Jeffrey H. Tigay, the Ellis professor of Hebrew and Semitic languages and literature at the University of Pennsylvania. The new approach, he said, “undermined the Jewish dogma of the whole Torah being given to Moses at one time.”

Professor Greenberg’s idea, which he called a holistic method, Professor Tigay said, was: “Let’s build on the idea of multiple authorship, but let’s not stop with unraveling the original components. Let’s figure out why the compilers put them together the way they did.” That method was central to Professor Greenberg’s extensive commentaries on the books of Exodus and Ezekiel, which analyzed how the multiple writers had woven their ideas into unified themes.

Professor Greenberg wrote 10 books and more than 200 articles that often combined his analysis of Hebrew with his expertise in Assyriology, the linguistic, archaeological and historical study of ancient Mesopotamia. He dissected the distinctions between the Israelites and the surrounding cultures, like the Canaanites, the Moabites and the Philistines.

In his book “Biblical Prose Prayer,” from 1983, Professor Greenberg examined every instance of people praying in the Bible and concluded that their prayers were what he called “a vehicle of humility, an expression of un-self-sufficiency.”

“Many of those who prayed in the Bible were commoners; you don’t have to be a priest in the Bible to pray,” Professor Sarna said. “Greenberg shows how the biblical concepts influenced the subsequent history of Jewish prayer, that Jews don’t need an intermediary.”

Professor Tigay added: “He reasoned that the frequency of spontaneous prayer must have sustained a constant sense of God’s presence and strengthened the egalitarian tendency of Israelite religion, which led to the establishment of the synagogue.”

Born in Philadelphia on July 10, 1928, Moshe Greenberg was one of two sons of Simon and Betty Greenberg. His father, a rabbi, later became vice chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York.

In addition to his son Joel, a former reporter in the Jerusalem bureau of The New York Times, Professor Greenberg is survived by his wife of 61 years, the former Evelyn Gelber; two other sons, Rafi and Ethan; his brother, Daniel; and nine grandchildren.

Professor Greenberg graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1949, received his doctorate there in 1954 and was immediately hired to teach there. While at Penn he had also studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Although ordained as a rabbi, he never led a congregation.

In 1970, Professor Greenberg emigrated to Israel and began his 26-year tenure at the Hebrew University. With the shift from Talmudic analysis by scholars in the nations of the Diaspora, he was convinced that Israel was becoming the focus of Jewish biblical study.

“Greenberg was central to a group of scholars that rescued the Bible as a subject of study by Jews,” Professor Sarna said.

    Moshe Greenberg, Biblical Scholar, Is Dead at 81, NYT, 19.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/arts/20greenberg.html

Complex Struggle: Prelate’s Record in Abuse Crisis

The New York Times
May 16, 2010
By SERGE F. KOVALESKI

In 2002, at the height of the sexual abuse crisis confronting the Roman Catholic Church in America, Timothy M. Dolan arrived in Milwaukee as the new archbishop, succeeding a prelate who had been caught up in scandal. To abuse victims who had felt rebuffed by the church, Archbishop Dolan — warm, down to earth — seemed a bright beam of hope.

He listened to them, wept with them and vowed to change the way the archdiocese dealt with the molestation of children by priests. But just months later, he handwrote a letter to Peter Isely, a victim and an advocate whose wife worried that the new archbishop would let him down.

“Listen to her,” Archbishop Dolan wrote. “Do not put your trust in me. You often speak eloquently about your own imperfection and sin. I’m in the same boat. I am imperfect, sinful, struggling, clumsy.”

His message was to trust only in God. And his warning proved accurate: He would disappoint many victims.

Days before the letter, they learned that Archbishop Dolan had instructed lawyers to seek the dismissal of five lawsuits against the church. Over the next six years, advocates would lament that he resisted many of their appeals for change, from opening church records on predatory priests to offering victims more comprehensive help.

Archbishop Dolan of Milwaukee is now Archbishop Dolan of New York, one of the church’s most visible leaders. As the scandal has reignited in recent months, focusing scrutiny on bishops from Ireland to India, he has used his influential post to defend Pope Benedict XVI from criticism that he was slow to move against priests.

The archbishop himself has struggled with the crisis during the decade since it struck the church in America with startling force. While sexual abuse has not confronted him as a major issue in New York, it loomed large in Milwaukee and in his previous assignment as a bishop in St. Louis. And a close look at his record there, largely unexamined since his arrival in New York about a year ago, shows how he tried — not always successfully — to accommodate competing demands.

One of a generation of bishops who came to the job after many of their predecessors were discredited, Archbishop Dolan faced not only abuse victims but also a church hierarchy worried about ruinous damages awards, parishioners angry over payments to victims, and his own priests, some perhaps falsely accused. It was a diplomatic gantlet many recent bishops have had to walk, and Archbishop Dolan trod it with particular care.

A genial conciliator, he consoled victims and created a fund to pay for compensation and counseling. He helped remove a dozen priests from ministry and disclosed the names of dozens more.

“He changed our experience in Milwaukee,” said Ralph Leese, 58, who received a financial settlement for his repeated abuse by a priest. “He made you feel like he knew where you were coming from, almost like the abuse had happened to him.”

But like bishops before him, the archbishop was also a tough defender of the church’s interests, clergy and bank balances. In Milwaukee, he worked in an unusually public and personal way to limit lawsuits and settlements. He declined to post the names of abusive priests who belonged to religious orders, though some other bishops have done so.

And in one St. Louis case, records show, he swiftly took the side of a priest who then sued his accuser with the archdiocese’s help, though church officials had not made a detailed investigation of the complaint.

In interviews and written responses for this article, Archbishop Dolan, 60, has discussed his handling of the abuse crisis at length. He expressed impatience with Mr. Isely’s group — Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, or SNAP — which, he said, could be impossible to please. The group, he said, was one of many forces pressing him, including Catholics who wanted no acknowledgment of the sex abuse problem.

“I kept saying, ‘We need to talk about this. We need to wrestle with this,’ ” he said. “They kept saying, ‘Would you quit talking about it?’ ”

The archbishop said the church had done more than any other organization to prevent future molestation. But he also acknowledged missteps as he and other church leaders struggled to address a growing scandal.

“This is a work in progress, and we’re learning as we go along,” he said. “That’s why perhaps you’ve heard me say, go ahead and criticize. We are just like everybody else that’s dealing with this painful issue — families, Boy Scouts, every other religion.”

‘I Found Myself Convinced’

The young man on the phone was distraught. The Archdiocese of St. Louis had appealed to people molested by priests to seek healing from the church. And in March 2002, the man, Arthur P. Andreas, called the auxiliary bishop handling abuse complaints: Timothy Dolan.

Mr. Andreas told Bishop Dolan he had been abused in the late 1980s, while in his early teens and living at St. Joseph’s Home for Boys, a Catholic center for troubled youth. He said a chaplain had groped him during three sleepovers in the clergyman’s quarters. Mr. Andreas told church officials he did not want his identity revealed, yet he hoped to get the secret off his chest and spare others similar mistreatment.

Bishop Dolan suggested they meet, but Mr. Andreas suspected that the bishop might try to talk him into dropping his complaint. Instead, he hired a lawyer and later detailed his allegations in writing to church officials and in person to prosecutors.

Mr. Andreas and the bishop never would meet, and the merits of his complaint would remain unclear. But his case, and his name, would spill into public view.

Bishop Dolan had little experience handling such cases, having been named the archdiocese’s point man for abuse complaints a month earlier, after about seven years in Rome. Born in St. Louis, he graduated from its local seminaries and knew many of its priests, including the accused chaplain, the Rev. Alexander R. Anderson.

Those connections, and what Bishop Dolan called “a tsunami” of abuse allegations, made the job excruciating. In an interview, he recalled “having to call these brother priests and confront them with accusations and tell them that they are out of the priesthood, and go to the parishes and tell that to the people.” He helped remove eight St. Louis priests from ministry, including two who lived in a rectory with him.

This new complaint, however, posed a different challenge. In most cases, the accused priests confessed. Father Anderson protested his innocence.

Meeting with the bishop about a week after Mr. Andreas called, Father Anderson acknowledged that during summers at St. Joseph’s, he had invited boys to sleep in his study because it was air-conditioned. But he firmly denied Mr. Andreas’s accusations.

Bishop Dolan, who said he had checked the priest’s personnel files and found no hint of a problem, was convinced on the spot.

“He said it with a lot of peace,” the bishop recalled in a 2003 deposition provided to The New York Times by David Clohessy, the executive director of SNAP. “I found myself convinced because of his — his tranquillity, his serenity and, I also have to say, because of his reputation.”

Bishop Dolan headed a review board — including priests, mental health professionals and other lay people — that helped evaluate abuse complaints. The same day that he met with the priest, he reviewed the allegations with three members and Archbishop Justin Rigali, and gave his opinion: Father Anderson was telling the truth.

The panel did not have investigators or subpoena power, Bishop Dolan said, but reviewed information provided by church officials and accusers. After several weeks, there was not much. The bishop said he had phoned a nun and a former nun who once worked at the boys’ home. They praised the priest and described Mr. Andreas as troubled, like the other boys, and thus prone to lie.

There is no evidence that during this time the archdiocese sought witnesses to any abuse; Bishop Dolan later testified that he was unaware of an earlier abuse complaint against Father Anderson that had been withdrawn.

The archdiocese decided that Mr. Andreas’s allegations were not credible, and said it passed them to the St. Louis circuit attorney in April 2002 at the urging of Father Anderson. “We thought, ‘Good, they’re going to look into this with a fine-tooth comb,’ ” Bishop Dolan recalled in his deposition.

But the criminal statute of limitations on the complaint would expire in two months, when Mr. Andreas turned 28. The church, in the meantime, went on the offensive.

Out in the Open

At weekend Masses in his parish in Eureka, Mo., a day after the archdiocese contacted prosecutors, Father Anderson announced he was the subject of a false abuse complaint. Archbishop Rigali issued a news release supporting him.

Father Anderson wanted more: permission to sue his accuser for defamation, as few priests had done. He wrote to Bishop Dolan, urging him to obtain the archbishop’s consent before the statute of limitations lapsed “so it wouldn’t appear that we were waiting until the young man’s hands were tied before we made a move against him.” Father Anderson wrote that the suit would ask Mr. Andreas to withdraw his allegations and to make a public apology, which the priest and the archdiocese could use “to our best advantage.”

Bishop Dolan said in his deposition that he had cautioned Father Anderson to consider the pain a lawsuit could cause. In an internal memo, he urged Archbishop Rigali to decide before the statute ran out, saying the “suit would of course lose force” after that.

The archbishop allowed the lawsuit. Records show that the archdiocese agreed to pay the priest’s legal bills but deleted a reference to it in correspondence, concerned about public criticism of its spending for accused priests.

Father Anderson filed suit in July 2002, a month after the statute expired and prosecutors said they would file no charges. News reports on the suit identified Mr. Andreas as the accuser.

Bishop Dolan was in the news, too, having been named archbishop of Milwaukee.

In his deposition the following year, he recalled that prosecutors had found the allegations against Father Anderson untrue. But Ed Postawko, then chief of the circuit attorney’s child sex abuse unit, said recently that the main obstacles to pursuing the case were the limited time and the difficulty locating witnesses and persuading them to come forward. “These cases can be quite complex to investigate,” he said.

Mr. Andreas countersued Father Anderson, and in 2004, both men dropped their lawsuits in a deal in which the archdiocese paid $22,500 for Mr. Andreas’s counseling — a settlement in which the church admitted no wrongdoing.

The truth in the case grew even more elusive. Litigation unearthed Mr. Andreas’s childhood psychiatric records, which reported tendencies to lie and to blame others. In 2004, after Archbishop Dolan had left St. Louis, another man claimed that Father Anderson had abused him at the boys’ home, but church officials found the complaint not credible.

Today, Father Anderson is pastor of St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in De Soto, Mo. He declined to be interviewed.

Mr. Andreas, who now has a sales job, said he regretted going to the archdiocese. “I would have never made the call if I knew that they would take something so painful to me and put it on everyone’s breakfast table,” he said.

Archbishop Dolan said he believed he had handled the case properly, though he said in some ways he would act differently now that the nation’s bishops have set new rules for dealing with complaints. He said he would not offer his opinion to a review board and would not sit on the panel, which he said must be “scrupulously independent.” He said he now knew that abusive priests could be deceptive, and that he should not “trust my gut.”

“One thing I’ve learned is, well, they can speak their piece,” he said. “I cannot give this credibility. It’s not up to me.”

From Hugs to Hard Feelings

On an October evening in 2002, about eight weeks after arriving in Milwaukee, Archbishop Dolan and other church officials sat down with an estimated 200 people — abuse victims, their families and supporters — in an extraordinary public forum. For four hours, as they told their stories, the archbishop listened intently, wiping his eyes and leaping up to embrace the last speaker.

“We can’t do business as usual,” he said. “That’s sledgehammer obvious to me this evening.”

Many in the crowd had felt marginalized by his predecessor, Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland, who had resigned after admitting that the archdiocese had paid $450,000 to a younger man with whom he had carried on an affair.

Now, they believed they could persuade the archdiocese to make an array of changes: publicly naming predatory priests; censuring church officials who may have covered up abuse; establishing an independent system to mediate abuse claims; and paying victims adequate compensation.

Archbishop Dolan would grant some of their requests. He met with victims to offer apologies and consolation. After the nation’s bishops required each diocese to appoint a coordinator of assistance to alleged victims, he went further, hiring a non-Catholic to work full time.

Yet he and SNAP, the group representing most victims, soon tangled in an escalating series of battles. One sticking point would be money.

The archbishop said that while he was ready to help victims financially, he would not tap donations that parishioners and others had intended for schools or charities, “to compensate for the sinful actions of a few in which they had no part and which they roundly condemn.” He announced he was creating a $4 million fund for settlements, to be raised by selling church property.

The archdiocese had a special immunity. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in 1995 that church-and-state separation barred lawsuits against religious organizations for negligent supervision of clergy. As in most states, the statute of limitations ruled out suits for abuse that had occurred many years earlier.

Yet church officials, saying they wanted to do justice, had long been meeting with individual victims to settle complaints. Archbishop Dolan commissioned a new system using mediators independent of the church.

SNAP, in turn, pushed for a group process in which church officials and dozens of victims would mediate claims together — a move it hoped would make settlements more equitable and lend individuals more leverage. Archbishop Dolan expressed support, and in December 2003, the two sides began to discuss that and other proposals.

Three months into the talks, the advocates walked out, saying the church had made non-negotiable demands; among them, that mediation would not include the victims of priests who belonged to religious orders like the Jesuits or Capuchins, and that victims would not have final say over how to divide settlement money.

Mr. Isely said that without the ability to sue, his group had no bargaining power, but relied on the church’s good faith. “And if that good faith was broken,” he added, “there was literally nothing we could do.”

The archbishop said he did not know why the advocates withdrew. But the archdiocese continued to negotiate with victims one by one. Under Archbishop Dolan, the independent mediation he set up reached resolution with more than 170 victims, paying about $10.2 million for settlements, therapy and other assistance.

Results varied widely. Mike Sneesby, 53, said he was abused by a parish priest over a four-year period starting when he was 12, and received $125,000. Gary Smith, one among scores of boys abused by the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy at a Wisconsin school for the deaf, was not allowed into mediation because he accepted $5,000 in 1994, two years before Archbishop Weakland began writing to the Vatican for guidance on how to move against the priest.

Patrick W. Carey, a professor of theology at Marquette University who sits on an archdiocesan panel on religious education, said the settlement fund helped limit the church’s fiscal exposure. “Financially, it made a lot of sense,” if only for a time, Professor Carey said. “It was an impossible situation.”

The archdiocese was less protected in California, where two abusive priests it allowed to take new posts in the 1970s had molested more children. Its lawyers fought unsuccessfully to avoid liability in 10 abuse claims, and the United States Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal. Archbishop Dolan flew to Los Angeles in 2006, at the recommendation of a judge, for negotiations that resulted in a $16.5 million settlement.

In Wisconsin, a new threat arose: a bill that would open a three-year grace period in which people could sue the church for abuse no matter how long ago it occurred. For years the church had successfully opposed similar proposals, but in 2008, a new measure had broad support. Archbishop Dolan went before a State Senate committee — a rare appearance by an American archbishop before a legislative body.

“There is no Catholic Superfund that can provide the monies this legislation will require of the church,” he testified. The bill did not emerge from committee.

Today, the archdiocese faces another hurdle. The Wisconsin Supreme Court, which had limited lawsuits against the church, ruled in 2007 that the archdiocese could be sued for fraud by plaintiffs claiming that it had placed abusive priests in new parishes without alerting parishioners. The archdiocese says it now faces 12 fraud suits in that state.

In New York, Archbishop Dolan has kept a much lower profile on sexual abuse. When a bill similar to Wisconsin’s surfaced in the State Legislature last year, other bishops led the opposition. The archbishop said the policies he inherited at the archdiocese, which has not had a mediation program, seemed sufficient. He has faced few calls for change from victims, though SNAP members traveled from Milwaukee to New York to protest his appointment.

The archbishop said he had come to regret his early overtures to the group.

At one parish visit in Milwaukee, he recalled, “a SNAP member spat in my face and yelled that he would not rest until there was a ‘going out of business’ sign in front of every Catholic parish, church, school and outreach center.”

Mr. Isely, the Midwest director of SNAP, said he was not aware of the incident, but if a member had acted that way, the group would apologize to the archbishop.

Many victims say their own persistence prompted the archbishop to make many of the changes that he did. Amy Peterson, whom he hired to coordinate assistance to victims, agreed. “I credit the survivors for the changes within the archdiocese,” said Ms. Peterson, who still holds the job. “Not the archdiocese alone.”

Naming Names

Even after talks with SNAP fell apart, Archbishop Dolan moved ahead on one of its priorities. In July 2004, he released the names of predatory priests in Milwaukee. The list, still posted online, names 43, living and dead. Only two dozen of the nation’s 195 dioceses have done so, according to the group BishopAccountability.org.

The archbishop recalled that the decision to make the names public was “very difficult” because many Catholics advised against it. “In retrospect,” he said, “I’m glad I did.”

But he has not done the same in New York, where the archdiocese has published each name in its newspaper once, when a priest is removed from ministry. In Milwaukee, many victims say he acted only after public pressure from them, the governor, senior state lawmakers and some members of his own community advisory board on sex abuse.

The list itself, they add, is incomplete. It includes only archdiocesan priests and omits those who belong to religious orders, though the latter constitute more than half the 704 priests in the archdiocese. SNAP says 26 religious-order priests in the archdiocese have abused children, but their orders have not identified them publicly.

Like most dioceses, Milwaukee has extensive ties to religious-order priests. Those who work in parishes need an appointment by the archbishop. The archdiocese sends its seminarians for their academic requirements to a theology school run by the Priests of the Sacred Heart. One of its two auxiliary bishops is a Conventual Franciscan.

Yet, under a longtime policy, the archdiocese does not investigate abuse allegations against such priests, but refers them to the leaders of their orders. By law, it forwards complaints to the authorities.

Archbishop Dolan has said church law bars him from publicly identifying religious-order priests who have abused children.

In interviews, a half-dozen canon law experts — including Msgr. Thomas J. Green, a professor at Catholic University — said the law did not specifically address the release of names.

Fourteen dioceses, including Baltimore and Los Angeles, that have listed abusive priests have included members of religious orders, according to BishopAccountability.org. Many, like the Diocese of Springfield, Mass., have investigated allegations against such priests and helped pay settlements.

Baltimore’s list includes a religious-order priest, the Rev. Dennis Pecore, who abused a child there in the 1970s before he was transferred to Milwaukee, where he was twice convicted of sexual offenses against children. The Milwaukee archdiocese joined with Father Pecore’s religious order, the Salvatorians, to settle with a victim. Yet neither has posted his name.

Church leaders in Baltimore and elsewhere said there were good reasons for listing every offender.

“It doesn’t seem appropriate just to do diocesan priests,” said Bishop Gerald F. Kicanas of Tucson, the vice president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “Our goal is to demonstrate to the person harmed that the church understood their pain and the harm that had been done to them, and to get as many victims as possible to come forward.”

Maryann Clesceri, the executive director of a Milwaukee center that serves sexual assault victims, said she and some fellow members of the archdiocese’s community advisory board encouraged Archbishop Dolan to list every abuser because “to maintain the silence is to mirror what the perpetrators want.”

“Some of us then said that if the religious orders did not release the names, those orders should not be allowed in the archdiocese,” she added.

The archbishop said he had encouraged the religious orders to list the names. “They chose not to,” he said. “I regretted their decision.”


Jack Begg, Alain Delaquérière and Toby Lyles contributed reporting.

    Complex Struggle: Prelate’s Record in Abuse Crisis, NYT, 16.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/nyregion/17dolan.html

Cardinal Has a Mixed Record

on Abuse Cases

May 5, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO

In January 2006, Cardinal William J. Levada, the highest ranking American official in the Vatican, slipped into a San Francisco office building, sidestepping a gaggle of media lying in wait. On leave from Rome, he was submitting to a day of questioning before a flotilla of plaintiffs’ lawyers.

For eight strenuous hours, the cardinal was pressed to explain why he had decided to return priests who were confirmed sexual abusers back to ministry. He acknowledged that he had failed to notify the authorities of allegations of abuse. He struggled to recall why he had chosen not to share information with parishioners.

The questions related to abuse cases that Cardinal Levada dealt with while he was an American bishop; he oversaw the archdioceses of Portland and San Francisco from 1986 to 2005. But by the time the questions were being asked, the cardinal had assumed an exalted position at the Vatican just vacated by his old friend Pope Benedict XVI, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

That put him in charge of adjudicating sexual abuse cases involving priests worldwide, as Benedict had been before him. And like Benedict, whose handling of delicate cases before he became pope has come under scrutiny, Cardinal Levada often did not act as assertively as he could have on abuse cases.

Cardinal Levada was ahead of other church officials on the issue at times, setting up an independent committee to vet abuse cases and calling for greater accountability from church leaders.

But an examination of his record, pieced together from interviews and a review of thousands of pages of court documents, show that he generally followed the prevailing practice of the church hierarchy, often giving accused priests the benefit of the doubt and being reluctant to remove them from ministry.

Erin Olson, a Portland lawyer who has been involved in numerous sexual abuse lawsuits against the Portland Archdiocese, said, “It’s no surprise that the Catholic Church continues to be mired in the abuse scandal when the cardinal put in charge of how the church as a whole responds to child sex abuse allegations did such a poor job himself as a bishop and archbishop.” She was largely responsible for forcing Cardinal Levada to testify that day in 2006.

Cardinal Levada did not respond to requests for comment. Jeffrey Lena, a lawyer in Berkeley, Calif., who is representing the Holy See in lawsuits, said the cardinal had not been given enough time to respond to a list of questions submitted to him 10 days ago.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, also declined to comment.

In a recent interview with PBS NewsHour, Cardinal Levada said the church had been through a gradual “learning process.”

“It took us a lot of time, I think, to understand how to deal with this part, and it took a lot of time to understand how much damage is done to victims, to children, by this kind of behavior,” said Cardinal Levada, who has strongly criticized media coverage of the abuse scandal.

Bishop John C. Wester of Salt Lake City, who served under Cardinal Levada in San Francisco as his vicar for clergy, said the cardinal had been unfairly maligned.

“My own judgment is he gets categorized negatively,” Bishop Wester said. “I don’t think it’s deserved. I just think he did right by the victims. He’s not somebody who’s going to slap you on the back, be super gregarious, the life of the party kind of guy. He’s more serious, more reserved. Sometimes people misinterpret that.

“In his own way, I think he’s very transparent and forthright,” Bishop Wester said.

Suzanne Giraudo, a psychologist and chairwoman of the San Francisco Archdiocese’s Independent Review board, which evaluates the credibility of sexual abuse accusations, praised Cardinal Levada, saying he wanted to “do what was right, not only for the priest but for the victim.”

An Early Warning

An assessment of Cardinal Levada’s performance in his current job at the Vatican is complicated by the fact that his congregation’s decisions are shrouded in confidentiality rules.

Canon lawyers said cases had been handled more efficiently by the Vatican since procedures were clarified in 2001. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to find cases that have dragged on for several years. The congregation has added staff members, but it still has only 10 people handling cases, and there have been more than 3,000 in the past decade.

Several recent cases that have become public have raised questions about whether the Vatican is even now acting aggressively enough.

American bishops have long argued that they were ignorant of the gravity of sexual abuse in the church until relatively recently. It was not until 2002 that the American church, with Cardinal Levada as one of its most prominent leaders, adopted a zero-tolerance policy in which priests who were credibly accused of sexual abuse were automatically suspended from ministry.

But Cardinal Levada himself heard the siren much earlier. In the spring of 1985, the alarm was sounded by an unlikely trio of concerned Catholics, the Rev. Thomas Doyle, a Vatican canon lawyer; Raymond Mouton Jr., a Louisiana criminal lawyer who defended the Rev. Gilbert Gauthe, a notorious pedophile priest; and the Rev. Michael Peterson, a psychiatrist.

In the wake of the Gauthe case, the three men produced a strongly worded 92-page report that argued for immediate action to deal with sexual molestation in the church.

In May 1985, Cardinal Levada, then a young auxiliary bishop from Los Angeles, was sent by church leaders to meet with the men. The meeting at a Chicago airport hotel went on all day, Father Doyle and Mr. Mouton said recently, with Bishop Levada going through their report almost line by line. They said he seemed enthusiastic about their proposals.

Two weeks later, however, the bishop called Father Doyle and told him that their report was being shelved and that the bishops would convene their own committee to examine the issue. But no such group materialized.

Two decades later, in various sworn depositions, Cardinal Levada would assert that he recalled little from the meeting. But his detailed briefing would have given him a far deeper awareness of the issue than a vast majority of church officials at the time.

Portland Years

Soon after he ascended to the top position at the Portland Archdiocese in 1986, he was forced to deal with the case of the Rev. Thomas B. Laughlin, a prominent priest who was arrested in 1983 and served six months in prison for sexual abuse.

In July 1988, Archbishop Levada wrote to then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, who headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Their friendship dated from several years earlier when the American had been a staff member at the congregation. Archbishop Levada laid out a four-page argument for the dismissal of Father Laughlin from the priesthood, which was granted.

In contrast, just a few months later, Archbishop Levada did not aggressively pursue a complaint that the Rev. Aldo Orso-Manzonetta had invited a boy to stay overnight at the rectory.

Church records indicate that he spoke to Father Orso-Manzonetta and told him not to repeat the mistake. It is not clear if he checked the priest’s personnel file. But there was a long trail of complaints against the priest, made public years later when the archdiocese released reams of priest personnel records as part of bankruptcy proceedings.

Four years later, more rumors about the priest’s relationships with boys and under-age young men surfaced. This time, the Rev. Charles Lienert, the archdiocese’s vicar for clergy, sent a memo in May 1992 to Archbishop Levada detailing a history of accusations against Father Orso-Manzonetta.

It was not until 1994, however, when another accuser came forward, that Father Orso-Manzonetta was sent for a psychological evaluation. A letter from Father Lienert to the examiner that was in the priest’s personnel file expressed concern about the sheer number of allegations, saying, “These records are discoverable should someone choose to sue us.”

Father Orso-Manzonetta then retired, and he died in 1996. But in 2000, several men who said he had abused them as altar boys sued the archdiocese. The case was eventually settled for an undisclosed amount.

In at least two instances during his time in Portland, Archbishop Levada chose to return priests with proven allegations of sexual abuse against them to ministry after treatment, with the agreement of therapists, according to church records.

At another point, the archbishop overruled advisers who recommended that the archdiocese make a general announcement encouraging sexual abuse victims to come forward, following new revelations about a priest who had molested children in the 1950s.

Archbishop Levada also apparently rebuffed the archdiocese’s lawyer, Bob McMenamin, when he urged him to hold a seminar for clergy members on sexual abuse, according to testimony from the lawyer in an ethics complaint that the archbishop filed against Mr. McMenamin after he went on to represent a man in a sexual abuse lawsuit against the archdiocese.

“He said he had more important things for his priests to do,” Mr. McMenamin said.

Cases in San Francisco

In 1995, Cardinal Levada moved to the San Francisco Archdiocese. Early on, he dealt with two priests who he learned had sexually abused children years before and decided not to restrict either.

In the case of the Rev. Milton Walsh, who was the rector of the city’s cathedral, Archbishop Levada testified in a 2005 deposition that a therapist had concluded that an episode in which Father Walsh had molested a 13-year-old boy, Jay Seaman, in 1984 was not indicative of a “tendency toward sexual abuse.”

Later, the police would record an extraordinary telephone call between Mr. Seaman and Father Walsh, in which Father Walsh said that he had learned not to put himself in situations where he would be tempted. He said he had told Archbishop Levada, “You can trust me, ’cause I don’t trust myself.”

The archbishop went through a similar calculus with the Rev. Gregory Ingels, a canon lawyer who had become a national expert on clergy sexual abuse. He would be charged by prosecutors in 2003 with “unlawful oral copulation” with a teenage boy over an episode from 1972.

Fathers Walsh and Ingels were suspended from ministry in 2002 under the zero-tolerance policy adopted by American bishops. The criminal charges against both men were dropped because of the statute of limitations.

In late 1997, Archbishop Levada faced a case in which the suspicions of abuse were current, not decades old. The Rev. John P. Conley, a former United States attorney who had become a priest, happened upon a flustered teenage boy in his church’s rectory.

Father Conley later said in a sworn deposition, released by his lawyer, Michael P. Guta, that he also spotted a man crawling away. The boy told the priest, an associate pastor in the parish, that he had been “wrestling” with the Rev. James Aylward, the head pastor.

Father Conley said he contacted the district attorney’s office even though he was told by an archdiocesan official that these matters were usually handled “in house.”

Father Conley also discovered that priests had never been briefed about a new state law that made members of the clergy mandatory reporters of suspected sexual abuse and that had gone into effect 11 months earlier. A bishop told him that church officials were still studying it.

Instead of imposing restrictions on Father Aylward, Archbishop Levada suspended Father Conley after the pair clashed over the handling of the episode. The archbishop cited reports of “anger outbursts” with parishioners.

Father Conley filed a defamation lawsuit against the archbishop, contending that he had been punished for reporting sexual abuse. Father Aylward, who was never criminally charged, admitted under oath in a deposition more than two years after the episode that he had wrestled with young boys for years and gotten sexual gratification out of i. At that point, he was suspended.

Father Conley eventually won a settlement from the archdiocese.

By the end of Cardinal Levada’s term in San Francisco, his approach on such cases had evolved. The archdiocese became among the first in the United States to create an independent committee to investigate sexual abuse cases.

Even so, the committee’s first chairman, James Jenkins, a psychologist, resigned in 2003 over differences with Archbishop Levada. “It was compromised by, really, disingenuousness and actions of deception and manipulation,” he said, citing the secrecy surrounding the board’s findings and other issues.

Less than two years later, Pope Benedict XVI brought his old friend to Rome.


Michael Powell contributed reporting from New York, and Malia Wollan from San Rafael, Calif.

    Cardinal Has a Mixed Record on Abuse Cases, NYT, 5.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/world/europe/06levada.html

White House

Quietly Courts Muslims in U.S.

April 18, 2010
The New York Times
By ANDREA ELLIOTT

When President Obama took the stage in Cairo last June, promising a new relationship with the Islamic world, Muslims in America wondered only half-jokingly whether the overture included them. After all, Mr. Obama had kept his distance during the campaign, never visiting an American mosque and describing the false claim that he was Muslim as a “smear” on his Web site.

Nearly a year later, Mr. Obama has yet to set foot in an American mosque. And he still has not met with Muslim and Arab-American leaders. But less publicly, his administration has reached out to this politically isolated constituency in a sustained and widening effort that has left even skeptics surprised.

Muslim and Arab-American advocates have participated in policy discussions and received briefings from top White House aides and other officials on health care legislation, foreign policy, the economy, immigration and national security. They have met privately with a senior White House adviser, Valerie Jarrett, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to discuss civil liberties concerns and counterterrorism strategy.

The impact of this continuing dialogue is difficult to measure, but White House officials cited several recent government actions that were influenced, in part, by the discussions. The meeting with Ms. Napolitano was among many factors that contributed to the government’s decision this month to end a policy subjecting passengers from 14 countries, most of them Muslim, to additional scrutiny at airports, the officials said.

That emergency directive, enacted after a failed Dec. 25 bombing plot, has been replaced with a new set of intelligence-based protocols that law enforcement officials consider more effective.

Also this month, Tariq Ramadan, a prominent Muslim academic, visited the United States for the first time in six years after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reversed a decision by the Bush administration, which had barred Mr. Ramadan from entering the country, initially citing the U.S.A. Patriot Act. Mrs. Clinton also cleared the way for another well-known Muslim professor, Adam Habib, who had been denied entry under similar circumstances.

Arab-American and Muslim leaders said they had yet to see substantive changes on a variety of issues, including what they describe as excessive airport screening, policies that have chilled Muslim charitable giving and invasive F.B.I. surveillance guidelines. But they are encouraged by the extent of their consultation by the White House and governmental agencies.

“For the first time in eight years, we have the opportunity to meet, engage, discuss, disagree, but have an impact on policy,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute in Washington. “We’re being made to feel a part of that process and that there is somebody listening.”

In the post-9/11 era, Muslims and Arab-Americans have posed something of a conundrum for the government: they are seen as a political liability but also, increasingly, as an important partner in countering the threat of homegrown terrorism. Under President George W. Bush, leaders of these groups met with government representatives from time to time, but said they had limited interaction with senior officials. While Mr. Obama has yet to hold the kind of high-profile meeting that Muslims and Arab-Americans seek, there is a consensus among his policymakers that engagement is no longer optional.

The administration’s approach has been understated. Many meetings have been private; others were publicized only after the fact. A visit to New York University in February by John O. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, drew little news coverage, but caused a stir among Muslims around the country. Speaking to Muslim students, activists and others, Mr. Brennan acknowledged many of their grievances, including “surveillance that has been excessive,” “overinclusive no-fly lists” and “an unhelpful atmosphere around many Muslim charities.”

“These are challenges we face together as Americans,” said Mr. Brennan, who momentarily showed off his Arabic to hearty applause. He and other officials have made a point of disassociating Islam from terrorism in public comments, using the phrase “violent extremism” in place of words like “jihad” and “Islamic terrorism.”

While the administration’s solicitation of Muslims and Arab-Americans has drawn little fanfare, it has not escaped criticism. A small but vocal group of research analysts, bloggers and others complain that the government is reaching out to Muslim leaders and organizations with an Islamist agenda or ties to extremist groups abroad.

They point out that Ms. Jarrett gave the keynote address at the annual convention for the Islamic Society of North America. The group was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal case against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a Texas-based charity whose leaders were convicted in 2008 of funneling money to Hamas. The society denies any links to terrorism.

“I think dialogue is good, but it has to be with genuine moderates,” said Steven Emerson, a terrorism analyst who advises government officials. “These are the wrong groups to legitimize.” Mr. Emerson and others have also objected to the political appointments of several American Muslims, including Rashad Hussain.

In February, the president chose Mr. Hussain, a 31-year-old White House lawyer, to become the United States’ special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The position, a kind of ambassador at large to Muslim countries, was created by Mr. Bush. In a video address, Mr. Obama highlighted Mr. Hussain’s status as a “close and trusted member of my White House staff” and “a hafiz,” a person who has memorized the Koran.

Within days of the announcement, news reports surfaced about comments Mr. Hussain had made on a panel in 2004, while he was a student at Yale Law School, in which he referred to several domestic terrorism prosecutions as “politically motivated.” Among the cases he criticized was that of Sami Al-Arian, a former computer-science professor in Florida who pleaded guilty to aiding members of a Palestinian terrorist group.

At first, the White House said Mr. Hussain did not recall making the comments, which had been removed from the Web version of a 2004 article published by a small Washington magazine. When Politico obtained a recording of the panel, Mr. Hussain acknowledged criticizing the prosecutions but said he believed the magazine quoted him inaccurately, prompting him to ask its editor to remove the comments. On Feb. 22, The Washington Examiner ran an editorial with the headline “Obama Selects a Voice of Radical Islam.”

Muslim leaders watched carefully as the story migrated to Fox News. They had grown accustomed to close scrutiny, many said in interviews, but were nonetheless surprised. In 2008, Mr. Hussain had co-authored a paper for the Brookings Institution arguing that the government should use the peaceful teachings of Islam to fight terrorism.

“Rashad Hussain is about as squeaky clean as you get,” said Representative Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat who is Muslim. Mr. Ellison and others wondered whether the administration would buckle under the pressure and were relieved when the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, defended Mr. Hussain.

“The fact that the president and the administration have appointed Muslims to positions and have stood by them when they’ve been attacked is the best we can hope for,” said Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America.

It was notably different during Mr. Obama’s run for office. In June 2008, volunteers of his campaign barred two Muslim women in headscarves from appearing behind Mr. Obama at a rally in Detroit, eliciting widespread criticism. The campaign promptly recruited Mazen Asbahi, a 36-year-old corporate lawyer and popular Muslim activist from Chicago, to become its liaison to Muslims and Arab-Americans.

Bloggers began researching Mr. Asbahi’s background. For a brief time in 2000, he had sat on the board of an Islamic investment fund, along with Sheikh Jamal Said, a Chicago imam who was later named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land case. Mr. Asbahi said in an interview that he had left the board after three weeks because he wanted no association with the imam.

Shortly after his appointment to the Obama campaign, Mr. Asbahi said, a Wall Street Journal reporter began asking questions about his connection to the imam. Campaign officials became concerned that news coverage would give critics ammunition to link the imam to Mr. Obama, Mr. Asbahi recalled. On their recommendation, Mr. Asbahi agreed to resign from the campaign, he said.

He is still unsettled by the power of his detractors. “To be in the midst of this campaign of change and hope and to have it stripped away over nothing,” he said. “It hurts.”

From the moment Mr. Obama took office, he seemed eager to change the tenor of America’s relationship with Muslims worldwide. He gave his first interview to Al Arabiya, the Arabic-language television station based in Dubai. Muslims cautiously welcomed his ban on torture and his pledge to close Guantánamo within a year.

In his Cairo address, he laid out his vision for “a new beginning” with Muslims: while America would continue to fight terrorism, he said, terrorism would no longer define America’s approach to Muslims.

Back at home, Muslim and Arab-American leaders remained skeptical. But they took note when, a few weeks later, Mohamed Magid, a prominent imam from Sterling, Va., and Rami Nashashibi, a Muslim activist from Chicago, joined the president at a White-House meeting about fatherhood. Also that month, Dr. Faisal Qazi, a board member of American Muslim Health Professionals, began meeting with administration officials to discuss health care reform.

The invitations were aimed at expanding the government’s relationship with Muslims and Arab-Americans to areas beyond security, said Mr. Hussain, the White House’s special envoy. Mr. Hussain began advising the president on issues related to Islam after joining the White House counsel’s office in January 2009. He helped draft Mr. Obama’s Cairo speech and accompanied him on the trip. “The president realizes that you cannot engage one-fourth of the world’s population based on the erroneous beliefs of a fringe few,” Mr. Hussain said.

Other government offices followed the lead of the White House. In October, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke met with Arab-Americans and Muslims in Dearborn, Mich., to discuss challenges facing small-business owners. Also last fall, Farah Pandith was sworn in as the State Department’s first special representative to Muslim communities. While Ms. Pandith works mostly with Muslims abroad, she said she had also consulted with American Muslims because Mrs. Clinton believes “they can add value overseas.”

Despite this, American actions abroad — including civilian deaths from drone strikes in Pakistan and the failure to close Guantánamo — have drawn the anger of Muslims and Arab-Americans.

Even though their involvement with the administration has broadened, they remain most concerned about security-related policies. In January, when the Department of Homeland Security hosted a two-day meeting with Muslim, Arab-American, South Asian and Sikh leaders, the group expressed concern about the emergency directive subjecting passengers from a group of Muslim countries to additional screening.

Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, pointed out that the policy would never have caught the attempted shoe bomber Richard Reid, who is British. “It almost sends the signal that the government is going to treat nationals of powerless countries differently from countries that are powerful,” Ms. Khera recalled saying as community leaders around the table nodded their heads.

Ms. Napolitano, who sat with the group for more than an hour, committed to meeting with them more frequently. Ms. Khera said she left feeling somewhat hopeful.

“I think our message is finally starting to get through,” she said.

    White House Quietly Courts Muslims in U.S., NYT, 18.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/us/politics/19muslim.html

Op-Ed Columnist

Worlds Without Women

April 11, 2010
The New Yorkk Times
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

When I was in Saudi Arabia, I had tea and sweets with a group of educated and sophisticated young professional women.

I asked why they were not more upset about living in a country where women’s rights were strangled, an inbred and autocratic state more like an archaic men’s club than a modern nation. They told me, somewhat defensively, that the kingdom was moving at its own pace, glacial as that seemed to outsiders.

How could such spirited women, smart and successful on every other level, acquiesce in their own subordination?

I was puzzling over that one when it hit me: As a Catholic woman, I was doing the same thing.

I, too, belonged to an inbred and wealthy men’s club cloistered behind walls and disdaining modernity.

I, too, remained part of an autocratic society that repressed women and ignored their progress in the secular world.

I, too, rationalized as men in dresses allowed our religious kingdom to decay and to cling to outdated misogynistic rituals, blind to the benefits of welcoming women’s brains, talents and hearts into their ancient fraternity.

To circumscribe women, Saudi Arabia took Islam’s moral codes and orthodoxy to extremes not outlined by Muhammad; the Catholic Church took its moral codes and orthodoxy to extremes not outlined by Jesus. In the New Testament, Jesus is surrounded by strong women and never advocates that any woman — whether she’s his mother or a prostitute — be treated as a second-class citizen.

Negating women is at the heart of the church’s hideous — and criminal — indifference to the welfare of boys and girls in its priests’ care. Lisa Miller writes in Newsweek’s cover story about the danger of continuing to marginalize women in a disgraced church that has Mary at the center of its founding story:

“In the Roman Catholic corporation, the senior executives live and work, as they have for a thousand years, eschewing not just marriage, but intimacy with women ... not to mention any chance to familiarize themselves with the earthy, primal messiness of families and children.” No wonder that, having closed themselves off from women and everything maternal, they treated children as collateral damage, a necessary sacrifice to save face for Mother Church.

And the sins of the fathers just keep coming. On Friday, The Associated Press broke the latest story pointing the finger of blame directly at Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, quoting from a letter written in Latin in which he resisted pleas to defrock a California priest who had sexually molested children.

As the longtime Vatican enforcer, the archconservative Ratzinger — now Pope Benedict XVI — moved avidly to persecute dissenters. But with molesters, he was plodding and even merciful.

As the A.P. reported, the Oakland diocese recommended defrocking Father Stephen Kiesle in 1981. The priest had pleaded no contest and was sentenced to three years’ probation in 1978 in a case in which he was accused of tying up and molesting two boys in a church rectory.

In 1982, the Oakland diocese got what it termed a “rather curt” response from the Vatican. It wasn’t until 1985 that “God’s Rottweiler” finally got around to addressing the California bishop’s concern. He sent his letter urging the diocese to give the 38-year-old pedophile “as much paternal care as possible” and to consider “his young age.” Ratzinger should have been more alarmed by the young age of the priest’s victims; that’s what maternal care would have entailed.

As in so many other cases, the primary concern seemed to be shielding the church from scandal. Chillingly, outrageously, the future pope told the Oakland bishop to consider the “good of the universal church” before granting the priest’s own request to give up the collar — even though the bishop had advised Rome that the scandal would likely be greater if the priest were not punished.

While the Vatican sat on the case — asking the diocese to resubmit the files, saying they might have been lost — Kiesle volunteered as a youth minister at a church north of Oakland. The A.P. also reported that even after the priest was finally defrocked in 1987, he continued to volunteer with children in the Oakland diocese; repeated warnings to church officials were ignored.

The Vatican must realize that the church’s belligerent, resentful and paranoid response to the global scandal is not working because it now says it will cooperate with secular justice systems and that the pope will have more meetings with victims. It is too little, too late.

The church that through the ages taught me and other children right from wrong did not know right from wrong when it came to children. Crimes were swept under the rectory rug, and molesters were protected to molest again for the “good of the universal church.” And that is bad, very bad — a mortal sin.

The church has had theological schisms. This is an emotional schism. The pope is morally compromised. Take it from a sister.

Worlds Without Women, NYT, 11.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/opinion/11dowd.html