History > 2011 > USA > Faith (I)

Catholic Order

Reaches $166 Million Settlement

With Sexual Abuse Victims

March 25, 2011
Reuters
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

SEATTLE — A Roman Catholic religious order in the Northwest has agreed to pay $166 million to more than 500 victims of sexual abuse, many of whom are American Indians and Alaska Natives who were abused decades ago at Indian boarding schools and in remote villages, lawyers for the plaintiffs said Friday.

The settlement, with the Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus, known as the Northwest Jesuits, is the largest abuse settlement by far from a Catholic religious order, as opposed to a diocese, and it is one of the largest abuse settlements of any kind by the Catholic Church. The Jesuits are the church’s largest religious order, and their focus is education. The Oregon Province includes Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana and Alaska.

“There is a huge number of victims, in part because these Native American communities were remote and vulnerable, and in part because of a policy by the Jesuits, even though they deny it, of sending problem priests to these far-off regions,” said Terry McKiernan of Bishopaccountability.org, a victims’ advocacy group that tracks abuse cases.

The province released a statement saying it would not comment on the settlement announced by the plaintiffs’ lawyers because it was involved in bankruptcy litigation. The bankruptcy stems from previous abuse settlements, totaling about $55 million, reached several years ago. A small group of victims and their lawyers have been negotiating the current settlement for more than a year as part of the province’s bankruptcy-ordered restructuring.

An insurer for the province is paying the bulk of the settlement, which still is subject to approval by hundreds of other victims and by a federal judge.

John Allison, a lawyer based in Spokane, Wash., represented many clients who were abused in the late 1960s and early 1970s while they were students at St. Mary’s Mission in Omak, Wash., near the reservation of the Colville Confederated Tribes, one of the largest reservations in the country. The Jesuits ran the St. Mary’s school until the 1970s, when federal policies began to encourage more Indian control. St. Mary’s is now closed, though its building stands beside a new school.

Mr. Allison noted that English was not the native language for some of the students at the time of the abuse. Some were 6 and 7 years old and came from difficult family situations. Some were orphans. At the same time, many Jesuit priests were not happy to have been assigned to such remote places.

“They let down a very vulnerable population,” Mr. Allison said.

Lawyers representing some of the victims initially suggested they would go after assets of some of the region’s large Jesuit institutions, including Gonzaga University and Seattle University. But the settlement does not involve them, and their future vulnerability is unclear. Mr. Allison said some of the accused priests, now in their 80s, live at Gonzaga under strict supervision.

Mr. Allison and another lawyer, Leander James, of Idaho, said the settlement required the province to eventually apologize to the victims.

One of the plaintiffs, Dorothea Skalicky, was living on the Nez Perce Indian Reservation in northern Idaho in the 1970s when she said she was abused by a Jesuit priest who ran Sacred Heart Church, in Lapwai. Ms. Skalicky, now 42, said that her family lived across from the church for several years, and that she was abused from age 6 to 8.

“My family looked up to him,” Ms. Skalicky said of the priest, who is deceased. “He was somebody high up that was respected by the community and my parents.” The church, she said, “was supposed to be a safe place.”


Laurie Goodstein contributed reporting from New York.

    Catholic Order Reaches $166 Million Settlement With Sexual Abuse Victims, R, 25.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/us/26jesuits.html






 

21 Priests Suspended in Philadelphia

March 8, 2011
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia announced Tuesday that it had suspended 21 priests from active ministry in connection with accusations that involved sexual abuse or otherwise inappropriate behavior with minors.

The mass suspension was the single-most sweeping in the history of the sexual-abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, said Terence McKiernan, president of BishopAccountability.org, which archives documents from the abuse scandal in dioceses across the country.

The archdiocese’s action follows a damning grand jury report issued Feb. 10 that accused the archdiocese of a widespread cover-up of predatory priests, stretching over decades, and said that as many as 37 priests remained active in the ministry despite credible accusations against them.

Of those 37 priests, 21 were suspended; three others already had been placed on administrative leave after the grand jury detailed accusations against them. Five others would have been suspended, the church said in a statement, but three are no longer active and two are no longer active in the Philadelphia Archdiocese. The church said that in eight cases, no further investigation was warranted.

The statement said the accusations against the 21 ranged from “sexual abuse of a minor to boundary issues with minors,” but did not describe them further.

Nor did it name the 21 whom it suspended, drawing the fury of groups representing abuse victims. Many parishioners are likely to learn that their priest was accused when he fails to appear for Ash Wednesday services.

The announcement was a major embarrassment for Cardinal Justin Rigali, who, in response to the grand jury report, had initially said there were no priests in active ministry “who have an admitted or established allegation of sexual abuse of a minor against them.”

A few days later, Cardinal Rigali placed three priests on administrative leave. His statement Tuesday did not explain why he had made his initial assurances nor did it say why the priests had not been suspended earlier.

“We may have to be asking, what did the cardinal know and when did he know it?” said Leonard Norman Primiano, a Roman Catholic and chairman of the religious studies department at Cabrini College in nearby Radnor, Pa. He described the mass suspension as “astonishing.”

At a minimum, the scope of the suspensions underscored the grand jury’s contention that the archdiocese had failed to clean house after a grand jury report in 2005 found credible accusations of abuse by 63 priests. And it suggested that potentially, predatory priests had had access to thousands of children for years.

The grand jury report prompted the indictment last month of four priests and a parochial school teacher. They include Msgr. William Lynn, the first senior church official in the United States to face criminal charges of covering up abusive behavior.

Cardinal Rigali, 75, said the suspensions were interim measures, pending fuller investigations. And he apologized for the behavior of abusive priests.

“I am truly sorry for the harm done to the victims of sexual abuse, as well as to the members of our community who suffer as a result of this great evil and crime,” he said. He is expected to address the issue Wednesday in a noon service at the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul. He has scheduled a penitential service for Friday.

Those on leave are not allowed to celebrate Mass publicly, wear collars or hear confessions. They were given a few hours’ notice to leave their parishes before the announcement.

Once the identities of the suspended priests become public, analysts said, there could be a dam-breaking effect as there was in Boston in 2002, when initial reports led to more sexual-abuse claims. Since the grand jury report in Philadelphia, two people have filed civil suits, and Jeff Armstrong, a lawyer representing them, said he had received “dozens” of calls from others who might file.

“We’re approaching this with a new vigor,” Mr. Armstrong said. “Like Boston, this is a watershed moment, where all of a sudden the secrets are no longer kept and permission is given to break the silence to this whole survivors’ community.”

If charges against the priests are upheld, the church could face a payout of millions of dollars in legal settlements. The charges come at a stressful time for the church, with membership and parochial school enrollment declining. The archdiocese announced last week that it was closing seven schools in June; it has already closed more than 40 since 2006.

    21 Priests Suspended in Philadelphia, NYT, 8.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/us/09priests.html

Fair to Muslims?

March 8, 2011
The New York Times
By AKBAR AHMED

Washington

MANY American Muslims are fearful and angry about the Congressional hearings on Islamic radicalism that will start Thursday, with some arguing that they are a mere provocation meant to incite bigotry. But as a scholar, I view the hearings, to be led by Representative Peter T. King, the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, as an opportunity to educate Americans about our community’s diversity and faith.

The topic is urgent, and the hearings overdue. It is undeniable that the phenomenon of homegrown terrorists appears to be increasing in frequency. A successful attack would set back relations between Muslims and non-Muslims for many years. The backlash would effectively sweep away the slow but steady progress in interfaith dialogue that has been achieved since 9/11.

Muslim leaders must acknowledge that many Americans are fearful of religiously motivated terrorism. Simply to protest the hearings and call for them to be canceled, as some have done, strikes many non-Muslims as uncooperative, or as intended to conceal dark secrets or un-American behavior.

Instead, Muslims should embrace the chance to explain their beliefs fully and clearly. We have nothing to hide. But members of Congress also need to act responsibly. They should avoid broad accusations, and be aware that the hearings will be closely followed worldwide. The actions of both groups will shape America’s relationship with Islam, and the relationship of American Muslims with their country.

To better understand the Muslim community and its attitudes toward American identity, I spent much of 2008 and 2009 traveling the United States. My research assistants and I visited 75 communities, from Dearborn, Mich., to Arab, Ala., and 100 mosques around the country. We conducted hundreds of interviews, and compiled some 2,000 responses to a long questionnaire.

We discovered that well before the debate last year over a proposed Islamic center in Lower Manhattan, American Muslims felt under siege. We heard heartbreaking stories: schoolchildren assaulted as “terrorists,” women wearing the hijab attacked, and mosques vandalized and firebombed.

Adding to their sense of being unfairly singled out were commentators in the news media talking as if it were open season on Muslims. Bill O’Reilly compared the Koran to Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” and Tom Tancredo, a Republican who was then a congressman from Colorado, said the United States could respond to a future terrorist attack by bombing Mecca.

But I also saw much to encourage me during my travels. Muslims told me in the privacy of their homes that this country was “the best place in the world to be Muslim.” A Nigerian in Houston said he placed Thomas Jefferson “at the top of my heart.” The bearded leader of a major Muslim organization called Jefferson, a defender of religious freedom, a role model.

In Paterson, N.J., an elderly woman from Cairo who got an education in America after her Egyptian husband deserted her told us, “America saved my life.” In the only mosque in the small city of Gadsden, Ala., we met a Muslim man who had lived in the area for decades and married a Christian woman. In a distinctively Southern accent, he summed up his identity as “Muslim by birth, Southern by the grace of God.”

The Muslim community in America is not a monolith. Very broadly, it comprises three groups: African-Americans (many of them converts), immigrants (largely from the Middle East and South Asia) and white converts. And Muslims from every part of the world study and work in the United States.

Yet the diversity of the Muslim community is frequently obscured by ignorance and mistrust. We were often asked by non-Muslims whether Muslims could be “good” Americans. The frequency with which this question was asked indicated the doubts that many harbored. Too many Americans acknowledged that they knew virtually nothing about Islam and said they had never met a Muslim.

Representative King, the New York Republican who has called the hearings, has raised the issue of Muslim cooperation with law enforcement agencies. On our journey, especially in mosques, we confronted an underlying unease and suspicion toward these agencies. Frequently, even while we were being welcomed and honored, people would ask us with a nervous laugh whether we were working for the F.B.I. The community complained that crude attempts by the agencies to “study” them were both insulting and ineffective. They believed that thinly disguised informants who claimed to be converting to Islam were acting as provocateurs.

In a Texas mosque dominated by the Salafi school of thought — widely equated with religious fundamentalism — the congregants condemned terrorism. They complained that the agencies had used clumsy infiltrators instead of simply talking to congregants. “Homeland Security and F.B.I. put us under surveillance, asking people, ‘Where are the terrorists?’” one interviewee, a Salafi who professed nonviolence, told us. “We know exactly where they are!”

At times, we did see evidence of the kind of extremist beliefs the hearing is intended to scrutinize. In one of the first mosques we visited in the Midwest, after I gave a talk advocating interfaith dialogue, I was accosted by members of the congregation who vehemently disagreed and dismissed my fieldwork because I had “white kids” with me. Later we learned that these men had threatened and assaulted other congregants who did not agree with them.

In our review of cases involving radicalized American Muslims, we learned that many homegrown terrorists said their actions were grounded in American foreign policy, particularly when it resulted in the deaths of women and children, rather than in their interpretations of Koranic precepts. In public statements, they expressed anger about American military and intelligence intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan and other Muslim countries. For example, Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani immigrant who confessed to the attempted car bombing in Times Square last May, was motivated by a desire to avenge drone strikes in his native province.

If a civil, respectful level of discussion and debate is not maintained in these hearings, and if a demonization of Muslims results, the news coverage in the Muslim world could feed into the high levels of anti-Americanism in countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan. This would play against the interests of American diplomats and troops in Muslim nations who have advocated the winning of Muslim hearts and minds.

To better inform the public debate, Representative King should invite religious and social leaders who have credibility in their communities. Equally important, he should include scholars who could present empirical findings and analysis with neutrality and integrity. Unfortunately, some of the names who have been associated with the hearings so far have neither research nor credibility to support them.

At the same time, Muslims must realize that to be truly accepted as “good” Americans, they need to more explicitly embrace American identity, culture and history — from political debates like Representative King’s hearing to the ideals of this country’s founders.

America, in turn, must realize its best aspirations by better understanding Islam. No appreciation of the founders is complete without an acknowledgment of their truly pluralist vision.

Akbar Ahmed, professor of Islamic studies at American University, is the author of “Journey Into America: The Challenge of Islam.”

    Fair to Muslims?, NYT, 8.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/opinion/09ahmed.html

Drawing U.S. Crowds With Anti-Islam Message

March 7, 2011
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

FORT WORTH — Brigitte Gabriel bounced to the stage at a Tea Party convention last fall. She greeted the crowd with a loud Texas “Yee-HAW,” then launched into the same gripping personal story she has told in hundreds of churches, synagogues and conference rooms across the United States:

As a child growing up a Maronite Christian in war-torn southern Lebanon in the 1970s, Ms. Gabriel said, she had been left lying injured in rubble after Muslims mercilessly bombed her village. She found refuge in Israel and then moved to the United States, only to find that the Islamic radicals who had terrorized her in Lebanon, she said, were now bent on taking over America.

“America has been infiltrated on all levels by radicals who wish to harm America,” she said. “They have infiltrated us at the C.I.A., at the F.B.I., at the Pentagon, at the State Department. They are being radicalized in radical mosques in our cities and communities within the United States.”

Through her books, media appearances and speeches, and her organization, ACT! for America, Ms. Gabriel has become one of the most visible personalities on a circuit of self-appointed terrorism detectors who warn that Muslims pose an enormous danger within United States borders.

Representative Peter T. King, Republican of Long Island, will conduct hearings Thursday in Washington on a similar theme: that the United States is infiltrated by Muslim radicals. Mr. King was the first guest last month on a new cable television show that Ms. Gabriel co-hosts with Guy Rodgers, the executive director of ACT! and a Republican consultant who helped build the Christian Coalition, once the most potent political organization on the Christian right.

Ms. Gabriel, 46, who uses a pseudonym, casts her organization as a nonpartisan, nonreligious national security group. Yet the organization draws on three rather religious and partisan streams in American politics: evangelical Christian conservatives, hard-line defenders of Israel (both Jews and Christians) and Tea Party Republicans.

She presents a portrait of Islam so thoroughly bent on destruction and domination that it is unrecognizable to those who study or practice the religion. She has found a receptive audience among Americans who are legitimately worried about the spread of terrorism.

But some of those who work in counterterrorism say that speakers like Ms. Gabriel are spreading distortion and fear, and are doing the country a disservice by failing to make distinctions between Muslims who are potentially dangerous and those who are not.

Brian Fishman, a research fellow at both the New America Foundation in Washington, and the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy at West Point, said, “When you’ve got folks who are looking for the worst in Islam and are promoting that as the entire religion of 1.5 or 1.6 billion people, then you only empower the real extremists.”

Ms. Gabriel is only one voice in a growing circuit that includes counter-Islam speakers like Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and Walid Shoebat. What distinguishes Ms. Gabriel from her counterparts is that she has built a national grass-roots organization in the last three years that has already engaged in dozens of battles over the place of Islam in the United States. ACT! for America claims 155,000 members in 500 chapters across the country. To build her organization, Ms. Gabriel has enlisted Mr. Rodgers, who had worked behind the scenes for the Christian Coalition’s leaders, Ralph Reed and the television evangelist Pat Robertson. (Ms. Gabriel herself was once an anchor for Mr. Robertson’s Christian television network in the Middle East).

As national field director, Mr. Rodgers planted and tended Christian Coalition chapters across the country, and is now using some of the same strategies as executive director of ACT! Among those tactics is creating “nonpartisan voter guides” that rank candidates’ responses and votes on issues important to the group.

Just as with the Christian Coalition’s voter guides, the candidates whose positions most often align with ACT!’s are usually Republicans. Mr. Rodgers previously served as campaign manager for Patrick J. Buchanan’s presidential run in 1996, and as a consultant for John McCain in 2008.

Ms. Gabriel and Mr. Rodgers declined to be interviewed in person or over the telephone, but agreed to respond to questions by e-mail. They permitted interviews with only their national field director and two chapter leaders they selected, though half a dozen other interviews were conducted with chapter leaders before they were told not to talk.

Ms. Gabriel says she is motivated not by fear or hatred of Islam, but by her love for her adopted country.

“I lost Lebanon, my country of birth, to radical Islam,” she wrote. “I do not want to lose my adopted country America.”

She insists that she is singling out only “radical Islam” or Muslim “extremists” — not the vast majority of Muslims or their faith. And yet, in her speeches and her two books, she leaves the opposite impression. She puts it most simply in the 2008 introduction to her first book, “Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America.”

“In the Muslim world, extreme is mainstream,” she wrote. She said that there is a “cancer” infecting the world, and said: “The cancer is called Islamofacism. This ideology is coming out of one source: The Koran.”

In what ACT! is calling “Open a Koran” day this September, the group plans to put up 750 tables in front of post offices, libraries, churches and synagogues and hand out leaflets selectively highlighting verses that appear to advocate violence, slavery and subjugation of women.

In the last year, the group played a key role in passing a constitutional amendment in Oklahoma banning the use of Shariah, a body of Islamic law derived from the Koran and from the Muslim prophet Muhammad’s teachings, sayings and acts. Most Muslims draw selectively on its tenets — in the same way that people of other faiths pick and choose from their sacred texts.

But group members and their allies have succeeded in popularizing the notion that American Muslims are just biding their time until they gain the power to revoke the Constitution and impose Shariah law in the United States.

“We can’t let Shariah law take hold,” said Susan Watts, who leads a large chapter in Houston.

ACT! members are challenging high school textbooks and college courses that they deem too sympathetic to Islam. A group leader in Eugene, Ore., signed up to teach a community college course on Islam, but it was canceled when a Muslim group exposed his blog postings denouncing Islam and denying the scope of the Holocaust.

A chapter in Colorado recently featured a guest speaker on “How to minister to Muslims,” and “Conversion success stories.” Mr. Rodgers said in a written response that ACT! does not encourage such activities.

Ms. Gabriel’s approach and her power appear rooted in her childhood trauma in the civil war in southern Lebanon. The war was a chaotic stew in which ever-shifting alliances of clan-based militias made up of Christian, Shiite, Sunni, Palestinian and Druse made war on one other, often with the backing of other countries. But in the rendering Ms. Gabriel shares with her American audiences, it was black and white. As her father explained to her, “The Muslims bombed us because we are Christians. They want us dead because they hate us.” (The refrain became the title of her first book.)

She moved to Israel in her early 20s to work for Middle East Television. Ms. Gabriel often mentions in lectures that she was an anchor for the network, but does not reveal that Middle East Television was then run by Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network to spread his politically conservative, Pentecostal faith in the Middle East.

On air as a reporter, Ms. Gabriel used the name Nour Saman. She married an American co-worker and in 1989 moved to the United States. They started a film and television production company, which says it has produced programs on terrorism for “Good Morning America” and “Primetime.”

She said she uses a pseudonym, voted on by her organization’s board, because she has received death threats.

Ms. Gabriel has given hundreds of lectures, including to the Heritage Foundation and the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Va. Her salary from two organizations she founded, American Congress for Truth and ACT! for America, was $178,411 in 2009. And the group’s combined income was $1.6 million.

In Fort Worth, Ms. Gabriel spent nearly an hour after her speech signing books and posing for pictures with gushing fans.

“She really opened up my eyes about Islam,” said Natalie Rix Cresson, a composer, clutching a signed copy of Ms. Gabriel’s book. “I didn’t realize it was so infiltrated in the schools, everywhere.”

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Lebanon.

    Drawing U.S. Crowds With Anti-Islam Message, NYT, 7.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/us/08gabriel.html

Flailing After Muslims

March 7, 2011
The New York Times
By BOB HERBERT

It has often been the case in America that specific religions, races and ethnic groups have been singled out for discrimination, demonization, incarceration and worse. But there have always been people willing to stand up boldly and courageously against such injustice. Their efforts are needed again now.

Representative Peter King, a Republican from Long Island, appears to harbor a fierce unhappiness with the Muslim community in the United States. As the chairman of the powerful Homeland Security Committee, Congressman King has all the clout he needs to act on his displeasure. On Thursday, he plans to open the first of a series of committee hearings into the threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism and the bogus allegation that American Muslims have failed to cooperate with law enforcement efforts to foil terrorist plots.

“There is a real threat to the country from the Muslim community,” he said, “and the only way to get to the bottom of it is to investigate what is happening.”

That kind of sweeping statement from a major government official about a religious minority — soon to be backed up by the intimidating aura of Congressional hearings — can only serve to further demonize a group of Americans already being pummeled by bigotry and vicious stereotyping.

Rabbi Marc Schneier, the president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, was among some 500 people at a rally in Times Square on Sunday that was called to protest Mr. King’s hearings. “To single out Muslim-Americans as the source of homegrown terrorism,” he said, “and not examine all forms of violence motivated by extremist belief — that, my friends, is an injustice.”

To focus an investigative spotlight on an entire religious or ethnic community is a violation of everything America is supposed to stand for. But that does not seem to concern Mr. King. “The threat is coming from the Muslim community,” he told The Times. “The radicalization attempts are directed at the Muslim community. Why should I investigate other communities?”

The great danger of these hearings, in addition to undermining fundamental American values, is that for no good reason — nearly a decade after the terrible attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — they will intensify the already overheated anti-Muslim feeling in the U.S. There is nothing wrong with the relentless investigation of terrorism. That’s essential. But that is not the same as singling out, stereotyping and harassing an entire community.

On Monday, I spoke by phone with Colleen Kelly, a nurse practitioner from the Bronx whose brother, William Kelly Jr., was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center. She belongs to a group called September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows and is opposed to Mr. King’s hearings. “I was trying to figure out why he’s doing this,” she said, “and I haven’t come up with a good answer.”

She recalled how people were stigmatized in the early years of the AIDS epidemic and the way that stigmas become the focus of attention and get in the way of the efforts really needed to avert tragedy.

Mr. King’s contention that Muslims are not cooperating with law enforcement is just wrong. According to the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, an independent research group affiliated with Duke University and the University of North Carolina, 48 of the 120 Muslims suspected of plotting terror attacks in the U.S. since Sept. 11, 2001, were turned in by fellow Muslims. In some cases, they were turned in by parents or other relatives.

What are we doing? Do we want to demonize innocent people and trample on America’s precious freedom of religion? Or do we want to stop terrorism? There is no real rhyme or reason to Congressman King’s incoherent flailing after Muslims. Witch hunts, after all, are about seeing what kind of ugliness might fortuitously turn up.

Mr. King was able to concoct the anti-Muslim ugliness in his 2004 novel, “Vale of Tears,” in which New York is hit yet again by terrorists and, surprise, the hero of the piece is a congressman from Long Island. But this is real life, and the congressman’s fantasies should not apply.

America should be better than this. We’ve had all the requisite lessons: Joe McCarthy, the House Un-American Activities Committee, the demonization of blacks and Jews, the internment of Japanese-Americans, and on and on and on. It’s such a tired and ugly refrain.

When I asked Colleen Kelly why she spoke up, she said it was because of her great love for her country. “I love being an American, and I really try to be thankful for all the gifts that come with that,” she said. But with gifts and privileges come responsibilities. The planned hearings into the Muslim community struck Ms. Kelly as something too far outside “the basic principles that I knew and felt to be important to me as a citizen of this country.”

    Flailing After Muslims, NYT, 7.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/opinion/08herbert.html

Peter King’s Obsession

March 7, 2011
The New York Times

Not much spreads fear and bigotry faster than a public official intent on playing the politics of division. On Thursday, Representative Peter King, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, is scheduled to open a series of hearings that seem designed to stoke fear against American Muslims. His refusal to tone down the provocation despite widespread opposition suggests that he is far more interested in exploiting ethnic misunderstanding than in trying to heal it.

Mr. King, a Republican whose district is centered in Nassau County on Long Island, says the hearings will examine the supposed radicalization of American Muslims. Al Qaeda is aggressively recruiting Muslims in this country, he says. He wants to investigate the terror group’s methods and what he claims is the eagerness of many young American Muslims to embrace it.

Notice that the hearing is solely about Muslims. It might be perfectly legitimate for the Homeland Security Committee to investigate violent radicalism in America among a wide variety of groups, but that doesn’t seem to be Mr. King’s real interest.

Instead, he is focusing on one group that appears to have obsessed him since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, resulting in slanders and misstatements that might have earned him a rebuke from his colleagues had they been about any other group. More than 80 percent of the mosques in America are run by extremists, he has said, never citing real evidence. Too many American Muslims are sympathetic to radical Islam, he said.

Most pernicious, he has claimed that American Muslims have generally refused to cooperate with law enforcement agencies on terrorism cases. He has cited no evidence for this, either, but a study issued last month by Duke University and the University of North Carolina found just the opposite. The American Muslim community has been the single largest source of tips that have brought terror suspects to the attention of authorities, the study found. (It also found that the number of American Muslims found or suspected to be part of terror operations dropped substantially in 2010.)

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights has written to Mr. King pleading with him to postpone or reframe the hearings. It said his single-minded pursuit “will inevitably stoke anti-Muslim sentiment and increase suspicion and fear.” Terrorists should be identified by behavior, not religion or ethnicity, the group said. All of that has been dismissed as political correctness by Mr. King. Fortunately, he has not seemed to gather much enthusiasm from his fellow Republican leaders.

Denis McDonough, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, aimed a speech directly at Mr. King on Sunday when he said at a Virginia mosque that this nation does not practice guilt by association. An unrepentant Mr. King later told The Times that there is no need to investigate any other group.

Mr. King plans to call as witnesses two family members of Muslims linked to terror groups, as well as Zuhdi Jasser, the leader of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, a Republican who has echoed Mr. King’s suspicions. Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota who is one of two Muslims in Congress, is also scheduled to testify, though he opposes the hearings.

Democrats on the committee plan to call Leroy Baca, the sheriff of Los Angeles County, who has often said that American Muslims have been crucial in helping terrorism investigations. But that involves empirical facts and expert observation. Nothing could be further from the real purpose of Mr. King’s show trial.

    Peter King’s Obsession, NYT, 7.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/opinion/08tue1.html

White House Seeks to Allay Muslims’ Fears on Terror Hearings

March 6, 2011
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

STERLING, Va. — As a Republican congressman prepares to open hearings on the threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser visited a mosque here on Sunday to reassure Muslims that “we will not stigmatize or demonize entire communities because of the actions of a few.”

The White House billed the speech by the adviser, Denis McDonough, as a chance for the administration to lay out its strategy for preventing violent extremism. But the timing was no accident; Mr. McDonough was in effect an emissary from the White House to pre-empt Representative Peter King of New York, the Homeland Security Committee chairman, who has promised a series of hearings beginning Thursday on the radicalization of American Muslims.

“In the United States of America, we don’t practice guilt by association,” Mr. McDonough told an interfaith but mostly Muslim audience of about 200 here at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, known as the Adams Center. “And let’s remember that just as violence and extremism are not unique to any one faith, the responsibility to oppose ignorance and violence rests with us all.”

Mr. McDonough made no explicit mention of the hearings or Mr. King. But his speech came on a day when the back-and-forth over Mr. King’s plans crescendoed, from the airwaves of Washington’s Sunday morning talk shows to the streets of Manhattan to this northern Virginia suburb, an area packed with Muslim professionals, many of whom are extremely wary of Mr. King and his plans.

In Washington, Mr. King, who represents parts of Long Island, faced off on CNN with Representative Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat and one of only two Muslims in Congress. Mr. Ellison said he would testify at Mr. King’s hearing on Thursday despite his deep conviction that it was wrong for Congress to investigate a particular religious minority.

In New York, 500 people demonstrated near Times Square to protest the hearings and to call on Mr. King to expand his witness list to include other groups.

“That’s absolute nonsense,” Mr. King said in a telephone interview, adding that Al Qaeda was trying to radicalize Muslims and that its effort was the leading homegrown terrorism threat.

“The threat is coming from the Muslim community,” he said, “the radicalization attempts are directed at the Muslim community. Why should I investigate other communities?”

As the Times Square demonstrators held up placards declaring “Today I am a Muslim too,” Rabbi Marc Schneier, president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, and Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam who is a co-founder of a project to develop an Islamic community center and mosque near ground zero, addressed the crowd.

“To single out Muslim Americans as the source of homegrown terrorism and not examine all forms of violence motivated by extremist belief — that, my friends, is an injustice,” Rabbi Schneier said.

Mr. King and Mr. McDonough each took pains on Sunday to say that he had no quarrel with the other. “We welcome any involvement in the issue,” Mr. McDonough said of the hearings. “It’s an important issue.”

Mr. King said that he and Mr. McDonough had spoken recently and that he did not disagree with any element of Mr. McDonough’s speech at the mosque.

For weeks, Muslims have been expressing deep anxiety over the hearings, which Mr. King has titled “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and That Community’s Response.”

He said witnesses would include Mr. Ellison; Representative Frank R. Wolf, Republican of Virginia; and Zudhi Jasser, a Phoenix physician and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. (Dr. Jasser made headlines last year when he was publicly critical of Mr. Obama’s statement supporting Muslims’ right to build a mosque and Islamic center near ground zero.)

In addition, Mr. King said on Sunday that he would call as witnesses two relatives of people who had been radicalized. He would not name them, but said that one had a nephew who was murdered and that the other had a son who committed “horrible crimes.” He said they would detail “how this happened, what it did to their families, what it did to the community, how this originated in mosques.”

The congressman said additional hearings — he is not certain how many there will be — would most likely focus on topics like radicalization in prisons and the flow of foreign money into mosques. But because Mr. King has not been specific about his plans, rumors are swirling.

“Everybody I talk to worries about it,” Mr. Ellison said during his Sunday morning appearance with Mr. King on “State of the Union” on CNN. He added, “It’s absolutely the right thing to do for the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee to investigate radicalization, but to say we’re going to investigate a — a religious minority and a particular one, I think, is the wrong course of action to take.”

Yet for many Muslim leaders, the initial outrage and fear is giving way to a determination to participate in the testimony and shape the outcome. Rizwan Jaka, a board member of the Adams Center here, said leaders of mainstream mosques were eager to testify about their cooperation with law enforcement.

“We’re ready to dialogue,” Mr. Jaka said. “We feel that we want to make sure we are part of the solution.”

Many counterterrorism officials say maintaining the trust of American Muslims is critical to attracting tips and foiling plots.

Republicans have accused the Obama administration of ignoring the Islamic nature of terrorism by preferring terms like “violent extremism,” a term that Mr. McDonough used frequently in Sunday’s speech.

“We have a choice,” Mr. McDonough said. “We can choose to send a message to certain Americans that they are somehow ‘less American’ because of their faith or how they look.”

“If we make that choice,” he added, “we risk feeding the very feelings of disenchantment that may push some members of that community to violent extremism.”

Mr. Obama has said from the outset of his presidency that he wants to reach out to Muslims; during a major speech in Cairo in June 2009, he called for a “new beginning” with the Muslim world. But the decision to weigh in at this moment — days before Mr. King’s hearings — is a tricky one for a president. Many Americans erroneously believe that Mr. Obama is Muslim (he is Christian), and he seems to generate controversy whenever he dips into such waters, as with the Manhattan mosque last year.

Mr. Jaka, of the Adams Center, said the White House had asked whether Mr. McDonough could come to deliver the administration’s message. Sunday’s event, in a brightly lighted gymnasium, was rife with interfaith symbolism; it began with a color guard ceremony led by Boy Scouts, followed by the Pledge of Allegiance and a reading from the Koran.

Mr. McDonough opened his speech by talking about his own Roman Catholic roots; his parents had 11 children, one of whom is now a priest.

“The bottom line is this,” Mr. McDonough said. “When it comes to preventing violent extremism and terrorism in the United States, Muslim Americans are not part of the problem, you’re part of the solution.”

Joseph Berger contributed reporting from New York.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 7, 2011

An earlier version of this article mistakenly referred to Representative Keith Ellison as the only Muslim in Congress. There is another, Representative André Carson of Indiana.

    White House Seeks to Allay Muslims’ Fears on Terror Hearings, NYT, 6.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/us/politics/07muslim.html

Muslims, supporters protest Congressional hearing

NEW YORK | Sun Mar 6, 2011
6:53pm EST
Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Muslims, activists and supporters demonstrated in Times Square on Sunday to protest a Congressional hearing on radicalization of U.S. Muslims.

Holding placards that read "Today I am a Muslim, too," a few hundred gathered at the interfaith protest, decrying what they said was the bigotry and ignorance behind anti-Muslim sentiments in the United States.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, until recently the leader of the controversial plan to build a mosque and cultural center near the former World Trade Center site, said he was concerned this week's scheduled hearing by Representative Peter King on radicalization of U.S. Muslims would only alienate them.

"My concern is the perception among the youth here that Muslims are under attack ... by their own government.

"This helps radicalize people, and we need to reverse that cycle of radicalization," Rauf said.

King, a New York Republican who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, said on CNN Sunday that while "the overwhelming majority of Muslims are outstanding Americans ... there is an effort to radicalize efforts within the Muslim community."

The protest was organized by an interfaith coalition of community and political leaders and activists, including priests, rabbis and imams.

Hip hop mogul Russell Simmons, who heads the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, also attended.

"The whole premise of the hearings is absolutely discriminatory" and would only foster fear," Simmons said.

Organizers said inclement weather likely kept attendance down.

A small group of counter-protesters from the Liberty Alliance gathered a few blocks away, while New York City Councilman Daniel Dromm earlier hosted a group opposing King's hearings.

No incidents were reported at either gathering, police said.

(Reporting by Chris Michaud; Editing by Jerry Norton)

    Muslims, supporters protest Congressional hearing, R, 6.3.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/06/us-muslim-protest-idUSTRE7252VY20110306

Jews in U.S. Are Wary In Happiness For Egypt

February 13, 2011
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Across the political spectrum, American Jewish leaders say that when they consider the future in Egypt and what it means for Israel, it is as if they are standing on a shaky tightrope stretched between poles of hope and dread.

In many ways, the collapse of the 30-year regime of President Hosni Mubarak is being welcomed by the leaders of American Jewish organizations as a historic moment worthy of rejoicing. After all, they said in interviews on Sunday, they can identify with the rebellion in Egypt because thousands of years ago the Jewish people rebelled against enslavement by an Egyptian pharaoh.

“I can’t help but look at them and see people rising up and saying, We want to be free,” said Rabbi Steve Gutow, president and chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an umbrella organization that represents 140 national and local Jewish groups.

“Certainly there are things to worry about,” Rabbi Gutow said, “but this has to be a moment to be supported and celebrated and looked at with a sense of awe.” But he, like other leaders, said he was watching warily to see who takes power in Egypt, whether the new government respects human rights, how it relates to the United States and whether it will preserve the longstanding peace treaty with Israel.

American Jewish leaders welcomed reassurances by Egypt’s military on Sunday that the country intends to honor the treaty with Israel. Egypt has maintained what many policy makers called a “cold peace” with Israel since the treaty was signed in 1979 — a relationship that was not overly friendly, but at least allowed the two countries to avoid open aggression.

“We are very much in wait-and-see mode,” said Nathan J. Diament, director of public policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. “It’s encouraging, but it’s hard to assess what the value of that statement is, not knowing who’s saying it and what their authority is.”

Several leaders said they were skeptical about the outcome in Egypt because of precedents in Iran and Gaza. The overthrow of the shah in Iran ushered in an extremist Islamic regime. In Gaza, open elections in 2006 encouraged by the American government resulted in victory for Hamas, which Washington classifies as a terrorist organization.

David A. Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, a centrist policy group, said, “You could end up not with Jeffersonian democracy, but with Hezbollah, Hamas and the likes of the Iranian regime.”

He said he would be watching how Egypt’s new government treats the minority Christian Copts and the tiny remnant of Egypt’s Jews, a once vibrant community that now numbers no more than 150 people.

“There should be hope,” said Mr. Harris, who has traveled to Egypt many times and is in touch with some government and nongovernment officials there. “It’s an extraordinary moment. But hope is not a policy.”

Some Jewish groups, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, a prominent pro-Israel lobbying group, favor the Obama administration’s review of the substantial military aid the United States gives to Egypt, said Josh Block, a partner in the Davis-Block consulting firm and a former spokesman for Aipac.

“It’s obviously appropriate for the administration to review America’s aid to Egypt,” Mr. Block said. “There are key factors to look at,” he said, including whether Egypt continues to support peace with Israel and sanctions against Iran; helps in the pursuit of terrorists; and allows international traffic, including Israeli and American transit, through the Suez canal.

Jeremy Ben-Ami is the president of J Street, a liberal lobbying group founded three years ago as a counterpoint to Aipac. He said he did not agree with policy makers who argue that now is not the time to push for a settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians because Egypt and Jordan could eventually abandon their truces with Israel.

Mr. Ben-Ami said that J Street would hold its conference in Washington in two weeks and expected to draw about 2,000 people. “We will give the president a friendly push to act now, to get out ahead of events,” he said.

“There are many of us in the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement,” Mr. Ben-Ami said, “who see this as a critical moment to recognize that just as Mubarak and the autocrats of the Arab world are unsustainable, so, too, is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as it stands now. The occupation of the West Bank, the current status quo, are unsustainable. Everybody knows it can’t hold.”

    Jews in U.S. Are Wary In Happiness For Egypt, NYT, 13.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/us/14react.html

Los Angeles Archdiocese to Dismiss Priest Over Admission of Molesting Girl

February 12, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

LOS ANGELES — A priest accused of having a long-term sexual relationship with a teenage girl, writing her decades later to ask for forgiveness and declare that he was a sex addict, is being removed from ministry in a parish, and the diocese’s vicar of clergy has also resigned, officials of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles said Friday.

The priest, the Rev. Martin P. O’Loghlen, was once a leader in his religious order and was appointed to an archdiocesan sexual abuse advisory board, although officials at both the order and the archdiocese knew at the time about his admission of sexual abuse and addiction. He served on the board, which was meant to review accusations of abuse by priests, for at least two years in the late 1990s, according to church and legal documents.

Tod Tamberg, a spokesman for the archdiocese, said church officials planned to announce the removal of Father O’Loghlen from his current parish in San Dimas on Sunday. Church officials decided to act after being contacted by a reporter about the priest’s history of sexual abuse.

Mr. Tamberg said in a statement that officials of the priest’s religious order assured the archdiocese in 2009 that Father O’Loghlen was fit for the ministry. He said that the archdiocese’s vicar for clergy, Msgr. Michael Meyers, resigned on Friday. Monsignor Meyers had been in the position since July 2009 and it was his job to grant clergymen what are known as faculties to serve as priests.

The Los Angeles Archdiocese, led by Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, has been rocked by sexual abuse accusations for years. In 2007, it agreed to a $660 million settlement with 508 people who said that priests had sexually abused them as children.

“The failure to fully check records before granting priestly faculties is a violation of archdiocesan policy,” Cardinal Mahony said in a statement. “We owe it to victims and to all our faithful to make absolutely certain that all of our child protection policies and procedures are scrupulously followed.”

Father O’Loghlen had sex on several occasions with Julie Malcolm in the 1960s while she was a student at Bishop Amat High School in nearby La Puente, Ms. Malcolm said. Nearly three decades after the abuse ended, Father O’Loghlen tried to reach Ms. Malcolm, who was then living in Phoenix.

After receiving several phone messages from Father O’Loghlen, Ms. Malcolm filed a complaint with the Diocese of Phoenix and later filed a lawsuit against the priest and his religious order, the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. In 1999, she settled the lawsuit for $100,000, Ms. Malcolm said.

“I am deeply sorry for our becoming involved and readily accept the fact that I was the responsible one in our relationship,” Father O’Loghlen said in a five-page handwritten letter dated June 23, 1996. “Clearly, I was the one in power position. If I had not made a move nothing would have happened between us. I sincerely hope that there were some moments of joy for you in our relationship, but ultimately it caused you much significant pain.”

Father O’Loghlen goes on to say that since Ms. Malcolm filed her complaint, he has undergone psychological evaluations, which determined that he is “not a pedophile” or a “sexual predator.” But, he adds, “I do have a sexual addiction.”

Copies of the letter and other documents were provided to The New York Times by Joelle Casteix, the southwest director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, who had received them from Ms. Malcolm.

Father O’Loghlen, 74, was ordained in Ireland in 1961. He began teaching at Bishop Amat later that year and remained there for six years. In 1967, around the same time of his involvement with Ms. Malcolm, he moved to Damien High School, a boys’ school nearby, where he was vice principal and principal for more than 10 years.

In 1995, Father O’Loghlen became the provincial leader in the western region for the religious order of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. After he contacted Ms. Malcolm in 1996, leaders in the Los Angeles Archdiocese and officials with the religious order based in Rome exchanged several letters.

According to copies of those letters, Father O’Loghlen admitted to molesting Ms. Malcolm and told his superiors that he was undergoing counseling. Msgr. Richard Loomis, then the vicar for clergy in Los Angeles, told officials in Rome that he would not remove Father O’Loghlen from the archdiocese but that his service should be limited.

Several months later, Monsignor Loomis removed all restrictions on Father O’Loghlen and, in a letter, thanked him for agreeing to serve on the sexual abuse advisory board. He writes that both he and Cardinal Mahony “feel that you will bring valuable insights to the work of the board.”

In a deposition in 1999, Father O’Loghlen said he had attended some of the review board’s meetings. Mr. Tamberg said it was not clear why Father O’Loghlen was appointed to the board. Father O’Loghlen remained the provincial for the religious order until 2001, according to the church records. Then, for five years beginning in 2003, he was a pastor in the Philippines.

Mr. Tamberg said the provincial, the Rev. Donal McCarthy, who now oversees the religious order in California, wrote to the archdiocese in March 2009, asking that Father O’Loghlen serve as a priest in Los Angeles. The letter included assurances that Father O’Loghlen “manifested no behavioral problems in the past that would indicate that he might deal with minors in an inappropriate manner” and had “never been involved in an incident or exhibited behavior which called into question his fitness or suitability for priestly ministry due to alcohol, substance abuse, sexual misconduct, financial irregularities, or other causes.”

He was appointed as an associate pastor in the San Dimas church four months later. Father O’Loghlen also worked at the parish’s elementary school.

The archdiocese’s Vicar for Clergy’s Office “did not fully consult” other records of the priest’s “previous assignments in the archdiocese, which would have indicated that he admitted to having had a sexual relationship with a female minor,” Mr. Tamberg said.

American bishops adopted a “zero tolerance” policy in 2002 that bars from the ministry any priest who has abused minors. Mr. Tamberg said that the archdiocese had not received any complaints about Father O’Loghlen in his time at the San Dimas church. He said officials would review records to verify that there had been no other errors.

Father McCarthy said he could not comment. “I can’t say anything about the placement of a priest, that’s our policy,” he said.

John C. Manly, a lawyer for victims in dozens of sexual abuse cases, said Father O’Loghlen’s case was egregious because of his time on the sexual review board. “He was personally selected for a board that is meant to protect people from priests like him,” Mr. Manly said.

Ms. Malcolm, now 61, said in an interview that Father O’Loghlen had been her debate coach at Bishop Amat High School and that he was particularly encouraging. Sometime around the time she was 16 years old, she said, Father O’Loghlen, who was around 29 at the time, met her at a home where she was baby-sitting. After a few minutes of sitting on the couch talking, Ms. Malcolm said, Father O’Loghlen kissed her. They began having sex more than a year later, Ms. Malcolm said.

“I was so naïve, I thought this was some kind of special treatment,” Ms. Malcolm said. “We would meet somewhere like it was this clandestine romance. We would periodically break up, but he would call and apologize and ask to see me again and I always agreed.”

She said she never considered filing a complaint until Father O’Loghlen tried to contact her.

    Los Angeles Archdiocese to Dismiss Priest Over Admission of Molesting Girl, NYT, 12.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/us/12abuse.html

Alan Slifka, Who Promoted Arab-Jewish Ties, Is Dead at 81

February 9, 2011
The New York Times
By DENNIS HEVESI

Alan B. Slifka, a New York investment manager who used his fortune to promote harmony among Israeli Arabs and Jews and to give the Big Apple Circus its start, died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 81 and also had a home in Manhattan.

The cause was cancer, his wife, Riva Ritvo-Slifka, said.

Mr. Slifka already had more than 30 years’ experience in the financial industry in 1981 when, with initial assets of $50 million, he started an investment management company bearing his name. Known today as Halcyon Asset Management, the company manages more than $10 billion.

Seven years after starting the company, Mr. Slifka visited friends in Israel and could not understand why so few of them were friendly with Arab-Israeli citizens.

“He toured Arab villages,” Ms. Ritvo-Slifka said, “and was troubled at the discrepancies in how they lived.”

With $500,000, Mr. Slifka started the Abraham Fund Initiatives, named for the biblical patriarch of both Arabs and Jews. Since its establishment, the fund has provided more than $10 million in grants for a range of educational programs to dispel stereotypes and to foster Jewish-Arab cooperation in health, social services and women’s rights. Among many projects, it has supported an Arab-Jewish theater workshop, touring chamber music quartets and a karate program for Jewish and Arab youngsters.

“We can be viewed as a coexistence mutual fund,” Mr. Slifka once said.

An urge to give something to his hometown, New York, spurred Mr. Slifka to become the founding chairman of the Big Apple Circus in 1977. It was another way to satisfy his philanthropic inclination. The renowned one-ring circus, with its custom-made French tent in Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center, is a nonprofit organization that supports community programs, health institutions and charities. Mr. Slifka gave more than $10 million to the organization over the years.

As Paul Binder, the founder and artistic director of the Big Apple Circus, said in 1984: “Our first supporter, Alan Slifka, said he’d been wanting to give New York a gift, like a statue or something. Instead, he decided to give New York the Big Apple Circus.”

Mr. Slifka also donated more than $20 million to the Abraham Joshua Heschel School in Manhattan, and in 2003 gave $5 million to Brandeis University to create a master’s degree program in coexistence studies.

Mr. Slifka liked to joke that he had learned about coexistence before birth. Born in Manhattan on Oct. 13, 1929, Alan Bruce Slifka was the twin son of Joseph and Sylvia Slifka. His father owned textile and real estate businesses. Besides his wife and his twin sister, Barbara Slifka, he is survived by three sons, Michael, Randolph and David; two stepdaughters, Torrie and Skye Ritvo; a stepson, Max Ritvo; and three grandchildren.

After graduating from Yale in 1951, Mr. Slifka earned a master’s in business administration at Harvard in 1953. He then joined the financial firm L. F. Rothschild & Company, where he worked as a securities analyst for 32 years, rising to partner before leaving to start his own company.

Mr. Slifka found great satisfaction in the annual United Nations Night at the Big Apple Circus.

“People from completely different backgrounds and cultures sit around the ring and laugh at the same time, worry at the same time and applaud at the same time,” he said in a Harvard Business School profile in 2001. “The ambassador of Israel once told me, ‘I come to this event every year, and it gives me hope for the world.’ ”

    Alan Slifka, Who Promoted Arab-Jewish Ties, Is Dead at 81, NYT, 9.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/nyregion/10slifka.html

Delaware Diocese Settles With Victims of Abuse

February 3, 2011
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Wilmington, Del., agreed late Wednesday to settle for $77 million with 146 victims of sexual abuse by clergy members and to release internal church documents about how the church hierarchy handled the allegations of abuse.

The sticking point in the negotiations was not the money, but the documents, according to those involved. The victims insisted that the diocese release the documents uncensored, and make them publicly available on the Internet.

The committee and the diocese finally agreed that an arbitrator would settle disagreements over redactions before making the documents public.

The Wilmington diocese filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2009 in response to the abuse lawsuits, seeking a consolidated settlement. The monetary award is less than the settlements in Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, Calif., Boston and Covington, Ky., but includes more assurances for the victims that the promised documents will actually be released.

Delaware and California passed laws in recent years that allowed people alleging abuse to file lawsuits after the statute of limitations had expired. The Catholic Church in several other states, including New York, has led the fight against similar “window legislation.”

In Wilmington on Thursday, both sides said they were pleased with the agreement, which included a list of nonmonetary provisions.

The diocese agreed to have priests sign a statement every five years affirming that they are not aware of undisclosed abuse of minors. And the diocese will place plaques in its schools saying that abuse of children “shall not be tolerated.”

Matt Conaty, an abuse victim who served as co-chair of the creditors committee that negotiated on behalf of those abused, said, “We were seeking some measure of monetary justice, but that was secondary to the concrete child protection measures and the transparency.”

Mr. Conaty, who is 41 and works in newspaper marketing, said of the two principals accused of abuse at his old Catholic high school: “Would this plaque have stopped them? I doubt it, because I think they were sick and I think they were criminals. But there were teachers who knew there were red flags, and could have done more.”

    Delaware Diocese Settles With Victims of Abuse, NYT, 3.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/us/04priest.html