Today on my drive back to NY from PA I listened to some fine journalism about religion and politics, and it highlighted everything that is wrong with our coverage of Israel/Palestine.
The piece I listened to was an hour’s conversation on Radio Times (WHYY Philadelphia) about the pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church. I don’t follow this issue closely, but let me lay out the roles that the different players assumed during the long conversation:
–The two experts on the show were both Catholic writers. Their attitude can be summed up: They want this scandal to come out and be addressed, but they don’t want it to hurt the church. At one point one of the writers actually said that Catholic writers have an obligation to respect their “corporate identity” and not to behave like investigative reporters, but to respect the good things that the church does, and to get the full context.
–The host was Marty Moss-Coane. She was extremely professional, but assertive, skeptical of the writers’ piety: she took up the side of our next two players. And I would note that (according to that link) Moss-Coane is not a Catholic, is married to a Jewish guy and is a former lefty.
–Offstage was the New York Times, which has recently done investigative pieces suggesting that Pope Benedict when a bishop or cardinal in Munich was informed of a pedophilia case in the ’80s and played some role in its being covered up. The two Catholic writers on this show kept dissing the New York Times coverage, saying that it was zealous and investigative; and in other ways they echoed the Pope’s recent warning that Catholics should not be “intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion.”
–The final players in the drama were the listeners. Several called. They were all outraged at the Catholic church. One said that life as an altar boy had hurt him in ways he did not want to talk about but is still coming to terms with. Another spoke of the culture of coverup. Another man said that celibacy was the issue.
Now let me get to the central dynamic of the show. The Catholic writers were performing damage control; still, Moss-Coane bored in on them, and whenever a caller went further than she had gone, for instance, about sexuality and celibacy, she promptly echoed the caller’s point. She stood up for the Times coverage. She asked, wisely, Is the church treating a crime as a sin? She said, What signal does it send people when a former bishop who played an active role in covering up a sex scandal is awarded a sinecure? (The writers said, Well it’s a giant step down for the bishop…) She said, What about what that caller just asked, How is this affecting congregations?
And to every push by Moss-Coane, the Catholic writers pushed back and defended the church. And they would: because they love the church, they see it as a force for good.
Why do I think this was fine journalism? Because the host was behaving as a good broadcast journalist with smart questions, the New York Times was behaving like a good investigative zealous newspaper when it smells a disgraceful scandal, and the listeners were sharp and engaged, pushing the story.
Now I hate the pedophilia scandal, I think it’s a good reason for the Catholic hierarchy to collapse, for congregations to implode. I think it’s wrapped up in celibacy. When the Catholic writers protested that the memo the Times uncovered from the ’80s (describing slap-on-the-knuckles discipline in a pedophilia case, and the future Pope was cc’d) doesn’t implicate the Pope, because he was just part of a “culture,” I think, Don’t b.s. me. This was not a routine memo. And isn’t there a problem with an institution that wakes up 30 years after the fact to the idea that it’s not good to damage children?
The significance of this piece for me was wholly about the journalism of the Israel lobby. The central problem in that story is that the roles of the Journalist and the New York Times are being played by the Catholic writers! The very parochial attitudes that Moss-Coane found so distasteful in the Catholic story are exhibited by countless journalists when it comes to Israel. Because they are Jews who have an investment in the emotional goodness of the Jewish state. Yes, people like Dan Schorr and Wolf Blitzer and Tom Friedman and Jeffrey Goldberg and Ethan Bronner, but also a lot of fellow travelers whose investment is not as well known to me. And they all get away with their piety all the time!
In the Israel lobby case we have an allegation now several years old that is way more serious than the Catholic scandal: the allegation that the forcible conflation of American and Israeli interests is damaging our country’s reputation. It is a form of corruption as deep and “cultural” as the Catholic mess Moss-Coane is investigating, but this time the broker-journalists are implicated in the culture. The former executive editor of the New York Times, Max Frankel, is vetting editorials to protect the Jewish state; my old newspaper the New York Observer is telling me to take a hike because I want to write about the Israel lobby; the Atlantic is killing Walt and Mearsheimer; Wolf Blitzer and Dan Senor used to work for the lobby and are now all over cable; and Jeff Goldberg used to be an Israeli soldier and is interviewed on Meet the Press by David Gregory, who is studying Hebrew. Ethan Bronner’s son goes into the IDF, and Bronner is the lead reporter for the New York Times???!! And on it goes, it never stops.
I am saying that all the f—ing excuses that the two Catholic writers made for their beloved church are being made all the time for the Jewish state by our journalists; it is in the culture of our journalism; and meanwhile there is no Moss-Coane to jump on them and keep them honest. I wonder if she’s ever covered the Israel/Palestine situation with half the honesty she covered the Catholic scandal, let alone the question of how it is corrupting our politics. I bet she hasn’t. Has she ever had on Palestinians to talk about the separate roadways in the West Bank, and then asked, why Americans are supporting Jim Crow conditions?
Well you get the point. And again, the New York Times, which should be printing the Pentagon Papers of the Iraq war, which should be interrogating neoconservatives about their crazy theory that invading Baghdad would take the Arabs’ minds off Israel/Palestine, which should be asking John Mearsheimer what his evidence is that oil had nothing to do with the disastrous decision to go to war, which should be telling readers why Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban give so much money to the political parties, and asking whether Adelson’s $300,000 gift in 2000 had anything to do with the hiring of Douglas “One-Jerusalem” Feith to a big job at the Pentagon where he would pass cooked data to Congress– the Times is doing no investigative journalism about the lobby at all. (In fact the best investigative work is being done by Grant Smith at IRMEP; and he’s marginalized…).
And now we have General Petraeus saying that the special relationship is hurting us; and Obama is trying to take Netanyahu on; and still these powerful men are getting no goddamn cover from the mainstream press in the form of investigative journalism that arouses the public about the abuses. If I were the Catholic church, I’d be mad.
Phil,
You answer your own questions in this piece as you write it. My late uncle talking about the Jewish Lobby in the late 1970s used to tell me that it practiced the most sophisticated form of book-burning: books critical of Israel were never allowed to be published.
Now since technology and the internet have made that impossible, the lobby and its protectors use the dwindling resources of the New York Times and NBC, among others, to perpetuate this fraud of Joan Peters proportions. The good news is that less and less people use either the New York Times or NBC or CBS ( where Larry Tisch as I remembered never wanted stories critical of Israel to be aired ) and those that do are literally dying out.
Larry, your late uncle was very astute; you don’t need to burn books if they never get published or promoted.
phil quote to which i heartily agree with…. “I am saying that all the f—ing excuses that the two Catholic writers made for their beloved church are being made all the time for the Jewish state by our journalists; it is in the culture of our journalism; and meanwhile there is no Moss-Coane to jump on them and keep them honest. I wonder if she’s ever covered the Israel/Palestine situation with half the honesty she covered the Catholic scandal, let alone the question of how it is corrupting our politics. I bet she hasn’t. Has she ever had on Palestinians to talk about the separate roadways in the West Bank, and then asked why Americans are supporting Jim Crow conditions? “
Good point James. I think since Obama passed health care, he should now work on a government run option for independent news channel.
Hey, it just like the health care option, you don’t have to buy it/watch it, but it will be there to watch like all other channels.
-I guess C-span is the nearest thing we have to balanced media, since it avoids bloated commentary. thanks to Brian Lamb and Co.
-Love that guys candor. Never cracks a smile.
This was one of your best in my opinion Phil.
i agree, something has to change. thanks for another dose of reality phil.
James Bradley. I was just about to write the same thing to Phil.
Phil, great piece. And I couldn’t agree more about the Catholic Church tumbling down. That unforgiving celibacy is going to destroy it; it’s karma for what they did during the Spanish Inquisition.
on the other hand, starving, sickening, and killing the children of a nation that supported an alien guest in its land for over 200 years is not karma-worthy, it’s cause for an annual, major feast to celebrate the triumph.
I actually heard the same show, Phil. One thing to be said is that the writers were identified as Catholics and as Catholic writers. Listeners were never told we were getting an objective voice. I found their perspective as Catholics to be very interesting and it was a POV we don’t usually get. I found the “is the church treating this as a sin or as a crime” question very provocative. It made me think for a moment about how priests might very well view this behavior as a sin and respond in kind.
I wish apologists for Israel would be represented similiarly honestly, rather than being pawned off as objective journalists.
As for I/P, Hanan Ashrawi was on Radio Times last week on March 25.
link to whyy.org
Watching the Catholic abuse scandal play out in Europe, one important aspect in Ireland- home to some of the worst abuses- was that the Church overplayed its hand.
After independence from the UK, the Catholic Church in Ireland was given untrammeled power and exemption from criticism- from a press veto under the Archbishop of Dublin in the long postwar period to a self-imposed culture of silence wherein journalists felt unable to take on the clerical establishment. But history moves on… with growing EU-funded prosperity and parallel secularisation, it swiftly became apparent that the church had overplayed its hand massively. When the end came, it came quickly- the Irish press is now the most virulently secular in Europe, and the Catholic church in Ireland had effectively destroyed itself through its actions during its long period of impunity.
In precisely the same way, perhaps future historians will say it was the Bush administration that destroyed the Zionist project. By giving Israel carte blanche to disregard world opinion, it may have unwittingly allowed it to destroy itself- in the same way that the Iraq war- contrary to Neocon assumptions- finally forced America to take heed of the Arab street and reassess Israel’s worth as a strategic partner .
As a Roman Catholic I find Phil’s and MRW’s wish to wipe the Catholic church off the map to be an existential threat to me and the institution that is a safe-haven and homeland for me and my people.
I call upon the government of the United States to organize an international campaign to sanction Phil and MRW until they change their behavior and renounce their efforts at developing weapons of mass communication.
Phil, MRW, and every person remotely identified with them should be made to suffer economic deprivation including inability to find affordable food; should be made to suffer unemployment. Phil and MRW and all their constituents should be deprived of the ability to carry on everyday financial transactions — no credit cards, no checking accounts, no ability to form capital to invest in expanded ability to deploy their vicious weapons of mass communication. They should wake up every morning wondering if today is the day the US or Israel will bomb their home, until Phil and MRW cease their existential threat to the Roman Catholic church.
Nice work Foxman.
Although as an altar boy I was never molested, and never knew a peer who was, I think Phil’s analogy is very apt, and Judy’s comment going to outing of the Catholic defenders
as Catholic Church reps, while the hasbara spielers are never identified as such, a great supplement.
Good angle to this story and I like the parallels with the Catholic reporters; well done.
Israel is like building a new Vatican center for Jews, although it’s much more corrupt and it’s never gets airtime for all the anguish it causes. But we’ll never know this through the newspapers, which have controlled the dialogue of the masses for decades.
Phil,
Very cathartic post for Catholics, such as myself, who read the newspapers and wonder why Catholic transgressions receive so much attention and criticism when the transgressions of other groups are washed over?
Why is the sexual abuse scandal framed as a Catholic phenomenon when the same percentage of Jewish rabbis and Protestant ministers sexually abuse their congregations? Why is this obvious fact never once mentioned in the same story? Why are the misdeeds of the Catholic hierarchy so thoroughly exposed when not a single word has ever been printed about how the more insular Jewish Orthodox community has protected its own predatory rabbis and silenced their victims?
In short, why is sexual abuse framed as a Catholic problem when it is a problem that plagues every known human institution? Strange, that such context is never included.
I was raised in a conservative Catholic home and belong to a conservative Parish. It is because of this upgringing that I learned to value and respect all human relationships. My Catholicism is the source of my intense social justice instinct. It is the source of my deep admiration for Jewish culture and history.
I was active in the life of the Church and had nothing but positive, enriching experiences. I was an alter boy. I also walked hundreds of miles on foot during pilgrimages with priests and seminarians. We talked philosophy, politics, science. We slept in old barns, open fields, and peasant houses. I worked in shelters, soup kitchens and hospitals with them. I heard stories of their toil in the darkest corners of society, in the trenches where the people society discards congregate. They have worked amidst crushing poverty and brutal war in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Why is this never news? Should we throw all of this out too along with the 4% of bad priests?
Justice is supposed to be blind, and yet it’s strange how the justice seekers in our papers fixate on the mistakes of the Catholic Church and on the crimes of the few without any context or sense of proportion.
Leonard Cohen was right. “Everybody knows the dice are loaded”, but it’s a damn shame that everybody plays along.
Thanks Phil, for pointing out the hypocrisy and double-standard of our media.
you make some excellent points koozie. i would never know about all the pedophilia in the orthodox community if i didn’t read failed messiah. the msm has no problem exposing the catholic church scandals but is virtually silent about the many scandals (including the very big one just breaking a couple weeks ago in israel) involving rabbis. it is a double standard for sure.
btw, i do know about the catholic community service and all the good they do, especially in rural areas.
Koozie you raise some good points. Part of the answer is that there are a number of influential Catholics that are insisting that the Vatican come clean on this problem. The united front has been broken. Rather than focus on the fact that Catholics are being singled out today, perhaps this will provide an example for people of other faiths to publicly demand transparency for the misdeeds of religious leaders. This is a process that will not necessarily occur at the same time but we can’t deny that the Catholic Church is in the spot light today.
Among some people (people who believe that group cohesion is the greatest good — if it is the right group), loyalty and its cousin patriotism are the highest virtues, the sine qua nons of social behavior. And then some moralizing folks come along and say things like, “yesh gvul” and “there is a law” and “there is a limit” and “obeying orders of a superior officer is no defense against an accusation of war crimes.”
Those Catholic Bishops were doubtless under two obligations: one (within their Catholic social system and Canon Law) to treat priests accused of sexual crimes as potential sinners; and the other, within the larger society, to report allegations of crime to police, etc.
They opted for a form of “loyalty” as did the Catholic speakers on the radio program.
And as do most USA reporters, politicians, media moghouls, Jewish Presidents of Major this and that, etc. And this “loyalty” (to Israel) protects crime and sometimes may even be itself a crime (e.g., the transmission of USA secrets or nuclear devices to Israel).
Beautiful analysis Phil. I nominate you for a big journalism prize. Columbia journalism school, here comes Phil to receive his prize. Pulitzer at least. I can’t wait. Really.
back in the early 1950s Bradley Westerfield, Dick Cheney’s most memorable prof at Yale, wrote an analysis of the power of the Jewish people from a political science perspective. He made three key points; I’ll mention 2 of them:
1. that Jews, tho small in number, wielded disproportionate power by using the US electoral system against the US: by being able to control key states, Jews could control national elections, and they knew it.
2. that no other group in the US was willing or able to organize a power strong enough to counterbalance the Jewish power elite.
At that time, the Roman Catholic church in the US came close to couterbalancing Jewish power elites, but Roman Catholicism in those years put their money and efforts into schools and — remember this: Hospitals.
Today, the sins and crimes of Roman Catholicism are magnified in order to minimize any challenge to Israel’s power elite and political dominance in the US.
Jacob Heilbrunn discussed his book, They Knew They Were Right, a kind of former insider’s view of neocons. He mentioned that he had lunch with William F Buckley, but that Buckley was not very forthcoming, not even over very good Scotch.
It’s not that difficult to imagine what must have been going through Buckley’s mind — his life’s work, National Review, was now being run by people who scorned the institution that nourished the core of his being.
Professor of Moral Theology at Marquette University (Jesuit) calls for Pope to resign.
link to consortiumnews.com
He was interviewed Monday on Dennis Bernstein KPFA Flashpoints’ for the first half hour which you should be able to listen to.
I’ve only vaguely heard of Westerfield, so I’m open to much correction. At about the same time, as I recall, Paul Blanshard was suggesting that an alliance with international Catholicism for Cold War purposes would give Catholicism undue power within the United States. Maybe the truer view in those years was that of Will Herberg in ‘Catholic, Protestant, Jew’, that for essentially humane reasons a balance was being struck that permitted genuine toleration for very different and historically antagonistic religious groups and of course genuine expression for the humane and charitable elements within those groups. The same idea seems to play a big part in the philosophy of John Rawls, with his talk of an overlapping consensus where different moralities could co-exist peaceably under an overarching commitment to human rights. But behind this pleasant picture something else lurks, a kind of permission for powerful religious groups to pursue cherished objectives with not too much external scrutiny, indeed with a convention that direct critique and opposition against any of these groups is socially excluded. Even when the supposedly overarching human rights are attacked there is an enormous tendency to look the other way. Most systems have the vices of their virtues and the religious peace, in a sense religious carve-up, described by Herberg is little different. It had great virtues in the 1950s – and still has – but its vices are becoming apparent.
What is needed is for all of us to become self-critical as well as self-assertive and to look scientifically rather than emotionally at the origins and progress of the groups to which we belong. I do tend to applaud Shlomo Sand in this regard.
One more Catholic here; and I absolutely agree…great post, Phil. It seems to me you are becoming one of America’s (few) truly great journalists. I mean that quite sincerely. Phil reminds me of William Pfaff.
My own thoughts about this are pretty simple…
It is one thing to “point out” what good things the Church does; it is entirely something else to use those good things to defend indefensible, and immoral actions by bishops and cardinals.
I personally think that if even one state had brought criminal charges against a bishop or cardinal…a lot of this covering up nonsense (which I find infuriating) would have stopped in a hurry. Why isn’t Cardinal law in a Mass state prison?
I have no doubt some of our bishops and cardinals now use “Jewish media” as more “evidence” of those “out to get Holy Mother Church”.
And last, I sometimes wonder if the endless criticism of Pius 12th silence isn’t somehow a bit Freudian (and I am not defending Pius 12th). But for a community that has so deliberately silenced thousands of its’ own critics for decades…it just seems a bit strange to me to be forever pointing out someone else’ silence (though I could be waaay off base here).
Phil: Shall we expect Israel and its cheering section to intervene to protect the Catholic Church (as they’re protecting others accused of war-crimes in US civil-suits — see: ‘A strange alliance at the Supreme Court: The pro-Israel lobby’s curious defense of an alleged Somali war criminal: A Shared Interest in Sovereign Immunity’) ON THE THEORY that lawsuits against long-ago injuries done by a faith-based institution [like Israel itself] are a threat to Israel?
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