Author: Andrew Sullivan

I kid you not:

Sources in the Prime Minister's Office said the crisis appeared to be orchestrated by the U.S. administration.

First his brother, now this from the Süddeutsche Zeitung:

“With the knowledge of the current pope, in the 80s a previously incriminated (charged with child molestation) priest was moved to Munich. There he abused more adolescents–and he continues to work today as a priest in Upper Bavaria.”

The London Times puts the news bluntly enough:

The Pope was drawn directly into the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandal last night as news emerged of his part in a decision to send a paedophile priest for therapy. The cleric went on to reoffend and was convicted of child abuse but continues to work as a priest in Upper Bavaria.

The priest was sent from Essen to Munich for therapy in 1980 when he was accused of forcing an 11-year-old boy to perform oral sex. The archdiocese confirmed that the Pope, who was then a cardinal, had approved a decision to accommodate the priest in a rectory while the therapy took place.

The priest, identified only as H, was subsequently convicted of sexually abusing minors after he was moved to pastoral work in nearby Grafing. In 1986 he was given an 18-month suspended jail sentence and fined DM 4,000 (£1,800 today). There have been no formal charges against him since.

But the victim of this abuse found out as late as 2006 that the priest

was still working with parishioners, including children.

The Vatican is claiming that Cardinal Ratzinger, as he then was, had no clue about any of this:

Mgr Gruber said that the Pope, who was made a cardinal in 1977, had not been not aware of his decision because there were 1,000 priests in the diocese at the time and he had left many decisions to lower-level officials. “The cardinal could not deal with everything,” he said. “The repeated employment of H in pastoral duties was a serious mistake … I deeply regret that this decision led to offences against youths. I apologise to all those who were harmed.” He did not indicate whether the convicted paedophile would be allowed to continue working in the church.

An American group, Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said it “boggles the mind to hear a German Catholic official claim that a credibly accused paedophile priest was reassigned to parish work without the knowledge of his boss, then-Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger”. Any expulsion of a priest from the Church, however, must go through the Vatican.

It boggles my mind too, as well as the fact that, according to his former victim, this convicted pedophile is still even working in the church around children! And why is he given anonymity as “H”?

(Video: ABC News’ Brian Ross trying to get an answer from then Cardinal Ratzinger about the rampant sexual abuse and misconduct – subsequently confirmed in great detail – about Vatican favorite Marcial Maciel.)

A single-serving blog that pours through old issues of Wired. From the mission statement:

This blog is not intended to be just a point-and-laugh central, picking apart the mistakes of the past and ridiculing those who got it wrong. You won’t have to look long for posts that do that, of course… but the main purpose of this blog is to put the past into perspective. In the fast paced world of tech, we often lure ourselves into believing that everything is different now, and old rules don’t apply. Well, quite often they do (if not always) and checking out our collective tech-past can help us get a perspective on the present.

So, will this blog tell you if the iPad is the next big thing? Or if Twitter is dead in 3 years? Nah. But hopefully it can shed some light on what similar ideas of the past worked out, which didn’t and why.

Hobart, Tasmania, 12 pm

David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow propose that the government stop prison rape:

Sexual abuse in detention is a human rights crisis in this country. Reform is urgent, and the commission makes clear how to achieve it. No one expects or wants Attorney General Holder simply to accept the commission's recommendations without question, but it is worth emphasizing that a bipartisan, government-appointed commission has already spent years developing standards to prevent prisoner rape. Its proceedings were inclusive, responsible, and exhaustive, and the standards themselves products of compromise among experts, reflecting the best practices already in place at our best facilities. If Holder needlessly delays in approving these standards, or ones very much like them—worse, if he strips them of their force because of pressure from corrections leaders—then tens or hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children will continue to be raped while in the government's care, when we could have prevented it.

(Hat tip: BF)

R.L.G at DiA interviewed Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi last weekend:

[Ebadi] was 100% certain that the democratic movement in Iran would eventually succeed—but the trick is that she could not say when. It would depend on the American relationship, the nuclear negotiations, the price of oil, and Russia and China's role, she said. She supports sanctions like those that would deny visas to the Revolutionary Guards and other regime figures, and confiscate their foreign holdings. But she opposes sanctions that would hit the population as a whole (presumably including refined petroleum sanctions, though she did not mention them by name).

Ms Ebadi repeatedly compared the green movement to the struggle for black civil rights in America, and was convinced it would triumph in the same way.

The maps above cause a conniption at Goldblog, prompts another claim to authoritah (a sure sign that someone has a weak argument) and ascribes to me all sorts of views I did not write in the post. (Despite Goldberg's claim, by the way, I did cite a reference – to Juan Cole's blog. Goldberg is free to take up the particulars with Cole if he so wishes – but I really wish he'd fact-check before making statements like that before he blogs.)

I will respond merely to the criticism of the Dish. First, the map was not discussed except as an historical illustrative context for the way in which the Netanyahu government is intent on aggressively expanding Israeli settlement even further in Jerusalem and the West Bank. This matters because as that famous anti-Semite, Joe Biden, said yesterday

“This is starting to get dangerous for us. What you’re doing here undermines the security of our

troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us and it endangers regional peace.”

Yes, there's a huge amount of historical context on the last sixty odd years, and, as I wrote in my response to Goldberg's luke-warm defense of my not being a bigot:

Like America's founding, [Israel's] was not immaculate, and its survival has been a brutal struggle in which Israel has not been as innocent as some want to believe, but whose enemies' anti-Semitism and hatred is tangible and omnipresent and despicable.

But that was scarcely the point of the post, and we can go on for ever on the subject. But some specific charges:

The intent of this propaganda map is to suggest that an Arab country called "Palestine" existed in 1946 and was driven from existence by Jewish imperialists. Not only was there no such country as "Palestine" in 1946, there has never been a country called Palestine.

Of course not. But there was a place called Palestine (among other things) under mostly Ottoman or British rule for a very long time before Israel came into existence. Wikipedia tells us that in 1850, for example, the population of the area comprised roughly 85% Muslims, 11% Christians and 4% Jews. In 1920, the League of Nations reported that 

Four-fifths of the whole population are Moslems. A small proportion of these are Bedouin Arabs; the remainder, although they speak Arabic and are termed Arabs, are largely of mixed race. Some 77,000 of the population are Christians, in large majority belonging to the Orthodox Church, and speaking Arabic. The Jewish element of the population numbers 76,000.

By the end of the British mandate, and an influx of Jewish refugees and Zionists, the proportions were roughly 70 percent Muslims and 30 percent Jews. Jews were concentrated in urban areas along the coast but, as the first map shows, some were indeed in the West Bank, although as a tiny minority.

This isn't propaganda; it's fact.

The maps show what has happened since – in sixty years in terms of growing sovereignty and accelerating Israeli control. The Muslim population is expanding as the geographic extent of their political self-government keeps diminishing. While Jerusalem was once in the center of Palestinian territory – and the Israelis agreed to this, while the Arabs refused – it is now not only in Israel but all of it will soon be under sole Israeli control, as Netanyahu continues, despite pleas from his American benefactors and allies, merely to freeze them.

The point of the illustration was to provide some background to the now-unavoidable fact that Israel has every intention of expanding its sovereignty to the Jordan river for ever, to segregate Palestinians into walled enclaves within, and to station large numbers of Israeli troops on the Eastern border. I notice that Goldberg has time to splutter against this blog but, until yesterday, no time to refer to the Israeli government's contemptuous treatment of the US vice-president in his visit, a subject that has dominated the Israeli press but contradicts Goldberg's view that my notion that the new Israeli that I have worried about this past year is real and is dangerous – to itself, the region, the world and, above all, the United States.