Should The Priests Flee?

When Oscar Wilde was packed off to Reading Jail in 1895 for sodomy, the railway trains to Brighton and Dover were soon replete with panicked gays fleeing England to Paris. Thousands of Catholic priests here, many of them in retirement, must be asking themselves whether it might be prudent to remove themselves from the jurisdiction until the heat dies down.

It was bound to happen. Five years ago a senior dignitary in the Roman Catholic hierarchy confided to a friend of mine that the church had paid out over a billion in out-of-court settlements on priest abuse cases. On the old way of doing business someone molested by a priest 20 years earlier would read of a big settlement and contact an attorney with experience in the field. Here in the Bay Area it's been Michael Meadows. Then, if the case looked as though it had merit, Meadows would push forward, and sooner or later be in communication with the church's lawyers, who would either settle out of court for some hefty sum (in the high hundreds of thousands or low millions) or the church would fight it, and often go down in court.

So now the church is cutting the priests loose, because it can't afford the money drain. Probably there will be fewer harassment suits in the long run because attorneys will be less interested in contingency suits if the church's dough isn't there to be picked up.

I've followed a lot of these suits because my friend Barbara Yaley has done investigative work for Meadows on the priest abuse cases. Sometimes one gets the no doubt false impression that not only has the Catholic Church been the prime sanctuary for repressed gays for the past several hundred years but that there isn't a priest alive who hasn't at some point made advances on an altar boy or Boy Scout. At least in the Middles Ages they got off with the nuns, or in the days when they could afford domestics, the maid.

Of course there's always been that powerful homoerotic element in the iconography of Christ and the saints, with all those arrows sticking out of poor dear St. Sebastian and such. Bishop Hugh Montefiore (my brother Patrick's father-in-law) was a high flyer in the Anglican church, the Bishop of Birmingham, and reckoned by many to be a shoo-in as Archbishop of Canterbury. Then, at some scholarly seminar on the nature of Christ, he was asked whether it might have been possible that Christ was gay. Montefiore said he supposed that could have been so. Unfortunately for him, there was an unscrupulous journalist in the audience and the headline in next day's paper blared, "Bishop Says Christ Was Gay," which cost him the archbishopric.

We're approaching the big moment in the Christian calendar when the pale Galilean gave his life for sinful humanity. We're also nearing the 100th anniversary of When It Was Dark, a big British bestselling novel published in 1903 by Guy Thorne, narrating a plot to subvert Western civilization by spreading the news that Joseph of Arimathea faked the resurrection and that therefore Christianity is a lie. The archvillain was a sinister Jewish millionaire straight out of Disraeli called Schuabe, moving effortlessly through the highest British social circles. Schuabe suborns an archaeologist who forges an inscription by Joseph of Arimathea saying he hid the body of Jesus in a separate crypt.

As soon as the news gets out, men turn into beasts. It turns out that Christianity has been the prime moral restraint. The Secretary of the World's Women League reports that "crimes of ordinary violence, wife-beating and the like, have increased, on an average, fifty per cent all over the United Kingdom." He is able to produce field reports from reliable individuals up and down the country. The Vicar of St. Saviour's, Birmingham, notes: "Now that the Incarnation is on all hands said to be a myth, the greatest restraint upon human passion is removed... In my district I have found that the moment men give up Christ and believe in this 'discovery,' the moment the Virgin Birth and the manifestation to the Magdalene are dismissed as untrue, women's claims to consideration and reverence for women's chastity in the eyes of these men disappear."

In the United States the situation is even worse. Reclaimed prostitutes are rushing from the World's Women League's "homes" back to the streets, only to return a few weeks later as mere wrecks. "The state of the lower parts of Chicago and New York City has become so bad that even the municipal authorities have become seriously alarmed. Unmentionable orgies take place in public. Accordingly a bill is to be rushed through Congress licensing so many houses of ill-fame in each city ward, according to the Continental system." According to one newspaper report, "we find a wave of lawlessness and fierce riot passing over the country such as it has never known before. The Irishmen and the Italians who throng the congested quarters of the great cities are robbing and murdering Protestants and Jews. From Australia the foremost prelate of a great country writes of the utter overthrow of a communal moral sense... 'Everywhere I see morals, no less than the religion which inculcates them, falling into neglect. Set aside in a spirit of despair by fathers and mothers, treated with contempt by youths and maidens, spat upon and cursed by a degraded populace, assailed with eager sarcasm by the polite and cultured.'"

This was the big bestseller of 1903, hailed in Westminster Abbey by the Bishop of London, who called it a "remarkable" work. It was routinely anti-Semitic, like much of the fiction of that period (also poetry, as those who have studied their T.S. Eliot know well). In the end Schuabe is exposed, goes mad and is locked up in a lunatic asylum, where schoolgirls go and laugh at him.

That Israeli Spy Ring

Insinuating laxity in recycling anti-Semitic myth, a letter by David Sobel in last week's edition of the paper takes exception to my citation of various stories disobliging to Israel that are sloshing around on the Internet. The letter says I should have stigmatized the story of an Israeli spy ring as having been discredited.

Alas for the letter writer, these allegations are soundly based. I sent Sobel's note to Justin Raimondo, who has been running useful material on the issue on his Antiwar.com site. Justin tells me the story has been considerably updated by John Sugg . Antiwar.com has posted the entire 60-page DEA task force report on more than 180 incidents involving Israeli "art students" sneaking around government offices and photographing defense facilities (www.antiwar.com/orig/dea1.html). And Raimondo's latest column on the subject, "The Truth, At Last," pretty much sums up all the new info (www.antiwar.com/justin/j032202.html).

Also, Jane's Intelligence Review had an article wondering why the media had taken so long to glom on to this story. As Raimondo comments, "Anyone who reads the 60-page government report can see what is going on?unless they don't want to see it. But I can tell you this: just imagine if the names in the report (and it names names, rank and all kinds of other information) had been Chinese, instead of Israeli, we damn well wouldn't be hearing about any 'urban myths.'"

From Bluster To Bombs

Will the U.S. attack Iraq? Saddam Hussein's regime is ordering thousands of small generators, which tells us that Hussein for one reckons that a U.S. attack may indeed be in the offing. When the bombing starts and the central generating stations get blown up all over again, there'll at least be some micro-generating capacity to keep a few lights on.

But just what is the likelihood of Bush cashing out his bluster about the axis of evil with an effort to finish off Saddam? Start with the diplomatic chess board. Bush I put together a formidable coalition in 1990 after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. There's scant chance of Bush II matching that achievement. Among the European allies only the UK has signified support, and it will be harder to enlist France, let alone Germany. In 1990 Arab nations mustered to the coalition, led by Saudi Arabia, which trembled at the prospect that after Kuwait it might be next. The likelihood that Saudi Arabia or any other Arab territory would endorse an attack today, let alone allow its territory to be the springboard for a ground assault on Iraq, is remote, as the visit of Vice President Richard Cheney has made abundantly clear.

What other springboards are available? Kuwait, no. Syria, no. Iran, no. What other nation would assume the role that Pakistan has in the assault on the Taliban? The obvious candidate is Turkey, in profound economic crisis and in desperate need of U.S. economic buttressing. The U.S. has a huge military base there. The Kurds have been satisfied with the present situation, but no doubt would be offered appropriate cash incentives to support the invasion.

Internally, the Shi'a learned the hard way in 1991 the dangers of relying on U.S. pledges of support for a rising against Saddam. The Iraqi dictator has been making his usual stringent moves against the possibility of a coup, shifting generals constantly, deploying his party militia constantly on the streets to ensure that even the smallest demonstration will be instantly crushed.

Throughout the 1990s the CIA's attempts at destabilization of Saddam met with total failure, and there is no particular reason to believe that this has changed. There is no obvious replacement for Saddam, and the U.S.'s best-known leader-in-waiting, Chalabi, lacks credibility. But Saddam is an unpopular leader whose support is based on one section of Iraq's population, as was the Taliban's in Afghanistan. The U.S. can pound Iraq again from the air. Armies desert if they feel defeat to be inevitable. New puppet leaders can be found and installed, as was Hamid Karzai.

In terms of domestic politics the opportune time for a U.S. attack would be at the time of the midterm elections in the fall, with the Congress up for grabs. The White House plainly feels it would win the battle for public opinion, with the flag-waggers routing all dissidence in government except for the usual 30 or so holdouts among liberal Democrats and a handful of Republicans like Rep. Ron Paul of Texas.

There have been a series of steady advances by the ultras whose aim is to wipe out Saddam. On the other hand, as Jim Ridgeway recently pointed out, an attack on Iraq could send oil prices through the roof, which would play well with the oil lobby but probably not with voters (excluding affluent conservationists in NRDC and kindred elite green groups) on their way to the polls.

There's also the issue of face. How long can the Bush regime threaten Saddam Hussein, without actually following through? Is the Bush regime blustering itself into war? Many knowledgeable people with excellent experience of Iraq and of political currents in Washington feel that the U.S. will indeed launch a military attack on Iraq later this year. I've heard one spirited dissent, from a former Pentagon official, arguing that the net effect of the ranting about the axis of evil has been to redemonize Saddam Hussein and to diminish pressure to lift the sanctions.

"The embargo has been under constant assault,"said the dissenter, "but now people will say, 'At least he's not carpet-bombing Iraq.' Remember, the whole strategy has always been to sabotage Iraq as a major oil supplier. In 1990 it worked brilliantly, sucking Saddam in to invade Kuwait. They wanted a heightened state of tension, a pretext for an embargo. Then Bush broke loose from the whole plan and pushed it to war. They walked into Iraq, the road to Baghdad was clear and then they panicked again, realizing no Saddam, no embargo. It was the most mysterious end to a war we've ever had. U.S. troops were under orders not to shoot at Iraqi divisions, not to disarm them, just to let them go. That came out in Seymour Hersh's piece about McCaffrey's massacre."

So the U.S. kept Saddam and the embargo in place. On some accounts it was Margaret Thatcher who pushed Bush I into war in 1991. We doubt Tony Blair has equivalent clout, but Bush II could stampede himself, just as his old man did. The antiwar movement had better be ready.