27th January 2009

I wrote this after seeing the film Doubt, starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

As I write this I feel deeply troubled. We are now in the wake of a 3-week Israeli onslaught on the Gaza strip, which started on the 27th of December 2008, two days after Christmas. It was relentless and cruel. The evidence of war crimes is pouring in from every direction. Some of the most important sources of this information are Israeli activist groups like ‘B’tselem’, ‘New Profile’, ‘Women’s Coalition for Peace’, and ‘Breaking the Silence’ who focus on collecting testimonies and information that they send out into the world. But the majority of Israelis supported the attack and the ongoing fuel and food siege on Gaza and support the continuation of the occupation. Judging by the hundreds of emails I receive every day, it is clear that there are many around the world who are outraged by what Israel has been doing and do everything they can to stand up for the rights of the Palestinians. But I know that these emails come from a minority. I also know that the leaders of the world support Israel, and seem to have no real interest in helping to end this 61 year old nightmare that the Palestinians have been living in.

I have just come from seeing the film Doubt, which left me shaken. Only when I got up to leave the movie theatre I realised how stiffly I sat the entire time. I was so tense. The film is about a nun who is the principal of a Catholic school. She begins to suspect that the parish priest has been interfering sexually with one of the altar boys, and she has no doubts about who she should support. She manages to get Father Flynn to all but confess and tender his resignation. The year is 1964. Then, as now, the Catholic Church was dominated by men and despite the authority that her role gives her, Sister Aloysius knows she has to submit to her male superiors in the Church hierarchy. She could get the priest to leave the boys in her school alone, but she could not do anything about the fact that he was promoted and moved to a role where he had even more ready access to young boys. We know now that many thousands of children, boys and girls all around the world have been interfered with in Catholic schools and churches, and in many other institutions. Hundreds of thousands of children have been and still are the victims of sexual abuse all the time, everywhere, in religious organizations, in families, in schools. The statistics we have rely entirely on reporting. The numbers probably don’t reflect reality accurately but they are still frightening. The thought that reality is even worse is appalling. Many thousands will never recover from the effects of their abuse, body and mind. Many will die prematurely because of its effects. Thousands of lives will be destroyed for ever. So many will never be able to live out their potential because of what they had suffered as children, not because there was anything inherently wrong with them but simply because they happened to be there.

The film highlighted not only the lack of desire by the Church itself to stand up for the victims but also the child’s own parents’ lack of interest in saving him from this. The mother asks the nun to leave the issue alone until June, when the child was to graduate and go to high school. She is not really grasping or doesn’t want to grasp what even one more episode of abuse could do to her son, let alone several months of exposure to that. There is a gentle younger nun in the story, Sister James, who was the one who initially disclosed her suspicions against the priest to the principal. But when the principal started to look into the matter seriously, Sister James got cold feet. After the priest offers a possible plausible explanation for what had happened with the boy, young Sister James is eager to believe him and joyfully says: “Well, I’m convinced!”. The principal’s response is: “You’re not. You just want things to be resolved so you can have simplicity back.”

What do Gaza and institutionalised child abuse have in common? Well, in my opinion plenty and I think that what the principal, Sister Aloysius tells Sister James captures it all. “You just want things to be resolved so you can have simplicity back.” Is this it? Is that why people do not support victims? Is this why society and its institutions cover up for evil? They can’t cope when the world isn’t simple, and bad things are being done without any good reason?

It shouldn’t take courage to stand up to evil, expose it and help its victims. But in our world it does. Why is human society so keen to abandon victims, so keen to support those who not only do evil but lie about it? Father Flynn in the film was a very talented speaker. He wrote great sermons. He sounded bold, progressive and sensitive and he made a lot of sense. His explanations for what had happened with the boy sounded plausible and he had the support of a powerful Bishop.

Over the past 61 years Israel has perfected its propaganda machine. It has ‘explanations’ and ‘reasons’ for what it is doing to the Palestinians. Explanations that just like Sister James, I would love to believe. I would love to believe that all these civilian deaths in Gaza were an accident, that Israelis don’t hate Palestinians, that they really do what they do for self-defence, and that we out there who criticise Israel do not really grasp how dangerous Hamas really is, and its bigger agenda. It would make it so much easier to turn my pain off and not care about the suffering of the Palestinians. Israel is trying to give us the tools to not care about its victims. Among those who choose to believe Israel are very influential people, elected leaders of the ‘free world’, who have the power to save the Palestinians from annihilation right now, but choose not to.

I wonder if this is the same as what happened in Germany in the 1930’s. The Western world began to stand up to Germany only when it became a threat to them. Prior to that, no one did anything to help German Jews no matter how outrageously Germany treated them. The world watched and said nothing at all while laws were being made that gradually stripped Jews of all their basic rights and their very status as humans, laws that meant that anyone could do anything to them, their children and their property with complete impunity. As Sister Aloysius says: “There is nothing new under the sun.”

Over the past 10 years I have worked with many adults who were victims of childhood sexual abuse. Most of them were abandoned. If they tried to tell, no one believed them. The majority didn’t even try because they feared that no one would believe them because the abuser was often an influential and charismatic person: a much loved and respected teacher, a trusted priest or pastor, a church elder, a father, a brother in-law, uncle or a grandfather. My clients had to live with the effects of the abuse into adulthood. They were isolated and often misunderstood when these effects showed in their behaviour, in their choices or in their performance in life. They were often criticised for not being ‘quite right’ without anyone knowing or caring to know why they are the way they are.

I don’t buy Israel’s propaganda because I can see the evidence of what the Israeli military machine has been doing to the Palestinians. It’s right there in front of us, recorded and reported by thousands of witnesses from all over the world. I can see the evidence just like I see the evidence of child sexual abuse written all over my clients who are adult survivors. People don’t make this up. Doctors don’t make up stories about strange horrific injuries. People don’t make up torn limbs, whole families murdered in their own house. It’s all there for everyone to see despite Israel’s attempt to hide its deeds by forbidding reporters from entering Gaza.

Yes, I am comparing Israel to child molesters because of how they are trying to cover up what they are doing; because of the almost but not quite plausible explanations they are trying to give for what they are doing, when they are confronted about it. The evil is in the deed but perhaps even more so in the attempt to cover it up. It’s also in the shameless re-victimisation of people who have already had everything taken away from them. I bet many people actually believed that German Jews did something to deserve what they got. I know there are people out there who still believe it. If they didn’t deserve it, why would Germany go to so much trouble to ‘punish’ them? Things have to be simple to make sense. It’s really hard to cope with the idea that people can do harm to others, commit evil for no logical reason. I know for a fact that many people believe the Palestinians have done something to deserve what Israel is doing to them. But they haven’t. Their only real ‘sin’ was that they happened to live on the land that the Jewish people chose as the site for an exclusively Jewish state. If they were Chinese, Italian or Martian Israel would have treated them the same way. There is nothing inherently bad or wrong about the Palestinians just as there is nothing inherently bad about a child who is being abused. Even in the film the child’s mother implied that there is something different about her son as if that could somehow explain his abuse. He is abused because a perpetrator happens to have access to him and because no one is prepared to pay close attention to what is going on or indeed to care enough to help. It’s all too difficult.

I am troubled because there is so much evil in the world. So much that it is hard to take. And even harder than the evil itself is the eagerness of nice people, people like Sister James to believe the perpetrators. Because to not believe is to not sleep well at night. When at the end of the film Sister James says she can’t sleep anymore, Sister Aloysius responds: “Maybe we’re not supposed to sleep so well.”

To not believe the perpetrator is to have no choice but to take action as Sister Aloysius did; make herself stand alone with her pain and doubts, against a corrupt and very powerful institution that was ready to cover up for perpetrators and abandon the victims. It has taken until the last few years for mainstream churches to begin to take some responsibility not only for child abuse by clergy but also for the institutionalised cover-up. What about the rest of the world?

How long will it take before enough people stand up to Israeli cover up? How long will it take before people develop the courage to acknowledge that Israel is doing wrong and that it is hurting an entire nation of people, that it does not act and never has acted like a country that wants peace; that it keeps doing evil and keeps lying about it systematically and consistently?

We do not entirely understand the motives of child sexual molesters. I do not entirely understand the reasons for what Israel is doing. Both are psychologically complicated. But the reasons don’t really matter. What matters to me is the psychological make-up of a world that stands by and allows evil to happen, and that is repeatedly throughout history able to abandon victims to their suffering while sleeping well at night.


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