Deliver Us From Evil

Has justice finally been served? Is the payment of a large sum of money enough justice for such horrendous crimes? Can the Catholic Church really be trusted with innocent children? Can the Catholic Church be forgiven for hurting so many people? If one "bad" priest is disrobed, does that solve the problem of sexual abuse within the Church?

I don't have any answers, but I want to say thank you to Amy Berg, director of the incredibly powerful and distressing documentary film Deliver Us From Evil, "the true story of the most notorious pedophile priest in the modern history of the Catholic Church." The film is about a disturbed Irish man who was a priest in various Churches of Northern California for dozens of years. He sexually abused hundreds of innocent children along the way, all the while under the protection of the Church.

I recently read a quote attributed to Cardinal Mahony (pictured above) which was printed in the Verbatim section in the July 30th edition of Time Magazine: "There really is no way to go back and give them that innocence that was taken from them. The one thing I wish I could give the victims... I cannot." The attribution reads "Cardinal Roger Mahony, Archbishop of Los Angeles, apologizing to more than 500 victims of clergy abuse in the archdiocese, which has agreed to a record $660 million settlement." There was another image on a separate page of Time Magazine that I think can be placed next to the one of Cardinal Mahony. A woman is crying, with one hand holding photos and the other hand up on her head (see image at left), a reaction to the largest payment ever made by the Church to victims of sexual abuse by priests.

I had the opportunity to see Deliver Us From Evil in March, right before the 2007 Academy Awards, in which the film had been nominated for Best Feature Documentary, and was blown away! A well-done documentary film with a powerful story that drove everyone in the audience to tears, I highly believe the film had something to do with the Church's "record settlement." For years, I had read about the sexual abuse scandals that had rocked American Churches. Now a documentary film had uncovered the unbelievable depositions of people like Cardinal Mahony. I had such a hard time understanding how people supposed to be doing good will in God's name could abuse innocent children and be protected by the institution of the Church. I won't ramble on here about all the injustices committed by the Church. I would love to believe that religion does good for many people around the world. However, in my life, institutionalized religion brings nothing but suffering for many people.

If it's possible for a documentary film to change the world in some way - then Deliver Us From Evil is a good example to follow.

Nazila Fathi's report, 2 Iranian Gas Stations Burned Over Rationing, in the June 28th edition of the NY Times, seems to underscore why Iran is "cracking down on dissent." Or perhaps, as some articles suggest, the decision to ration gas is a way to prepare the Iranian people for possible UN Sanctions against Iran because of the country's insistence on maintaining a nuclear program against International demands to the contrary.

Fathi's report follows an article in last Sunday's issue of the NY Times (see post below) about how the current regime in Iran has been particularly hard on dissent within Iran.

In particular, the arrest and detention of Iranian-American Haleh Esfandiari, the Director of the Middle East program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in D.C., has sparked outrage among many Iranians (especially Esfandiari's husband, Shaul Bakhash, who wrote a NY Times Op-Ed Our Family Hostage Crisis - June 27) who insist that Esfandiari is not an the American spy the Iranian regime claims she is.

More on Iran:
Negar Azimi wrote an article titled Hard Realities of Soft Power in the Sunday, June 24 issue of the NY Times Magazine.

On the same day, Neil MacFarquhar's article was featured on the cover of the NY Times with a gruesome photo on Page 8: Iran Cracks Down on Dissent.

UPDATE: The NY Times added an Editor's Note to the above article on their website. I have pasted the note in it's entirety here:

Editors' Note: June 25, 2007

A front-page article yesterday described a crackdown in Iran that has included the jailing of three Iranian-Americans, repression or intimidation of nongovernment organizations pressing for broader legal rights, warnings to newspaper editors against articles on banned topics, arrests of advocates for women’s rights and of student leaders, and the detention of 150,000 people for wearing clothing considered not Islamic.

The headline over the article said that Iran was cracking down on dissent and “parading examples” in the streets, and one paragraph in the article also said that young men detained for wearing tight T-shirts or western-style haircuts had been “paraded bleeding through Tehran’s streets by uniformed police officers.” The Times caption on an official Iranian news agency photograph that ran with the article said that it showed a police officer punishing a young man in public for wearing un-Islamic clothing by forcing him to suck on a plastic container normally used for intimate hygiene, a punishment the article also asserted was for that offense.

But the man in the photograph, according to widespread Iranian news reports, was one of more than 100 people arrested recently on charges of being part of a gang that had committed rapes, robberies, forgeries and other crimes. The caption published on the Web site of the news agency, Fars, had said only that the man was being punished as part of a roundup of “thugs” in a Tehran neighborhood.

The current repression has made reporting in Iran difficult. In this case, The Times relied on an interview with a researcher for a nongovernment agency that no longer operates within Iran who said the photograph was evidence of a more visible police role in public crackdowns on what the authorities consider immoral behavior. The reporter then wrongly interpreted what the researcher said as applying to a crackdown on dress, and incorporated the erroneous interpretation into the body of the article, without giving any indication of the source for it.

These errors could have been avoided with more rigorous editing. The article should not have said that young men had been paraded through the streets for wearing un-Islamic dress, and the headline over it should not have said that dissenters were being paraded as part of the crackdown.

Not sure what to say about it all... Excerpt that I never know how to separate the hype and propaganda from the various shades of truth. Iran has certainly cracked down on Iranian-Americans (see post below) and Ahmadinejad is certainly more conservative than his predecessor. But haven't Iranians been enduring crackdowns for the last 25 years? And hasn't American foreign policy been focused on regime change in Iran for the past 25 years?

I saw 2 great programs at the 2007 Sundance at BAM festival:

1) The documentary Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)

A highly stylized doc about corruption in Brazil, but with a focus on the city of Sao Paulo, the film opens with a frog farm somewhere in Brazil. Soon we learn about Jader Barbalho, a powerful Brazilian politician from Para who has been accused of funneling public money from SUDAM, a governmental agency that was supposed to fund environmentally sustainable projects in the Amazon, to more favorable personal projects... While we are learning more about the corruption scandal, the film begins to weave in stories of the grotesque kidnapping industry in Sao Paulo. While I found the film highly engaging with great characters and dramatic arcs, I don't know enough about recent Brazilian history to comment on the political stories and implications drawn by the director of the film. In the Q&A session after the screening, the director, Jason Kohn, is asked why the police were portrayed as innocent do-gooders... Apparently the person asking the question was from Brazil and mentioned how it was widely known that the Brazilian police are also corrupt and are often involved in the kidnapping schemes themselves. Jason's response was that the main police character was a friend of the family, and that if he wanted to get this policeman to be in the film and talk on camera, he had to make a decision to focus more on the other threads of the story (ie: Jader Barbalho, the kidnapped victims, the plastic surgeon, etc.) That said, the doc is definitely worth seeing.

2) The Albert Maysles Sample Retrospective as part of the Four Independents That Turned The Tide event. Albert had put together a reel of work that included clips from his travels in Russia to Grey Gardens.

Iran - The mention of the word provokes so many contradictory feelings and thoughts for me (as I'm sure it does for many people all over the world). I'd like to briefly mention the rash of news articles on Iran in the past couple of days. In no particular order...

Marjan Satrapi's animated film of her widely acclaimed graphic novel Persepolis earned the Jury Award at this year's Cannes Film Festival! In today's ever more polarizing world of Iran versus the West, an Iranian woman has created a wonderful work of art that has touched so many people. I can't wait to see the film (see post below).

Then there is there the world of politics... US Warns against travel to Iran is the disturbing headline for Matthew Lee's Thursday, May 31 Associated Press report in the Washington Post.

On May 31, the U.S. State Department issue a renewed Travel Warning to Americans traveling to Iran. The May 31 warning "supercedes the Travel Warning for Iran issued October 10, 2006." The reason for the update:

"Recently, Iranian authorities have prevented a number of Iranian-American citizen academics, journalists, and others who traveled to Iran for personal reasons from leaving, and in some cases have detained and imprisoned them on various charges, including espionage and being threat to the regime. Americans of Iranian origin should consider the risk of being targeted by authorities before planning travel to Iran. Iranian authorities may deny dual nationals access to the United States Interests Section in Tehran, because they are considered to be solely Iranian citizens."

According to Lee's report, 4 Iranian-Americans have been detained in Iran in the past couple of months, including: "Ali Shakeri, a peace-activist and a founding board member at the University of California, Irvine's Center for Citizen Peacebuilding; academic Haleh Esfandiari; Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planning consultant with George Soros' Open Society Institute; and journalist Parnaz Azima."

Lee continues, "Esfandiari, Tajbakhsh and Azima have all been charged with endangering Iran's national security and espionage, the country's judiciary spokesman said Tuesday."

To counter the negative reaction to the depiction of Persians in the recently released film 300 (see post below), my older sister Ayshe sent me an email about BBC's latest documentary on the Persians called Engineering an Empire - The Persians. You can watch all five parts of the doc on YouTube. I've embedded Part 1 here:


And today, sex is the latest hot topic to be discussed in Iran... Iran Minister Backs Brief Marriages to Stem Illicit Sex reports the AFP (Agence France-Presse) on Yahoo.com News. An Iranian minister has sanctioned temporary marriage, known in Iran as "sigheh", among young Iranians as a way to stem illegal extramarital sex. For those who don't know, Sigheh "is a contract that allows a man and a woman to be married for any period of time from just an hour to 99 years."

"'We should expect violations and repercussions if we do not practically respond to young people's sexual needs,' the centrist Kargozaran daily quoted Interior Minister Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi as saying."

Pour-Mohammadi continues, "'Islam has solutions for all human problems and temporary marriage is a solution to this kind of problem.'"