It’s hard to watch France’s political and cultural elite rush to support filmmaker Roman Polanski against extradition to the United States on a decades-old sex charge and not wonder exactly how they interpret the national motto “liberté, égalité, fraternité.” It’s tempting to ask whether they’re defending the liberty to break the law and skip town, respecting the equality of all before the law and championing a brotherhood of artists who can do no wrong.

(Photo: Roman Polanski, 19 Feb 2009/Hannibal Hanschke)

Here in Paris, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner declared the arrest was “a bit sinister … frankly, (arresting) a man of such talent recognised around the world, recognised in the country where he was arrested — that’s not very nice.” He and his Polish counterpart have written to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the issue. Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand said “just as there is a generous America that we like, there’s also an America that scares us, and that’s the America that has just shown us its face.” Directors, actors and intellectuals have been signing a petition demanding Polanski’s immediate release.

Almost all the focus is on the argument that Polanski is a brilliant director, the charge of unlawful sex with a 13-year old dates back to 1977 and the victim herself says she wants the whole issue to be forgotten.  Almost completely ignored is the fact that he fled the U.S. to escape sentencing, which added a crime to the original crime. There is such a widespread assumption that all artists and intellectuals would automatically support Polanski that Paris papers today — both the left-of-centre Libération and the conservative Le Figaro — wrote with an air of surprise that Hollywood was not storming the barricades to back him.

The French Greens leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit made headlines by bucking the trend and saying he was “ill at ease” with the rush to absolve Polanski of raping a minor and the culture minister should have been more cautious in his comments.

Across the Atlantic, by contrast, Hollywood’s hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times, reviewed the objections by Polanski’s supporters and concluded: “Plausible or preposterous, these arguments are eclipsed by a simple fact: Polanski fled the country … the Justice Department and L.A.’s district attorney are right to seek extradition.”

And almost nobody in the media here in France asks the tough questions that Fr. Tom Reese, S.J. (photo at right) did in his Washington Post blog post entitled “Father Polanski would go to jail”:
“Polanski’s defenders … argue that he should not be punished. They say that the girl was willing and sexually experienced and she has forgiven him (after receiving a settlement). They even cite his tragic childhood and life as an excuse. And besides, it is ancient history. Such arguments from paedophile priests would be laughed out of court and lambasted by everyone, and rightly so…

“The Catholic Church has rightly been put under a microscope when 4 percent of its priests were involved in abuse, but what about the film industry? The world has truly changed. Entertainment is the new religion with sex, violence and money the new Trinity. The directors and stars are worshipped and quickly forgiven for any infraction as long as the PR agent is as skilled as a saintly confessor. Entertainment, not religion, is the new opiate of the people and we don’t want our supply disturbed.

“Is there a double standard here? You bet.”

There’s a lot to say about the different ways Americans and French approach the law. But let’s go right to Tom Reese’s question. Do you think Polanski’s supporters cut him slack they wouldn’t think of permitting for a paedophile priest? Is the entertainment industry setting our values?

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(Photo: Video grab of Bishop Anders Arborelius on Swedish TV, 23 Sept 2009)

There’s nothing new about tit-for-tat and finger-pointing in diplomacy and politics but the Vatican is usually quite careful not to wash its dirty laundry in public. So it was surprising to see some of the principal characters in the the long-running saga of Richard Williamson, the traditionalist bishop who sparked a crisis in Catholic-Jewish relations when he denied the extent of the Holocaust on Swedish television, now spatting in public over it.

Just when the Vatican thought it had put the Williamson affair behind it, the story has came back to haunt the Holy See. On Wednesday evening, the Swedish television network SVT aired a follow-up to its January 2009 documentary about the Society of St Pius X (SSPX). That program sparked off a public controversy because the Vatican lifted excommunications on Williamson and three other SSPX bishops three days later, creating the impression the Church either didn’t know or didn’t care about his Holocaust statement. In the uproar that followed, Pope Benedict once again condemned Holocaust denial and said he hadn’t known about the statements in advance. Usually discreet Vatican officials publicly blamed others for not informing him.

(Photo: Bishop Richard Williamson, 28 Feb 2007/Jens Falk)

The new report on the “Uppdrag granskning” (Assignment: Investigate) program said the Vatican knew about Williamson’s views well before the bans on the SSPX bishops were lifted. To make matters worse, in conjunction with the new broadcast, the website of Stockholm’s Roman Catholic diocese posted a note saying Bishop Anders Arborelius and the Vatican nuncio to Sweden told the Holy See in November 2008 about the not-yet-aired interview that Williamson had given to Swedish television in which he said “I believe there were no gas chambers”. The interview was recorded in Germany in November 2008 and aired in Sweden on 21 January 2009. See our latest story on this here.

Now, in an interview with the Munich newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (excertps in German here and English here), the Vatican official at the center of the controversy, Colombian Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, is fighting back. Castrillon Hoyos was until July the head of Ecclesia Dei, the department set up by Pope John Paul in 1988 to try to bring the traditionalists back into the fold. He said “None of us knew about Bishop Williamson’s statements. None of us!” and then he adds this: “And no one had the duty to know it!”

In the full text of the interview published only in the print edition, Castrillon Hoyos fired away at Bishop Arborelius for saying he informed the Vatican last November. “I regret this dubious statement very much because it is wrong,” he said. “Spreading this information is slander. We store digitally all documents that we get. So Bishop Arborelius should say how, to whom and when he communicated that, and whether this was done in writing or orally.”

(Photo: Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos, 25 Dec 2005/Alessandro Bianchi)

Williamson’s interview and the story and reactions to it made headlines in the Italian and international media for days afterwards. Radio Vatican’s German service reported on it as early as January 23. While defending himself, the cardinal implied he was completely unaware of all that for two weeks: “I was only informed of his (Williamson’s) statements on Feb 5. The nunciature had informed the Secretariat of State, which then gave me the information in sealed envelope that I have kept.” In his defence, he added that no other bishops had ever told him about Williamson’s views.

After being presented as the guilty party by others, Castrillon Hoyos took his turn to point the finger — at Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the head of the Congregation of Bishops: “If anyone should have known about Williamson’s statements, he was the one. He was working for many years in the Secretariat of State. And now he runs the Congregation of Bishops, which has the task over watching over the bishops.”

The question of who knew what and when in the Vatican has never been fully answered and the broadside from Castrillon Hoyos did not shed much light. The Vatican press office has several times asserted that Pope Benedict did not know anything about Williamson’s denial of the Holocaust when the excommunications were lifted. “Affirming or even insinuating that the Pope was informed beforehand of Williamson’s position is absolutely groundless,” chief Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said on Wednesday when before the follow-up program that Swedish television was about to air.

(Photo: Cardinal Battista Re, 13 April 2005/Max Rossi)

According to Vatican sources, Lombardi himself was involved in a spat with Castrillion Hoyos earlier this year. He told the French newspaper La Croix in February that if anyone in the Vatican should have known about Williamson’s background, it was Castrillon Hoyos. The cardinal was reportedly infuriated and pulled rank and some sources say he demanded an apology from Lombardi, which he got.

The Vatican’s communications disaster, both internal and external, over the Williamson affair was clear from the start. Cardinal Walter Kasper, head of the the Vatican office that oversees relations with Jews, was furious at the time of the lifting of the excommunications because he had not been informed ahead of time. Even the pope said that the Vatican had to learn how to use the internet. After the Williamson affair many journalists noted that his positions on the Holocaust and Jews were out there for all to see for some time.

What do you think the whole saga says about how the Vatican communicates internally and externally?

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A running crisis in relations between Silvio Berlusconi’s government and the Church deepened when Italy’s top Catholic weekly accused him of acting like a “prince” while many Italians were struggling financially.  A scathing editorial in Famiglia Cristiana, Italy’s largest circulation weekly news magazine, also indirectly criticised the media mogul’s private life and attacked the type of women politicians he has promoted in his centre-right party. And it did so without naming him once. The clever editorial in its online edition on September 16, here in Italian, was unsigned, meaning it was written by the magazine’s editor, Father Antonio Sciortino.

The editorial came several weeks after relations between the government and the influential Church nose-dived when a newspaper owned by the Berlusconi family launched a personal attack against a top Catholic editor, forcing him to resign. Read our previous blogs on that episode here and here.

In the latest episode of a duel between the Church and the prime minister, the Famiglia Cristiana editorial made a number of clear references to Berlusconi and scandals or controversies that have surrounded him recently. In a laundry list of what it said were examples of the country’s moral degradation, it spoke of “escorts” and “high-class prostitutes.” Berlusconi has been at the centre of media attention in Italy and abroad over allegations that he spent a night with a call-girl in his Rome residence. The woman, Patrizia D’Addario, taped their private conversations and says she and other escorts were paid to attend his parties.

(Photo: Patrizia D’Addario in Otranto, 19 Aug, 2009/Fabio Serino)

Berlusconi has not denied sleeping with the woman but says he did not know she was an escort and says he has never paid for sex.

The Famiglia Cristiana editorial also spoke of women politicians and television personalities chosen “for their looks rather than intelligence.”

One of Berlusconi’s cabinet ministers is a former showgirl who has had a meteoric rise in politics. Berlusconi’s wife Veronica, who is seeking a divorce over his womanising, last April said his party’s selection of women candidates was a “shamelessly trashy” process aimed at keeping him “entertained.”

After listing its complaints, the editorial added sarcastically: “But everything is fine. The important thing is to spread optimism in spades and celebrate the triumphs of the Prince at L’Aquila, hiding the problems of a tough autumn for workers and families, who see themselves becoming always poorer.”

The reference to the “Prince at L’Aquila” was not lost on anyone. On Tuesday, critics accused Berlusconi of hogging the media spotlight during a programme on state television about the consignment of temporary homes to victims of the L’Aquila quake.

The opposition was furious after both state broadcaster RAI and Berlusconi’s Mediaset network abruptly postponed rival talk shows to give him more exposure.

(Photo: Berlusconi on RAI television, 15 Sept 2009/Remo Casilli)

The government’s relations with the influential Church have been icy in recent months in part because of Catholic media criticism of Berlusconi’s private life.

Earlier this month Il Giornale, a newspaper owned by the Berlusconi family, launched front-page attacks on Dino Boffo, the editor of Avvenire newspaper of the Italian bishops conference, to retaliate for the editorials he wrote against Berlusconi. Il Giornale said the editor had a sexual scandal in his past. Boffo denied the charges but resigned after two weeks, saying he was innocent but was stepping down for the good of the Church.

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An Afghan journalist, sentenced to death for blasphemy, reduced to 20 years’ jail on appeal, has been set free and is living in exile in an undisclosed country, a media watchdog has said.  Perwiz Kambakhsh, 24, a reporter with the Afghan Jahan-e Now daily, was sentenced to death in January 2008 by a court in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

(Photo: Kambakhsh at a Kabul court hearing, 21 Oct 2008/Omar Sobhani)

Kambakhsh was arrested and imprisoned for downloading and distributing an Iranian article from the Internet that said the Prophet Mohammad had ignored the rights of women. Under Islamic law — stipulated in Afghanistan’s constitution — blasphemy is punishable by death.

In a statement on its website, Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, which campaigns for press freedom, said Kambakhsh’s lawyer had confirmed to them Monday his release and that President Hamid Karzai had signed a pardon several weeks earlier. Karzai’s office was not immediately available for comment.

The arrest and sentencing of Kambakhsh drew criticism from a number of Western nations, the Afghan media and rights groups. FaithWorld has followed this story closely from his death sentence in January 2008, the October 2008 appeals verdict of 20 years in jail and appeals to President Hamid Karzai last March to pardon him.

Read the whole story here.

Here is an interview with Kambakhsh that Reporters without Borders recorded in a Kabul detention centre in February 2009:

Call it a case of duelling headlines.

For the past few days, a highly personal and often below-the-sash battle has been waged in Italy between two newspapers — Il Giornale, owned by the family of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and Avvenire, the daily of the Italian Bishops Conference.  The generals in the battle, which has riveted Italy and has resulted in one of the worst periods for years in relations between church and state here, are the editors-in-chief Vittorio Feltri of Il Giornale and Dino Boffo of Avvenire.

It all started on Friday, Aug. 28 when Il Giornale published a front-page, banner headline story purportedly revealing that that Boffo had accepted a plea bargain in court in 2002 after being accused of harrasing a woman. The paper said Boffo had a homosexual relationship with her husband. The headline read “The Super-Moralist Was Condemned for Molestation” (see image above). Feltri, one of Italy’s more unorthodox journalists, attacked Boffo because he had written a spate of editorials criticising Berlusconi over the prime minister’s private life. The fact that ultimately Berlusconi’s family is Feltri’s boss was not lost on Italian readers.

Another element in the background was the fact that Berlusconi has been under the spotlight for anything but government recently, including accusations of cavorting with teenagers and prostitutes. For the record, Berlusconi says there was nothing “spicy” in his relationship with an 18-year-old aspriring model and that even if  a call girl spent a night in his house, he never paid for sex in his life. What’s more, Berlusconi is also going through a messy divorce. His wife Veronica says she wanted out because she couldn’t take any more of his “lies”.

Hours after the first Il Giornale story came out, the Vatican announced that a long-planned dinner between Berlusconi and Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone had been cancelled. The dinner was to have taken place in L’Aquila during the annual “feast of forgiveness” in the city that was devastated by an earthquake last April. The official Vatican explanation was a nice try, but hard to swallow. It said the local bishop  had decided (five hours before the start of a dinner that had been planned for weeks) that the money would be better spent if donated to reconstruction efforts.

(Photo: Berlusconi on Italian television, sign says “And Veronica asks for a divorce,” 5 May 2009/Remo Casilli)

Boffo called the Il Giornale attack “journalistic assassination” and rejected the accusations “absurd”.  Here’s our story about the first day of the battle.

If this sounds like a soap opera, it is.  And like all good soap operas, it gets better.

Boffo did indeed have some judicial problems in 2002, but he says he was the victim not the perpetrator of “telephone harassment” and agreed to a plea bargain just to put it all behind him. Avvenire colleagues say he did indeed fly off the handle and have some kind of altercation with a woman in 2002, but it had nothing to do with him being homosexual. They say she had been pestering him by phone to hire her son.

The homosexual angle was found on a one-page report which Il Giornale implied was part of the police record. But Boffo’s defenders say that page was fabricated to look like an ammendment to a police report and sent anonymously years ago to Italian Catholic Church leaders, all of whom saw it as a smear campaign and binned it. The next day Il Giornale ran the following banner headline: “The Rage of the Unmasked Moralists”. And Tuesday it was “The Bishops Knew Everything For Some Time.”

Avvenire has been putting most of its responses to Il Giornale on its back pages and editorial pages, one calling the charges “a colossal worthless fake.” It has also run pages and pages of letters from readers in support of Boffo.

For days, the Vatican did not weigh in on the dispute even though it was blazing all around the walls of the city state. When it did on Tuesday, it got out the big guns, issuing a statement that Bertone — the number two man in the Vatican after Pope Benedict himself — had called Boffo and expressed his “closeness and solidarity.” This seemed to put aside rumours that Boffo might resign for the good of the Church.

For his part Berlusconi has kept a low profile. He issued a statement disassociating himself from the positions of his family newspaper on the first day, but has refused to make any further comments. “Everything I want to say, I have said already,” he declared on Tuesday, Sept 1.

(Photo: Berlusconi wipes face during conference in Milan, 30 July 2009/Alessandro Garofalo)

The fact remains that the whole episode – sometimes slow drip, sometimes percolating – has brought relations between the Italian Catholic Church and the Vatican on the one side and the Berlusconi government on the other side, to one of their worst levels, if not the worst. And the sometimes buffa soap opera continues. Tune in next time for the latest episode.

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Knowing what not to report is just as important for journalists as knowing what to write. We’re inundated with handouts about some pioneering new scientific research or insightful new book. Should we write about it? It’s refreshing to hear experts who can dazzle you with their work but warn against falling for any hype about it. This “let’s not overdo it” approach has been a recurrent theme in the Neuroscience Boot Camp I’m attending at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

(Photo: The “official” boot camp T-shirt, 8 Aug 2009/Tom Heneghan)

Andrew Newberg’s “no God spot” message to boot campers has already been noted here on FaithWorld. Other lecturers added similar reality checks to their presentations. Cognitive science has already begun to influence religion studies (as John Teehan explained here) and we’re bound to hear more in the future about what neuroscientific research has to say about faith, morals, altruism and other issues of interest to readers of this blog. Much of this will be fascinating. But before the next “gee-whiz” report comes out, here’s the advice the neuroscientists are giving us about speculative claims based on brain research.

(Photo: Geoff Aguirre, 5 Aug 2009/Tom Heneghan)

After two days of explaining fMRI brain scanning, the sexiest procedure in current neurological research, Geoff Aguirre poured cold water on some of the exaggerated conclusions that researchers or journalists draw from it. When shown brain scan images, he said, “people immediately start thinking about trying to catch terrorists and being able to screen people as they pass through metal detectors.” This is “science fiction, science fantasy,” he said, but it comes up regularly. Why? Aguirre, who is an M.D and assistant professor of neurology at Penn, listed several reasons:

• scientific awesomeness — “This is an incredible technology. Neuroimaging is not phrenology. It really is a scientific discipline that has reproducible results that makes valuable predictions that explain larges areas of cognition and cognitive neuroscience that previously had been inaccessible.”
• image properties — “There’s definitely an esthetic in the presentation of this data. People see this as a natural aspect of the brain, not the result of tests. Some groups made a very wise investment in the display technology for how neuroimaging results were reported. Those were the images that got displayed on the covers of the top scientific journals and made a splash.”
• thresholding — The brain images leave out data outside the main focus. “This contributes to the overly localised view of brain function. So we say, ‘ah this is the spot for love’ or whatever, because it’s all that we see.”
• overinference — “It’s very easy to believe a lot of things about these images that might not be true… It’s also implied that when you’ve found activisation in a region, you’ve found the region ‘for’ something. But what does that mean?”
• chicken versus egg problem — “Just because you find a difference between groups in some brain imaging measure does not mean that structural difference was genetically determined.” But the brain also develops according to its owner’s environment and experience, so this is too narrow a focus.
• lurking Cartesian dualism — “In the way we think about people’s actions and describe the effect of diseases or drugs, there is frequently a lurking dualism there. We say, ‘oh it wasn’t his fault, his brain did that.’ Well, who else could it have been? Where else could those thoughts and feeling or plans have come from, except in the brain? This idea that the brain and the mind are separate is part of what makes these images so remarkable. Wow look! Here’s a part of the brain that’s more active when you’re feeling romantic love or not! That’s just astounding to folks who would have thought romantic love was outside the brain, in the heart or the soul and far away.”
  

  (Photo: Near infrared spectroscopy imaging slide/GK Aguirre)

• illusion of inferential proximity — “It doesn’t automatically follow that a brain imaging technology is going to give you greater inferential leverage on a question than just talking to somebody. There’s an illusion that somehow you’re getting much closer to the behavior you want to measure, just because you’re measuring a brain image. That might not be the case.”
  
• ease of imaging — Many hospitals have brain scanners and researchers can use them and free imaging software to create impressive images. “If you have an internet connection and a scanner, you can be a cognitive neuroscientist and publish a paper. Lots of the variance in the lousy scientific papers over these years can be explained this way. What will come out will be a well-formed brain image that will give the impression you must be a very good scientist because you created something that looks very polished.”

Aguirre said that brain scans might be able to identify pedophiles by showing they are excited by pictures of children. “Does having that response to seeing kids in underwear lead to an increased risk of you actually going out and molesting kids?” he asked. “It could be the case that this population of people now divides into two subgroups, one that can control that impulse and one that cannot.” It would be hard to base a policy on who to put in jail on the basis of such brain images, he said.

(Photo: Reward responses slide/Joe Kable)

Another example would be a study into people who lose their temper. “So I do a study of people who are enraged and can find that activity within the right insula is associated with a sense of rage. I have explained the sense of rage,” he said. “But since we all strongly suspected that the sense of rage was derived from events taking place in our nervous system, what have we learned?” The study could say what happens in the brain during rage but still not explain why the person flew off the handle.

Penn law professor Stephen Morse said that “neuroscience can gives us tons of data that teaches us about our capacities and our propensities, but ultimately it’s up to us to decide. Neuroscience might have a lot of information for us, but ultimately deciding what to do won’t be decided by neuroscience, it will be decided by us.”

In a well-attended session on “the chemistry of love,” Mike Kaplan, director of Penn’s Neurolab, said “a lot of people think that, as soon as you’ve come up with a physical explanation for something, you’ve taken the magic out of it. I don’t think that. If they find a peptide that’s released when you fall in love, some people would say love is just another brain function. If this was reported next week, how many of you would stop buying Valentine’s Day cards? Saying something is a brain function is not an insult. The brain is the most interesting object in the universe.”

(Photo: Mike Kaplan in the Neurolab with boot campers Jennifer Drobac and Sita Kotnis, 5 Aug 2009/Tom Heneghan)

For more on the daily lectures, check out Francis X. Shen’s Bloggin’ the Boot Camp blog.

What do you think about what brain science is telling us about the relationship between the brain and religion, morality and behavior?

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A crucial part of gunman Mohammad Ajmal Kasab’s confession at the Mumbai attack trial has been censored by the judge on the grounds that it could inflame religious tensions between Hindus and Muslims in India. After stunning the court on Monday by admitting guilt in the the three-day rampage that killed 166 people, Kasab gave further testimony on Tuesday that included details about his training by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a Pakistan-based militant group on U.S. and Indian terrorist lists.

The front-page report in today’s The Hindu, which noted the judge’s gag order in its sub-header, put it this way:

Ajmal made some crucial statements on Tuesday as part of his confession. They pertained to the purpose of the attack as indicated by the perpetrators and masterminds and the message they wanted to send to the government of India. Ajmal also wanted to convey a message to his handlers. However, this part of his confession faces a court ban on publication.

In view of the communally sensitive nature of Ajmal’s statements, judge M.L. Tahaliyani passed an order banning the publication and broadcast of Ajmal’s statement recorded on Tuesday by any media or person, except the part which pertains to the CST. Mr. Tahaliyani remarked that the trial was at “a delicate stage.”

Given the complex mix of religion and politics in India, it’s not unusual to see the media playing down the communal aspect of tension and violence. In the recent general election, the party that usually plays up these differences, the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), hardly used the “religion card” in its losing campaign. But that doesn’t mean things are getting better. According to the Centre for Study of Society and Secularism in Mumbai, the “unfortunate year of 2008 … proved to be worse than 2007.” See their two-part report on 2008 here and here.

But Kasab’s testimony could shed important light on what role religion plays in Islamist militancy. How could a young man who wanted to become a dacoit (bandit) be convinced by Islamist militants to try to become a shahid (martyr) instead? Was he actually convinced, or did he do it for other reasons?

(Photo: Taj Mahal hotel burns, 27 Nov 2008/Punit Paranjpe)

Kasab told the court on Monday that he originally approached the militants to get weapons and training and won (surprisingly easy) admission to their office by saying he wanted to wage jihad. He was taken in and given extensive training in preparation for the Mumbai attack last November. All of this is detailed in published accounts of his statement in court on Monday. In earlier statements, police say, he showed little understanding of Islam or jihad, saying the latter was “about killing and getting killed and becoming famous.”

What role did Islamist ideology play in this, and what part the confused ambitions of a poor and impressionable young man? In a publication entitled Why Are We Waging Jihad?, Lashkar-e-Taiba listed its goals as:

1) to eliminate evil and facilitate conversion to and practice of Islam;

2) to ensure the ascendancy of Islam;

3) to force non-Muslims to pay jizya (poll tax, paid by non-Muslims for protection from a Muslim ruler);

4) to assist the weak and powerless;

5) to avenge the blood of Muslims killed by unbelievers;

6) to punish enemies for breaking promises and treaties;

7) to defend a Muslim state; and

8 ) to liberate Muslim territories under non-Muslim occupation.

Did his handlers stress all this to Kasab? Did he want to do any of the above? What did his Islamist handlers say about Hindus? If they fed him a diet of anti-Hindu hatred, might it be better to publicise the details so they can be debated and discredited? Some of the most interesting contributions to such a debate could come from Indian Muslims, who live in the kind of secular democracy the LeT rejects.

(Photo: Kasab in detention, 3 Feb 2009/video grab from CNN IBN)

I’d be especially interested to hear the reaction from the famous Darul Uloom Deoband seminary, which is a traditionalist Sunni school but has urged Muslims to reject terrorism and vote in elections against extremists.

Right now may not be the best time to publish Kasab’s censored confession. But revealing it at a later date, for example after the verdict, might do more good than the harm Judge Tahaliyani fears. What do you think?

By Niluksi Koswanage

Gay Austrian fashionista Bruno will not be making an appearance on Malaysia's screens this summer for fear of corrupting this mostly-Muslim nation's youth.

But Malaysia's parents will still not have it easy as the country's opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim  is again on trial for sodomy in a re-run of a 14-month case that in 1998 generated endless sexually explicit headlines and questions from curious children.

Photo: Anwar enters Kuala Lumpur courtoom with wife Wan Aziza Wasn Ismail for his sodomy trial on July 15/ Reuters (Zainal Abd Halim)

I was a teenager then when the former deputy prime minister was first found guilty of
sodomy and corruption in a marathon trial that featured graphic descriptions of anal
penetration, faithfully reported in lurid detail by this country's government-owned press and on prime-time TV.

(Photo: Anwar arrives in court on July 15, Reuters/

On my way to school, I saw angry protesters take to the streets and heard parents and teachers raging about children getting exposed to gay and straight sex (Anwar was accused of having an affair with a woman as well), accompanied by the kind of graphic descriptions usually reserved for specialist magazines.
 
A columnist in the normally staid government-run New Straits Times suggested at the time that all Malaysians should study a book to be entitled "An intelligent parent's guide to sodomy and other painful issues," based on the explicit testimony of Anwar's former driver who said he had been assaulted by Anwar and his adopted brother. Needless to say, he lost his column.
   
These were pre-YouTube days where sexual images were only available on illicit video recordings  and imported magazines. At the time, it was impossible to ignore the headlines as pro-government newspapers sought to tarnish Anwar's image.

One of the many ironies of the case was that Anwar, a pious Muslim, had been an education minister who had fervently opposed sex education in schools on moral grounds.  And blushing teachers often skipped or skimmed over the reproductive system in classes.

But with the trial, a generation of school kids were confronted with a court parade of x-rated items from a semen-stained mattress, medical reports on anal tearing to pubic hair samples.

Malay-language newspapers had to invent new words to decribe sex acts and body parts as Arabic loan words were inadequate to explain everything. Slang Bahasa Malaysia words like "pondan", a derogatory word for homosexual entered the formal lexicon via the courts and media.

The uncovering of Anwar's alleged sexual crimes in court and in the media was seen by many as a demonisation of a popular Malay politician in a leadership struggle during the Asian financial crisis that rocked Malaysia.

Despite the press palaver, there was no real crackdown on homosexuals during the trial, apart from the Muslim morality police occasionally raiding private gay parties in hotels. They still do that but you can more likely be arrested by the religious police for being in "khalwat" or "close proximity" to a person of the opposite sex.  

What 1998 did bring was protest. For the first time in a country that has now been ruled by the same political party for 51 years, many university students and young professionals took part in daily demonstrations numbering in the tens of thousands.

It also gave birth to Malaysia's political alternative media that have grown into the main source of news in a country where the printed press is heavily controlled. Websites like Malaysiakini (www.malaysiakini.com) got their first breath of life. A widely read Reformasi (reform) diary (a precursor to the blog), which detailed the movement started by Anwar, made its rounds in cyberspace and Malaysian gay websites saw their best business in years with chatrooms like GayMalaysia and SayangAbang (darling brother) filled with inquisitive onlookers. 
  
If there were long lines to get into the courthouse to witness the downfall of one of the country's best-known political figures, there were also long queues of straight patrons trying to get a feel of the drum and bass-thumping gay clubs like Liquid Room and the Blue Boy in the heart of Kuala Lumpur.

The clubs, like Anwar, are still around today.
   
One young gay reporter even told Time Magazine his sex life had sizzled in 1998 as many people wanted to experiment, inspired by the trial.
   
Will the trial shock as much this time round or are Malaysians just too exposed to sex through MTV, YouTube and MySpace and numerous blogs?

More than 10 years on and two prime ministers later, Malaysia's conservatism appears to have grown deeper. Its rising political force is an Islamist party, one of Anwar's staunchest allies.

Will the new trial and publicity damage Anwar or the government? Finally released from imprisonment in 2004 and after a bar on holding office ended, the 61-year old was catapulted back into parliament in 2008 by-election with a huge majority, so it seems not.

Senior figures from across Austria's political spectrum have condemned the head of the far-right Freedom Party, Heinz-Christian Strache, over his party's European election campaign directed against Israel and Turkey.

In an advertisement in the newspaper Kronen Zeitung, Freedom opposes the accession of Turkey and Israel to the European Union. Although Turkey is in EU accession talks, Israel is not.

Heinz-Christian Strache prepares for a TV discussion in Vienna, Sept. 17, 2008. REUTERS/Heinz-Peter Bader (AUSTRIA)

"What is the most distasteful and despicable is the style," says Ernst Strasser, the conservatives' candidate in next month's elections for the European Parliament, referring to Strache's campaign. "This style is abusive. He vilifies other religions and ethnicities."

According to Chancellor Werner Faymann, Strache is "a hate monger, a disgrace".

"It makes absolutely no sense for Israel to be mentioned. Israel is not a candidate for accession. There isn't even an accession process. The only reason to mention Israel is to serve anti-Semitic prejudices. It is disgraceful."

Strache, who denies he is preaching hatred, accuses Faymann of being a "rabble-rouser" and abusing his position as chancellor.

The dispute indicates more than just political opportunism in the run-up to the poll, although that is obviously playing a part.

Freedom, which polled 18 percent in September's national election, has become a hard-right party since former dental technician Strache took the helm in 2005. It has also focused on religion. A recent rally where Strache waved a crucifix drew condemnation from politicians and religious leaders. Another campaign slogan, "The West in Christian hands", was not well received, either.

The hard-right rhetoric, an eye-catching campaign aimed at the youth vote and dissatisfaction with the centre parties, appears to have given Freedom a boost. However, Strache's line has at times been a bonus for the more moderate Alliance for Austria's Future, the party of late far-right leader Joerg Haider, who used to lead Freedom.

A controversial European Union election campaign poster of Austrian far right Freedom party in Vienna May 11, 2009. Posterreads " The West in Christian hands - Judgement day". REUTERS/Dominic Ebenbichler

The parties are often lumped together as "Austria's far right", such as when they polled almost a third of the vote last year. Together they could make a serious political force -- they outpolled the conservatives and were just behind the Social Democrats in September. the Alliance has tried to use the dispute to portray itself as the more mature. "(Freedom) is using the only way to mobilise votes it has," Alliance's EU candidate Ewald Stadler says.

Freedom's popularity has nevertheless affected mainstream policy, with centre parties loath to open up a flank to the far right. The conservatives and Social Democrats have spoken out against the EU asylum directive and oppose lifting labour market restrictions to the eight ex-communist countries that joined the EU in 2004.

Pope Benedict has left the Holy Land bequeathing a message of peace, tolerance and love between all religions and peoples.

We hope that message also filters through to the eternally fractious relationship between journalists and security men - which gets even more strained when a high-profile visitor like the Pope is in town.

Months of elaborate preparation went in to ensuring the Pope's visit was safe and successful and also to ensure journalists got controlled access to major events to tell the stories their readers and viewers want to see.

This planning process is hostage, however, to a simple dichotomy which pits journalists against bureaucrats and security officials.

In the eyes of the security men, journalists are bothersome, quarrelsome and disobedient and need to be coralled (even though that process is often like 'herding cats'). Notions of a free press and unlimited access take a back seat to security concerns.

In the eyes of the journalists, security men are unthinking automatons with no common sense or an appreciation of the (self-)importance of journalists - and they need to be challenged and confronted whenever possible. The elaborate coverage restrictions, security sweeps, shuttle buses and byzantine pool regulations are, of course, both ridiculous and the main obstacle between the journalist and his/her exclusive, prize-winning story.

Perhaps its not unusual then that tempers occasionally overheat.

In the video below you will see what happens when very clear 'pool' rules are breached by a local photographer - who runs from a pre-ordained position towards the Pope and enters the inner core of accredited Vatican journalists who travel with Benedict wherever he goes.

The photographer in question had a different accreditation - only allowing limited access to the Pope's itinerary.

To give you an idea of how seriously these breaches of protocol are taken - the gentleman 'herding the cats' in this case is the Director of the Government Press Office which oversees many aspects of the work of foreign journalists in Israel.

In this next video you will see what happens when people spend too much time waiting around in the sun wearing suit jackets and ties and getting...well, a little cranky.

The cameraman here was doing exactly what he was supposed to do on behalf of the Host Broadcaster pool which has been providing the bulk of the live pictures of the Pope's visit to Israel. A TV Pool like this is set up to film on behalf of everyone so as to avoid a crush of journalists attending every event and making it even more unmanageable. Maybe someone should have explained that part a bit better to the security guy.

If things can get a little heated when diplomatic protocol and stringent preparations are in place, it can get even uglier when unofficial visitors attract even more attention than the leader of the world's Roman Catholics....

Cue Leonardo diCaprio visiting Jerusalem two years ago with his Israeli girlfriend Bar Refaeli and a private security escort to keep the couple out of harm's way....

Two of diCaprio's security guards were arrested for their part in the scuffle.

Perhaps its only fitting to leave the last word to the Pope himself who said, as he left the Holy Land for Rome: "It remains only for me to express my heartfelt thanks to all who have contributed in so many ways to my visit. To the government, the organisers, the volunteers, the media..."

(PHOTO CREDIT: Pope Benedict during the Nazareth mass REUTERS/Tony Gentile)