Multilateralism is the geopolitical equivalent of mediation between abused and abuser
International
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And in Ireland, which has pervasive problems with paedophile abuse and not just in swimming, that is the conversation that must be kept alive By Irvin Muchnick I panicked. “Out of sight, out of mind”, I said. But you heard me say it, you heard and listened — popular unconventional translation of Psalms, 31:22 Perhaps unsurprisingly, on 14 August, the media relations department of America’s ‘newspaper of record’ declined the invitation to tell Village that there will be any addition to its coverage four years ago of an Irish coach who had attained a dubious diversity lottery visa – which a federal judge suggested had been facilitated by the American Swimming Coaches Association – and who thereby traversed the country across three decades, despite having been rejected for citizenship. The reason being that he had lied on his application about his prior criminal indictment in Ireland. At least the New York Times is consistent. In March 2024, a 277-page congressional commission report, co-authored by sports law experts and Olympic legends such as track and field’s Edwin Moses, recommended restructuring the American youth sports system to stem the scourge of coach abuse. The Times has yet to inform readers of that report’s release and content, either. “We can’t and don’t cover every study, and do not comment on what may or may not publish in future editions”, said Times spokesperson Nicole Taylor. When I pointed out that the congressional commission report had been covered by the Washington Post, USA Today and other outlets, and was a thorough and much-anticipated fulfilment of a legislative mandate to offer the first significant reforms of America’s nearly-half-century-old Olympic and Amateur Sports Act, Taylor doubled down: “We can’t and don’t cover every study, and do not comment on what we may or may not publish in future editions. We’ve covered the issue of abuse and accountability in amateur, professional and Olympic sports with sensitivity and rigour”. According to the poet Wallace Stevens, there are thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird. When it comes to sexual abuse, there are only two. One is not to talk about it. The other is to talk about it. A list which shows the difficulties in bringing border-hopping coach predators to book In that spirit, Village submits for your consideration a list which shows the difficulties not just for law enforcement but for journalists in bringing border-hopping coach predators to book. Our list drops just as Michael Phelps, perhaps the greatest male swimmer ever, and other American Olympics legends are lambasting the leadership of USA Swimming in the wake of a tepid national team performance at the recent world championships. As Britain’s Guardian notes: “Notably, Phelps’s broadside does not directly address the most damaging area of USA Swimming’s recent history: its handling of sexual abuse, harassment and athlete safeguarding”. Rick Curl In the summer of 2012, an ex-swimmer, now living in Texas in her 40s, was watching the US Olympic Swimming Trials on television. The former Kelley Davies spotted on the pool deck a coach named Rick Curl. In abuse survivor vernacular, this sighting “triggered” her. She chose to speak out to the media, and in the aftermath Curl was banned by USA Swimming and incarcerated in Maryland state prison. Curl had been the founder and co-owner of one of the country’s largest and most prestigious swim programmes, out of several locations in the Washington, D.C., area. He began having sex with Davies, one of his top swimmers, when she was 12, and he molested her throughout her teen years. Around the time Kelley started swimming on an athletic scholarship at the University of Texas – at which point Curl also held the post of coach at the University of Maryland – her mother and father learned details and sought Curl’s prosecution. The Davies parents were advised that their evidence was less than iron-clad for that purpose, and that they should pursue civil action. They achieved a $150,000 financial settlement tied to that bête noire of transparency: a non-disclosure agreement or “NDA”. In utmost quiet, the University of Maryland dismissed Curl. He moved to Australia and coached with Carlile Swimming, the top programme in Sydney. By 2012, presumably calculating that the coast was again clear in the US, he returned to his eponymous club. David Berkoff is an American Hall of Fame swimmer who is rightly credited with being an early whistleblower on abuse. In 2010, about to run for the USA Swimming board as an insurgent, he had told another activist in an email: “Denying knowledge of Rick Curl, Mitch Ivey and others banging their swimmers! It’s a flat out lie. They knew about it because we (coaches and athletes) were all talking about it in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I was told by several of Mitch Ivey’s swimmers that he was sleeping with Lisa Dorman in 1988. I heard the whole Suzette Moran from Pablo Morales over a handful of beers and nearly threw up. I was told Rick Curl was molesting Kelley Davies for years starting when she was 12 by some of the Texas guys. That was the entire reason I formed the abuse subcommittee [at USA Swimming]. I was sick and tired of this crap. No one was standing up. No one was willing to take on these perverts”. When Davies noticed Curl at the 2012 Trials in Omaha, Nebraska, Berkoff was in the stands. By now he had been elected to the USA Swimming board as technical vice president. Anti-abuse activists who thought he was one of their own now were complaining he was a sellout who, once on the inside, was doing little about the problem in the sport’s higher councils. Berkoff defended himself in an interview with the Independent of Missoula, Montana. He said he had had no idea that Curl was coaching at the Trials. Berkoff also disavowed knowledge of Curl’s abuse of Davies. “I don’t know”, Berkoff said. “I heard rumours”. And so, in a rhetorical instant, the circle between “flat out lie” and “rumours” was squared. Alex Pussieldi Alex Pussieldi
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By Caroline Hurley Eloquent enforced absences The evening opened sombrely: the organisers, Cloughjordan Arts and Cloughjordan Palestine Justice informed the assembled crowd, nearly a hundred strong, that Abubaker Abed, the 22-year-old Gazan journalist who had only recently escaped the besieged enclave, would not be attending. His absence, however, was eloquent. News had just reached him of another death within his already devastated family—who remain trapped in Gaza, having already lost forty members to Israel’s annihilating assault. At a previous event, Abubaker had spoken with searing candour about the experience of hunger—not in the abstract, but as endured by himself and witnessed in those he loves. Once destined for a career as a sports commentator, he was drawn inexorably into the theatre of war, compelled to bear witness to horror. His reporting soon attracted the ire of Israeli authorities who warned that his work was becoming “troublesome”; targeted and threatened, he fled. The entry fees and donations from the event were dedicated to supporting him. A musical performance by members of the Lajee cultural tour from the Ayda Refugee Camp in Bethlehem had also been planned, but the now-familiar obstacle of delayed visas rendered their presence impossible. In their absence, a candle was lit, and the room fell into a moment of mindful silence — an act of collective mourning and solidarity. The machinery of dispossession in the West Bank An update was shared on the ongoing wave of evictions and systematic land theft in the West Bank. The tactics of displacement were laid bare: obstruction of harvests, mass sackings, and bureaucratic sabotage that forces Palestinians to complete Kafkaesque documentation in order to prove ownership of their own homes. Access to neighbourhoods is denied through strategically placed street gates; arbitrary detentions proliferate. At the heart of these efforts lies a relentless Israeli ambition to seize full control over Land Registry Area C. https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/34008a8c7d3446789674bc79f59d9477_18.jpeg Since June, under what can only be described as an imposed lockdown, over 40,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced in just 100 days. One fifth of the West Bank is now designated a military firing zone. Amid this devastation, one beacon of practical resistance remains the Union of Agriculture Workers Committee (UAWC). Trusted by both sides, though not unscathed — their seed bank was damaged in a bombing — UAWC personnel continue to provide water, food, shelter, and building materials to those in greatest need. The international solidarity movement (see: International Solidarity Movement) has witnessed a recent resurgence, particularly across social media platforms. Its Irish counterpart, Pals for Palestine (Pals for Palestine Ireland), has emerged as a growing force. Audrey Kissane: mainstream media’s complicity Audrey Kissane took to the floor with quiet force, introduced as a rare voice in Irish journalism—one unafraid to expose the complicity of mainstream media, not through overt distortion, but by the more insidious method of silence. An independent journalist and media reform advocate, Kissane has garnered wide publication for her work—especially her trenchant critiques of national broadcaster RTÉ’s reporting on Palestine. Her talk was titled with sharp irony: ‘RTÉ: Covering Genocide or Covering Up?’. Kissane’s central contention was stark: in its quest for “balance”, RTÉ has deliberately downplayed the scale of overwhelmingly one-sided Israeli violence. Journalism, she argued, must be the vanguard of truth — not its obfuscation. While even figures like Taoiseach Micheál Martin have acknowledged the likelihood of genocide, RTÉ continues to equivocate, lagging behind even traditionally cautious outlets like The New York Times. She cited mounting evidence—from legal experts, human rights organisations, and damning statements by Israeli officials like Smotrich, Netanyahu, and Ben-Gvir (all now wanted by the ICC). In June 2025, a study linked to Harvard revealed that nearly 400,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been “disappeared” since 7 October 2023 — half of them children. “Framing”, Kissane explained, “erases victims by painting them as Hamas terrorists”. RTÉ’s editorial loyalties, she argued, appear to lie more with the Israeli narrative and its American backers, such as the CIA, than with international humanitarian law. Worse still, their sources are frequently subject to Israeli military censorship — restrictions never declared to their audience. Such concealment, she insisted, is not merely dishonest but a betrayal of democratic ideals. An absence of effective regulatory oversight has allowed these practices to go unchecked. When questioned, Ireland’s media regulator, Coimisiún na Meán, offered only a generic reply claiming such matters were “outside their remit” — an astounding abdication, especially given its European responsibilities. Kissane condemned the media’s blatant asymmetries in humanisation. Israeli hostages are afforded detailed, empathetic coverage—names, familial context, psychological insights — while Palestinian detainees are rendered faceless, often not even named, and rarely acknowledged as victims of arbitrary detention. The United Nations, she noted, has sounded the alarm on a new Israeli law allowing life sentences for children as young as twelve. Such normalisation of propaganda, Kissane warned, constitutes a crisis of democratic representation. “What should be a critical inflexion point for Ireland is largely ignored”. She referenced The Ditch’s reporting on Israeli intelligence operatives such as Inbal Goldberger and their secretive meetings with Irish ministers, including Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, where strategies were discussed for incorporating the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism into the regulation of international tech companies operating in Ireland. Micheál Martin’s dismissive reaction to The Ditch — a well-regarded independent outlet — was symptomatic of a broader tactic: to frame transparency seekers as “bullies”, a rhetorical sleight-of-hand bordering on corruption. Goldberger’s influence reportedly extends to the review of Irish school textbooks, urging that narratives of oppression be softened to serve future pro-Israeli historiography. The Chair of the Jewish Representative Council, Maurice Cohen, is likewise a regular figure in hate-speech discussions, including in relation to the Occupied Territories Bill. Despite frequent accusations of anti-Israel bias by Ambassador Dana Erlich, Kissane reminded the audience that President Michael D Higgins has publicly refuted the claim that Ireland has a problem with antisemitism. The IHRA definition adopted recently by this government, she warned, dangerously discourages accurate references to Israeli aggression. RTÉ’s
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In Gaza, dreams
Resilience among the rubble By Eman Abu Zayed On the night of October 6 2023, I laid out my clothes for university like I always did neatly folded on the chair next to my bed. I packed my bag with books, charged my phone, and set my alarm for 6:30 a.m. Earlier that day, I had been laughing with my friends on campus. We talked about our classes, shared silly jokes, and promised to catch up again the next morning. Nothing felt unusual. It was just another ordinary day. But I didn’t wake up to the sound of my alarm. I woke up to the sound of rockets. By morning, everything had changed and my life would never be the same again By morning, everything had changed and my life would never be the same again. From the very first moment, I felt like the life I knew had ended. Suddenly, there was no water, no electricity, and no signal. It was like we had been thrown back hundreds of years, living in complete darkness. The borders were shut, the phone lines were dead, and we had no way to check on our families or friends. Sometimes we’d hear the bombing loud, close but we couldn’t tell where it had hit. We only knew it was too close. The airstrikes were terrifying in a way we had never experienced before. The ground shook beneath us, and everything felt black and silent. No news, no voices, no safety. I was sitting at my neighbour’s house, with my friend Dima, when the tanks started shelling the upper floors of the building we lived in. The entire tower shook, and I ran toward our apartment, desperately trying to find my family, terrified something might have happened to them. We all gathered in one room my aunt, my cousins, and the rest of us trying to shield ourselves from the explosions, holding our breaths with every blast. But the shelling didn’t stop. The upper floors were hit again, and we had no choice but to flee into the street. What we saw outside felt like the Day of Judgment. People were running in every direction, screaming, crying, chaos everywhere. Smoke filled the air. Tanks were closing in on the neighbourhood, and bullets were flying from every side. It was one of the most terrifying days of my life. We whispered the shahada dozens of times in a single minute. We walked for what felt like over a thousand meters, and the sound of shelling still echoed behind us. My father was pushing my grandmother in her wheelchair, and I was holding my little brother’s hand tightly as we ran through the street, not knowing where we were going or where we could possibly be safe. Eventually, we found a house nearby that belonged to relatives. We took shelter there. More than sixteen of us crowded into a single room. There was no privacy, no comfort but we had no choice. This was now our reality. The shelling grew closer and closer, and the bullets from Israeli quadcopters began hitting the walls of the house we were staying in. That’s when we made the decision to flee again this time to a tent in Rafah, in what they called the “humanitarian zones”. I had only ever seen tents in movies or read about them in camping stories. I never imagined one would become my home even temporarily. But we had no other choice. We gathered whatever belongings we could carry and headed to Rafah. There, we began setting up tents. The sun was blazing, the air unbearably hot, and there was no water. Still, we tried to finish building the tent before nightfall, just so we could have somewhere to sleep. That night, twenty-eight of us slept in a single tent. We were still trying to adapt to life in the tent, telling ourselves it was temporary, holding on to any sense of routine or stability. Then came the devastating news: our home had been bombed. But when I say “our home was bombed”, I don’t just mean the walls came down. Everything was gone. Not only was our house destroyed, but so was my father’s goldsmith workshop it was on the ground floor. That news hit us like a punch to the chest. We broke down in tears, unable to believe it, hoping somehow it was a mistake. How could the house I had lived in for twenty-two years disappear in the blink of an eye? How could my room, the memories, the laughter, the photos on the walls, and my childhood bed be gone? Everything was lost the house, the workshop, and a piece of my heart with them. Then came the news that shattered my heart completely: Rama had been killed. Rama wasn’t just anyone she was my closest friend at university, my favourite person, the one who knew me better than anyone else. We shared everything: lectures, long talks between classes, our fears, and our dreams. Losing her felt like losing a part of myself. At the time, there was no communication. I had no idea what was happening in the north. My friend Rawaan sent me a message telling me that Rama was gone, but I didn’t receive it until two days later because the network was down and sending messages was nearly impossible. I couldn’t believe it. I cried and screamed, unable to grasp the loss. I never got the chance to say goodbye. Rama was one of the few who refused to evacuate. She chose to stay in the north enduring hunger, bombing, and humiliation but she stood her ground. She stood… and then she was killed, along with her sister Ruba, who used to share her room, her nights, and her laughter. Even in death, they weren’t separated they were buried together in the same grave. I never got to see her. I never even got to hear her voice. This war has taken everything from
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The decline of the Liberal International Order (LIO) in dates and key events
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Scene: The set of Piers Morgan Uncensored (on Youtube because TV is yesterday) in either London or New York. Or perhaps it is LA.
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Friedrich Merz is back, as Chancellor, with a budget, to lead Europe and close borders to irregular immigrants
