Posted on 08/01/2003 9:17:06 AM PDT by DPB101
"The Jews didn’t kill Christ," my stepfather was fond of saying. "They just worried him to death." Nonetheless, there was palpable relief in my Jewish household when the Vatican officially absolved us of the crime in 1965. At the very least, that meant we could go back to fighting among ourselves.
These days American Jews don’t have to fret too much about the charge of deicide — or didn’t, until Mel Gibson started directing a privately financed movie called "The Passion," about Jesus’ final 12 hours. Why worry now? The star himself has invited us to. Asked by Bill O’Reilly in January if his movie might upset ‘‘any Jewish people,’’ Gibson responded: "It may. It’s not meant to. I think it’s meant to just tell the truth."
"Anybody who transgresses has to look at their own part or look at their own culpability."
Fears about what this ‘‘truth’’ will be have been fanned by the knowledge that Gibson bankrolls a traditionalist Catholic church unaffiliated with the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese.
Traditionalist Catholicism is the name given to a small splinter movement that rejects the Second Vatican Council — which, among other reforms, cleared the Jews of deicide.
The Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages, which have lavished praise on Gibson and his project, reported in March in an adulatory interview with the star that the film’s sources included the writings of two nuns: Mary of Agreda, a 17th-century Spaniard, and Anne Catherine Emmerich, an early-19th-century German.
Only after Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, among others, spoke up about the nuns’ history of anti-Semitic writings did a Gibson flack disown this provenance.
Emmerich’s revelations include learning that Jews had strangled Christian children to procure their blood. It’s hard to imagine a scenario that bald turning up in ‘‘The Passion.’’ Indeed, it’s hard to imagine the movie being anything other than a flop in America, given that it has no major Hollywood stars and that its dialogue is in Aramaic and Latin (possibly without benefit of subtitles). Its real tinderbox effect could be abroad, where anti-Semitism has metastasized since Sept. 11, and where Gibson is arguably more of an icon (as his production company is named) than he is at home.
In recent weeks, Gibson has started screening a rough cut of his film to invited audiences, from evangelicals in Colorado Springs to religious leaders in Pennsylvania to celebrities in Washington. But the attendees are not always ecumenical. At the Washington screening, they included Peggy Noonan, Kate O’Beirne, Linda Chavez and David Kuo, the deputy director of the White House’s faith-based initiative.
The screening guest list did include a token Jew: that renowned Talmudic scholar Matt Drudge. No other Jewish members of the media were present, said one journalist who was there.
That journalist must remain unnamed as a result of signing a confidentiality agreement — a practice little seen at movie screenings. Since then, some of those present, including Drudge, have publicly expressed their enthusiasm for ‘‘The Passion.’’
If ‘‘The Passion’’ is kosher, couldn’t Gibson give Jews the same access to a Washington media screening, so they could see for themselves? Such inhospitality is not terribly Christian of him. One Jewish leader whose requests to see the film have been turned away is Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League.
‘‘If you tell everyone they won’t see it until it’s ready, O.K.,’’ Foxman said in a phone interview from Jerusalem. ‘‘But what Gibson’s done is preselect those who’ll be his supporters. If the movie is a statement of love, as he says it is, why not show it to you or me?’’
When I addressed this question last week to the star’s press representative, Alan Nierob, he told me that the ADL was being kept out because it had gone public with its concerns — as indeed it had, once Foxman’s letter to Gibson about ‘‘The Passion’’ failed to net a meeting with the filmmaker or a screening three months after it had been sent.
When I asked to see ‘‘The Passion,’’ Nierob said The New York Times was a ‘‘low priority’’ because The Times Magazine had run an ‘‘inaccurate’’ article in March in which Hutton Gibson, Mel Gibson’s father and a prominent traditionalist Catholic author, was quoted as saying that the Vatican Council was ‘‘a Masonic plot backed by the Jews’’ and that the Holocaust was a charade. But in fact, neither Hutton nor Mel Gibson — nor anyone else — has contacted the magazine to challenge the accuracy of a single sentence in the article in the four months since its publication.
Eventually, Gibson’s film will have to face audiences he doesn’t cherry-pick. We can only hope that the finished product will not resemble the screenplay that circulated this spring. That script — which the Gibson camp has said was stolen but which others say was leaked by a concerned member of the star’s own company — received thumbs down from a panel of nine Jewish and Roman Catholic scholars who read it. They found that Jews were presented as ‘‘bloodthirsty, vengeful and money-hungry,’’ reported The Jewish Week, which broke the story of the scholars’ report in June.
Perhaps ‘‘The Passion’’ bears little resemblance to that script. Either way, however, damage has been done: Jews have already been libeled by Gibson’s politicized rollout of his film. His game from the start has been to foment the old-as-Hollywood canard that the ‘‘entertainment elite’’ (which just happens to be Jewish) is gunning for his Christian movie.
But based on what? According to databank searches, not a single person, Jewish or otherwise, had criticized ‘‘The Passion’’ when Gibson went on O’Reilly’s show on Jan. 14 in January to defend himself against ‘‘any Jewish people’’ who might attack the film. Nor had anyone yet publicly criticized ‘‘The Passion’’ or Gibson by March 7, when The Wall Street Journal ran the interview in which the star again defended himself against Jewish critics who didn’t yet exist. (Even now, no one has called for censorship of the film — only for the right to see it and, if necessary, debate its content.)
Whether the movie holds Jews of two millenniums ago accountable for killing Christ or not, the star’s pre-emptive strategy is to portray contemporary Jews as crucifying Gibson. A similar animus can be found in a new book by one of Gibson’s most passionate defenders, the latest best seller published by the same imprint (Crown Forum) that gave us Ann Coulter’s ‘‘Treason.’’ In ‘‘Tales From the Left Coast,’’ James Hirsen writes, ‘‘The worldview of certain folks is seriously threatened by the combination of Christ’s story and Gibson’s talent.’’
Now who might those ‘‘certain folks’’ be? Since no one was criticizing ‘‘The Passion’’ when Hirsen wrote that sentence, you must turn elsewhere in the book to decode it. In one strange passage, the author makes a fetish of repeating Bob Dylan’s original name, Robert Zimmerman — a gratuitous motif in a tirade that is itself gratuitous in a book whose subtitle says its subject is ‘‘Hollywood stars.’’
Another chapter is about how ‘‘faith is often the subject of ridicule and negative portrayal’’ in Hollywood. One of the more bizarre examples Hirsen cites is ‘‘Sophie’s Choice,’’ in which ‘‘passages from the New Testament are quoted by Nazi officials in support of atrocities that were committed.’’
Now sectarian swords are being drawn. The National Association of Evangelicals, after a private screening of ‘‘The Passion,’’ released a statement last week saying, ‘‘Christians seem to be a major source of support for Israel,’’ and implying that such support could vanish if Jewish leaders ‘‘risk alienating two billion Christians over a movie.’’
Foxman says he finds that statement ‘‘obnoxious and offensive.’’
‘‘Here’s the first time we’ve heard that linkage: We support Israel, so shut up about anti-Semitism,’’ he added. ‘‘If that’s what support of Israel means, no thanks.’’
But the real question here is why Gibson and his minions would go out of their way to bait Jews and sow religious conflict, especially at this fragile historical moment. It’s enough to make you pray for the second coming of Charlton Heston.
Foxman is a walking stereotype, a complete embarrassment.
Many journalists claim that Agreda and Emmerich are the basis of the movie script, but I have never heard Gibson reference anything other than the Gospels.
And I highly doubt that the florid ramblings of nun of the Counter-Reformation could produce a version of Christ's Passion that would be so palatable to American Evangelicals.
Put this on the mounting pile of hatchet jobs.
Passion Plays are a Christian tradition and anyone using them to justify hating Jews is already a 'Jew Hater' that misses the whole point of Jesus's life.
If this shmekel Abe Foxman hadn't raised such a big stink about this movie before anyone had ever seen it, then maybe his request to attend a screening would have been taken more seriously.
This movie sounds like it's going to be a great one -- all the right people are pissed off about it.
I don't know any Christians who would hate the Jews for doing what was God's will to save all of humanity.
The Jews involved with Jesus's death were "bloodthirsty, vengeful and money-hungry"... get over it. They were the ruling elite who were threatened by Jesus's popularity and message. Mel is telling a true story that happened nearly 2,000 years ago... is he wrong for portraying mankind at the time as "primarily agrarian, without electricity and decidely lacking in modern conveniences"? No... that was the times and that is the truth... just as true is his rendering of Jesus's killers.
The hearts of His own people is also the greatest message of Christ. Jesus didn't come to save us because we were worth saving. He came to us when we were at our worst and willingly died to save even those who had him killed--simply out of His love for us. If Mel has captured that fact, then he has captured the essence.
Lastly, the Jews at the time were not held blameless by God Himself. Jesus told of the punishment that would befall His killers:
Luke 11:49 "For this reason also the wisdom of God said, 'I will send to them prophets and apostles, and some of them they will kill and some they will persecute, 50 so that the blood of all the prophets, shed since the foundation of the world, may be charged against this generation, 51 from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the house of God; yes, I tell you, it shall be charged against this generation.'
...and...
Luke 17:22 And He said to the disciples, "The days will come when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it. 23 "They will say to you, 'Look there! Look here!' Do not go away, and do not run after them. 24 "For just like the lightning, when it flashes out of one part of the sky, shines to the other part of the sky, so will the Son of Man be in His day. 25 "But first He must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation.
And finally...
Luke 23:27 And following Him was a large crowd of the people, and of women who were mourning and lamenting Him. [on His way to Golgotha] 28 But Jesus turning to them said, "Daughters of Jerusalem, stop weeping for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.
Jesus was crucified somewhere in the vicinity of 30-33 AD. Jerusalem and the Temple were completely destroyed in 70 AD. It was the worst massacre in the history of the Jews. Truly the generation present for His death and their children suffered greatly as He said they would.
On another thread, several Christians mentioned they had never been taught Jews killed Christ. Nor had they heard any Christians say that. They first heard it from Jews and liberals.
That was my experience too. Regret to admit, I simply assumed Christians were making that claim on a regular basis.
The Enquirer would insist on equal rights on the basis of trustworthiness.
When we talk about the Jews who had Jesus put to death, it doesn't mean modern day Jews. To deny that Jews had Jesus put to death, is to mutate the Bible and history.
Jews have already been libeled by Gibson’s politicized rollout of his film. His game from the start has been to foment the old-as-Hollywood canard that the ‘‘entertainment elite’’ (which just happens to be Jewish) is gunning for his Christian movie.
Wow. Libeled?? (Call the lawyers..) His game?? Yet another article attacking the movie, but hey, they aren't gunning for it or anything. Nooo.
Indeed, it’s hard to imagine the movie being anything other than a flop in America, given that it has no major Hollywood stars and that its dialogue is in Aramaic and Latin (possibly without benefit of subtitles).Keep dreaming, Frank : )
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