Posted on 03/05/2004 8:26:00 AM PST by Pikamax
Frank Rich: 'Passion' and the U.S. culture war Frank Rich NYT Friday, March 5, 2004
NEW YORK Thank God - I think. Mel Gibson has granted me absolution for my sins. As "The Passion of the Christ" approached the $100 million mark, the star appeared on "The Tonight Show,'" where Jay Leno asked if he would forgive me. "Absolutely," he responded, adding that his dispute with me was "not personal." Then he waxed philosophical: "You try to perform an act of love even for those who persecute you, and I think that's the message of the film."
Thus we see the gospel according to Mel. If you criticize his film and the Jew-baiting by which he promoted it, you are persecuting him - all the way to the bank. If he says that he wants you killed, he wants your intestines "on a stick" and he wants to kill your dog - such was his fatwa against me in September - not only is there nothing personal about it but it's an act of love. And that is indeed the message of his film. "The Passion" is far more in love with putting Jesus' intestines on a stick than with dramatizing his godly teachings, which are relegated to a few brief, cryptic flashbacks.
With its laborious build-up to its orgasmic spurtings of blood and other bodily fluids, the film is constructed like nothing so much as a porn movie, replete with slo-mo climaxes and pounding music. Of all the "Passion" critics, no one has nailed its artistic vision more precisely than the journalist Christopher Hitchens, who called it a homoerotic "exercise in lurid sadomasochism" for those who "like seeing handsome young men stripped and flayed alive over a long period of time."
If "The Passion" is a joy ride for sadomasochists, conveniently cloaked in the plain-brown wrapping of religiosity, does that make it bad for the Jews? Not necessarily. As a director, Gibson is no Leni Riefenstahl. His movie is just too ponderous to spark a pogrom on its own - in America anyway. The one ugly incident reported on Ash Wednesday, in which the Lovingway United Pentecostal Church posted a marquee reading "Jews Killed the Lord Jesus," occurred in Denver, where the local archbishop, Charles Chaput, had thrown kindling on the fire by promoting the movie for months. Whether "The Passion" will prove quite as benign in Europe and the Arab world is a story yet to be told.
But speaking as someone who has never experienced serious bigotry, I must confess that, whatever happens abroad, the fracas over "The Passion" has made me feel less secure as a Jew in America than ever before. My quarrel is not with most of the millions of Christian believers who are moved to tears by "The Passion." They bring their own deep feelings to the theater with them, and when Gibson pushes their buttons, however crudely, they generously do his work for him, supplying from their hearts the authentic spirituality that is missing in his jamboree of bloody beefcake. Jews, after all, can overcompensate for mediocre filmmaking in exactly the same way; even the schlockiest movies about the Holocaust (Robin Williams as "Jakob the Liar," anyone?) will move some audiences to tears by simply evoking the story's bare bones in Hollywood kitsch.
What concerns me much more are those with leadership positions in the secular world - including those in the media - who have given Gibson, "The Passion" and its most incendiary hucksters a free pass for behavior that is unambiguously contrived to vilify Jews.
Start with the movie itself. There is no question that it rewrites history by making Caiaphas and the other high priests the prime instigators of Jesus' death while softening Pontius Pilate, an infamous Roman thug, into a reluctant and somewhat conscience-stricken executioner. "The more benign Pilate appears in the movie, the more malignant the Jews are," is how Elaine Pagels describes Gibson's modus operandi in The New Yorker this week. As if that weren't enough, the Jewish high priests are also depicted as grim sadists with bad noses and teeth - Shylocks and Fagins from 19th-century stock. Yet in those early screenings that Gibson famously threw for conservative politicos in Washington last summer and autumn, not a person in attendance, from Robert Novak to Peggy Noonan, seems to have recognized these obvious stereotypes, let alone spoken up about them in their profuse encomiums to the film.
Nor do some of these pundits seem to recognize Holocaust denial when it is staring them in the face. In an interview in the current Reader's Digest, Noonan asks Gibson: "The Holocaust happened, right?" After saying that some of his best friends "have numbers on their arms," he responds: "Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps." Yes, mistakes happened, atrocities happened, war happened, some of the victims were Jews. This is the classic language of contemporary Holocaust deniers, from David Irving to Gibson's own father, Hutton Gibson, a prominent anti-Semitic author and activist. Their rhetorical strategy is to diminish Hitler's extermination of Jews by folding those deaths into the war's overall casualty figures, as if the Holocaust were an idle byproduct of battle instead of a Third Reich master plan for genocide. Rather than challenge Gibson on this, Noonan merely reinforces his junk history. "So the point is that life is tragic and it is full of fighting and violence, mischief and malice," she replies.
No, that is not the point of the history of the Holocaust. Of course, if a Jew points out such callousness, he is not practicing journalism or trying to clarify the historical record. He is instead "rabidly anti-Christian," as James Dobson of Focus on the Family is fond of describing Jews who raise questions about Gibson. The message is clear: Jews who criticize a poor, defenseless multimillionaire movie star and his film are behaving much as Caiaphas and his cronies do in "The Passion" itself. There's a consistency of animus here.
There is also a mighty strange inversion of reality. America is 82 percent Christian, and 60 percent of the population believes the Bible is historical fact. (The Jewish population is 2 percent.) The president of the United States has endorsed Jesus as his favorite philosopher, and Gibson's movie had almost as large an opening week as "The Lord of the Rings." The star has won his battle. He's hotter than ever in Hollywood, a town whose first commandment is that you never argue with a hit. ("If Hitler did a movie with these numbers, we'd give him his next deal," one Jewish mogul told me in a phone conversation this week.) So by what stretch of the imagination is Gibson so aggrieved that he can go on "The Tonight Show," purport to be a victim and not be laughed at by Leno or anyone else? For all his talk of "suffering" for his art, it's hard to see exactly how Gibson has suffered.
The vilification of Jews by Gibson, his film and some of his allies, unchallenged by his media enablers, is not happening in a vacuum. We are in the midst of an escalating election-year culture war in which those of "faith" are demonizing so-called secularists - any Jews critical of Gibson and their fellow travelers, liberals.
Politicians, we are learning, seem increasingly eager to wrap themselves in "The Passion of the Christ" as a handy signal to indicate they are opposed to all those "secularists" whose conspiracy is undermining all that right-thinking Americans hold near and dear. Predictably enough, both the president and Mrs. Bush have publicly indicated their desire to see Gibson's film. But when even Connecticut's John Rowland, a scandal-ridden governor facing impeachment, starts to rave about "The Passion" in public ("unbelievable!" "breathtaking!"), as he did last weekend, it's clear that we're witnessing the birth of a phenomenon. You come away from this whole sorry story feeling that Jesus died in "The Passion of the Christ" so cynics, whether seeking bucks or votes, could inherit the earth.
There was nothing remotely Christian about Nazism or their government. They were atheists who thought ancient pagan Germanic rituals should be revived to give the masses something to identify with and cling to. Christianity was considered weak minded nonsense and of Jewish heritage which made it doubly unsuitable for the New Germany.
The "Gott Mit Uns" motto on the Army's belt buckles was not a Nazi motto, it was a traditional Prussian motto that the Army carried over into the Nazi era. The Army and Navy also had chaplains by tradition. However Hermann Goring would not allow chaplains in his Luftwaffe. The SS, a thoroughly Nazi organization in function and origin made would be members denounce the church as a condition of membership. Theodor Eike, head of the SS Totenkopf Verbande made arrangements that soldiers who were disowned by their families for denouncing their religion had places to go during holidays so they would not be alone. When need be he even brought some TK members to his own home for holiday diners. The SS became a family unto itself, a very anti-Christian one.
Historically Germany was a Christian nation but that does not mean the church was alive and well in the hearts of the population by time the 20th century rolled around. The same can be said for other European nations then and now. Bill Clinton waves the bible around when he goes to church, does anyone here really believe he is a real Christian?
I find it interesting that no one, to date, has commented in response to this statement. Polybius; walden - what do you think of it?
Well, to be perfectly honest, I don't keep track of who is a "Jewish" journalist or politician or Government advisor and who is not.
Of course, with some people such as Joe "Did You Know I'm a Devout Orthodox Jew?" Lieberman, the issue is crammed down our collective throats. For others, I find that keeping a "Jewish Score Card" clouds the issues.
For example, the entire issue of "Neo-Cons" is being used to substitute the boogeyman of "the Jews have an agenda" for the fact that a conservative President has some conservative advisors who happen to be Jewish and whose foreign policy advice serves the vital interests of the U.S. and not some global Jewish conspiracy.
In my own Miami Cuban American ethnic background, one of "our" Cuban American Comgressmembers is Representative Ilena Ros-Lehtinen who is a very strong supporter of Israel. Cuba had a sizable Jewish community that fled Castro along with the rest of us. They jokingly refer to themselves as "Jewbans".
With Ileana's maiden surname of "Ros", it is a given that her paternal line was of "Jewban" origin. However, whether Ileana is now Jewish or Catholic is really quite irrelevant to us. I don't know and I don't care. The only thing that matters is that Ileana thinks and votes like "we" Cuban Americans do. We Catholic Cuban Americans think of "Jewbans" as one of "us" and we think of a Ted Kennedy Catholic Liberal as one of "them".
That is the basic ideological divide: The Left vs. our side.
The Left tends to use the same tactics and one of those tactics is to stiffle debate by throwing out the "Insult and/or Bigot Card". Criticism of a Black Liberal is "racist". Criticism of a Jewish Liberal is "anti-Semitic". Any war against non-Europeans is a "racist war". Any mention of 9/11 is an "insult to the victims". Any criticism of a Mexican is also "racist".
On the flip side, any criticism of a Cuban American is............ "Progressive".
Yep. I get pretty damned sick of that.
The pack of Leftist journalists that engage in this practice is not defined by religion or ethnicity but by their Leftist ideology.
They do not constitute a "Sanhedrin" because, in the ancient Judean Sanhedrin, issues were actually debated and discussed there. The Leftist journalist cabal has it's Politically Correct cookbook of pre-determined responses. Put an issue on the table and we can predict what "insult" they will write about.
Although I don't go searching for an individual's religious roots, I do believe that their particular ancestral background can have a profound effect on their thinking.
I am not a Protestant but, by flipping through the cable channels, I have seen that the most fervently pro-Israel media in America today is the "Christian" cable station. They may have their religious reasons but they truly belive that the Jewish people are God's special people and that an enemy of the Jews is an enemy of God.
That may be totally at odds with the experience that an Ashkenazi's grandfather may have had back in Eastern Europe where pogroms were the national sport but that is the reality of Bible Belt Protestant America.
For that reason, it is my belief that Left-wing Ashkenazi Jews have done America and the Jewish people as a whole absolutely no good by bringing and nurturing their Eastern European political baggage to America.
It is my belief that Left-wing Ashkenzi Jews romanticize Communism because Communism was the political force that was going to overthrow the hated Czar and grandpa emmigrated to America before the family could actually experience Communism's evils like we Catholic and "Jewban" Cuban Americans did.
It is my belief that Left-wing Ashkenzi Jews see a Republican and they never get past the superficial labels of "Left" vs. "Right" as if European political labels coined during the French Revolution meant the same things across centuries and across the Old and New Worlds. So therefore, a Republican is "Right", as the Nazis allegedly were "Right", so voting Republican is is like voting to send Anne Frank to the gas chamber.
It is my belief that Left-wing Ashkenzi Jews see American Protestant Bible Belt Christians who takes their religion very seriously and they automatically see a mob of Eastern European peasants ready to get out their pitchforks and torches for the monthly pogrom.
It is my belief that Left-wing Ashkenzi Jews see America as if it were Czarist Russia or Czarist Poland or as if it were Nazi Germany and reflexive attack anything labeled "Right", "Christian" or "Conservative"......in short, they attack the traditional values of Old America when it was precisely those values that created the America that saved then from the revages of the Old World.
If Left-wing Ashkenzi Jews ever see the day that the values of Old America have been destroyed, they may be shocked to find an America much like the Eastern and Central Europe that great-grandfather escaped from. They may find that Politically Incorrect no longer means "practicing Christian" but maybe now means "Jew, either practicing or secular" as Political Correctness changes to be in harmony with "sophisticated" Europe and with militant Blacks and MEChA types.
If Left-wing Ashkenzi Jews ever see the day that the values of Old America have been destroyed, they will miss those American Bible Belt Protestants that believed those silly, superstitious ideas that God had made the Jews a special people and that an enemy of the Jewish people was an enemy of God.
Nor do some of these pundits seem to recognize Holocaust denial when it is staring them in the face. In an interview in the current Reader's Digest, Noonan asks Gibson: "The Holocaust happened, right?" After saying that some of his best friends "have numbers on their arms," he responds: "Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps." Yes, mistakes happened, atrocities happened, war happened, some of the victims were Jews. This is the classic language of contemporary Holocaust deniers, from David Irving to Gibson's own father, Hutton Gibson, a prominent anti-Semitic author and activist. Their rhetorical strategy is to diminish Hitler's extermination of Jews by folding those deaths into the war's overall casualty figures, as if the Holocaust were an idle byproduct of battle instead of a Third Reich master plan for genocide.
We are winning ~ the bad guys are losing ~ trolls, terrorists, democrats Frank Rich and the mainstream media are sad ~ very sad!
I think it's a quote from Frank Rich's article. Frank Rich, a man well known for his objectivity and lack of animosity towards the devout of any faith.
If I were you, if you want to feel "more secure", I would try keeping a lower profile instead of trying to run the country when, self admitingly you only comprise 2% of the population. Keep your mouth shut and just sit back and enjoy the ride.
Good one, *amn Jews. They're thaking everything over.
You appear to be one of those Christians that Christians on these threads say aren't Christian.
BTW, don't keep your mouth shut, it's instructive to see the venom just under the skin of some of the non-Christian Christians.
Time for you to slip into high dudgeon mode again
Love your enemies----nothing irritates them more.
Well, there was a little bit of editting between the "You betcha" and the "Gott Mit Uns".
In my post, I made a disctinction between the Nazi leadership and the common German "soldier in the trenches".
It is hard to imagine the leaders that dreamed up the Nazi atrocities as anything other than atheists. However, the German common people still considered themselves "Christian" in the generic meaning. The Nazis replaced the Hohenzollern Crown on the World War One Belt buckle with Nazi symbolism but they left the "Gott Mit Uns" on the buckle for the very practical reason that it still resonated with the German people.
There is no doubt that God abhorred what the Third Reich did but a hefty percentage of the common German people still believed that Jesus was on their side and their Death Cards still sought comfort in religious terms.
It may be argued that, if you are not Born Again, you don't qualify as a "Christian" or that if you are not a full practicing Catholic you don't qualify as a "Catholic Christian". However, we need to consider what the German people considered themselves and how the Jews saw their Nazi German and Czarist Russian-era Eastern European persecuters.
If the common German people shouting Sieg Heil called themselves "Christian" and the Polish or Russian peasants conducting a pogrom called themselves "Christian", then that forms the Ashkenazi Jewish ancestral memory of what a "Christian" is.
As I elaborated in my Post 82, it is my belief that that Eastern and Central European Jewish ancestral memory is the underpinning of the hostility that many Ashkenazi Jews have against devout American Christians.
Devout American Christians, who wouldn't know a pogrom from a pierogi, are then left totally puzzled as to why so many Ashkenazi Jews react so negatively against them in view of the fact that American Born Again Christians are the Jewish people's strongest supporters.
If we narrow the historical definition of "Christian" to a narrow theological defintion that includes only those people that live their lives as Christ wanted them to live it, then the American devout Christian will always be left wondering why on Earth so many Jews have a gut reaction against anything labelled "Christian" and against any American Christian that takes his religion very seriously.
Back to the buckle motto, the army was conservative and respected tradition. The army was not a Nazi formed organization and the party needed support of the officer corps. I maintain the position that the retention of the motto was political pandering by the party to the Army. The design of the buckle was the same for many long decades. Only the national emblem changed. In fact even the German communists had use for tradition and that basic style buckle sans motto can be seen utilized by the Red Front and other communist organizations in the1920s. In fact the East German Army wardrobe looked remarkably like the Nazis era army uniforms which really were only a modified version of the Wiemar period styles which themselves carried on from the Imperial era before that. The communist East German Army buckle lacked the Prussian motto but there is no mistaking the traditional look of it. So it is tradition that resonated with the people not necessarily God. Mention of God was mere tradition.
In fact the wide spread support of communism in Europe long before WWII shows just how dead Christianity was in those days. It's only more so today. And commonly even to this day Europe is referred to as a Christian land. The modern average % of the population that attends church on Sunday in Europe is 5%. Sure attendance was greater 60 - 70 years ago but still the church had even by then long lost its general mass appeal and authority. The German funeral cards were typically religious but then people do tend to seek crutches at time of loss. Even people who never went to church in their lives get religion when time comes to plant a loved one. Again it's tradition.
Have a nice day.
Thanks for your perspective.
Gibson made a movie. The reasons he made it can be discussed forever, but it's very popular. Part of that popularity is the controversy. And it's the Jews who caused the controversy. If they had kept their mouths shut, it probably wouldn't have generated the publicity it did and our Christian friends probably wouldn't think twice about whether there's a message about the Jews in the film. Sometimes, I think that liberal Jews hate Judaism so much, they look for ways to antagonize non-Jews so that they'll hate us...some even more than they do now.
An interesting perspective. It's my belief that they hate Judaism and it's values. That self-destructive tendency makes them say and do things that brings out the anti-Semite in some people who then attack the most visible of the Jews - the observant...leaving the left-wing secularists safe to promote more hatred. It's so frequent, I have to think it's deliberate.
It's been interesting chatting with you. Thanks for an enlightening conversation.
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