Posted on 02/10/2005 7:02:09 AM PST by malakhi
This week's nominations for the film industry's Oscars for the best movies of the year 2004 provided a sigh of relief to some, as it stoked the conspiracy theories harbored by others.
Nearly a year after Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" launched 1,000 commentaries, the 77th Academy Awards ceremony closes the parenthesis on this remarkable cultural phenomenon.
As much as critics blasted it -- while others condemned it for incitement of anti-Semitism -- "The Passion" turned into the surprise blockbuster of the year. As such, its popularity was widely considered a slap in the face to the liberal media/culture establishment.
So while some feared that an Oscar for Gibson or the film would revive the controversy, the unsurprising refusal of the same Hollywood elite that despised the film to honor it will cause the argument to be revisited anyway.
Let us waste no more ink debating the merits of this thoroughly bad film. But I am still interested in the way this story pushes buttons and illustrates the way some Jews look at the world.
Case in point is the way two people have hung on to the controversy and done their best to keep it alive.
They are the Anti-Defamation League's national director, Abe Foxman, and Rabbi Daniel Lapin, a Seattle-based talk-radio host and the head of a small conservative group called Toward Tradition.
Foxman led the charge against the film and its seeming reaffirmation of the myth that placed the responsibility for the death of the Christian messiah on the Jews. He also took the lion's share of blame from those who believed that Gibson used critics to hype a small film into a mega-hit.
Foxman's still smarting from that charge.
He responded in a recent Jerusalem Post opinion piece that restated his reasons for protest and his fears that those who see it in the future will be exposed to "the film's vile notions of Jews."
Blame it on Barbra
On the other end of the spectrum is Lapin, a marginal figure among Jews but someone who enjoys some notoriety among evangelicals who flocked to see the movie. At the time that most other Jews were following Foxman's lead, Lapin was part of Gibson's cheering section.
But rather than merely gloat about Foxman's discomfort, Lapin is attempting to use the "Passion" anniversary to refloat one of his own ideas. He doesn't think the real cause for anti-Semitism lies in the age-old canards that Foxman and others have sought to debunk. For the South African-born rabbi, the cause of hatred for the Jews can be found in the behavior of actors Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand.
What has this famous Jewish duo done?
The answer is that they made a movie that the right-wing rabbi considered far worse than Gibson's.
For Lapin, the Streisand-Hoffman appearance in the regrettable "Meet the Fockers" wasn't merely an exercise in bad taste. For him, it was a defamation of American Jewry.
In the film -- the sequel to the extremely popular "Meet the Parents" -- Streisand and Hoffman portray the oversexed and eccentric Jewish parents of a character played by actor Ben Stiller, a dorky Jewish male nurse who's marrying a gentile goddess. The conceit of the piece lies in a visit by the girl's uptight parents to Miami, home of their Jewish hippy in-laws. Comic complications ensue, some of which deal with the stereotyped connections of the Jewish couple to Judaism.
But rather than dismiss this as cinematic nonsense, Lapin, in a piece widely distributed by his organization, considers it a prime example of how Jews are destroying American morals.
"You'd have to be a recent immigrant from Outer Mongolia not to know of the role that people with Jewish names play in the coarsening of our culture," fulminates Lapin. "Almost every American knows this. It is just that most gentiles are too polite to mention it."
Was Hitler right?
Acknowledging that any ordinary reader would be shocked at such a statement, Lapin remains undaunted, and goes even further with a quote from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. Lapin observes that "that evil megalomaniac roused his nation" not through use of the deicide myth, but by noting the Jewish influence in German cultural life.
"It does not excuse Hitler or his Nazi thugs for us to acknowledge that this maniacal, master propagandist focused on a reality that resonated with the educated, and cultured Germans of his day," writes Lapin.
In other words, according to Lapin, avant-garde Jewish artists "linked Jews and deviant sexuality" in the German imagination, and so set the stage for the Shoah. He sees American Jews as similarly responsible for our country's "cultural decline" -- something that "angers more Americans than the crucifixion."
Lapin is right that some Jews on the left have been all too quick to wrongly stigmatize Christian conservatives as anti-Semites when, in fact, many are ardent supporters of Israel.
He's also right when he condemns the decline of public morality. But who but an anti-Semite or a Jew who hates liberals more than he despises Jew-haters would place the blame for this solely on the Jews?
Blaming liberals for anti-Semitism is as vile as blaming it on Jewish actors.
When Lapin claims that actors who spoof Jewish secularism are practicing anti-Semitism while at the same time rationalizing those who would single out "the Jews" as the destroyers of American decency, the rabbi has crossed the boundary from irresponsible commentary to fomenting hatred of his own people.
Out of all the loopy things that have been said and written about Gibson's film, Lapin's article qualifies as the low point of the discussion. In his zeal to condemn his foes, the talking rabbi has proven that self-hatred isn't a virus that can be solely linked to the Jewish left.
Say what you will about Foxman's dogged attempt to justify his role as Gibson's unwitting foil in last year's cultural follies. But Daniel Lapin represents an example of how "The Passion" helped motivate a cultural conservative to turn on his own people. Viewed in that context, it turns out to be a far scarier movie than anyone may have dreamed.
Hmmm... Kinda makes the guy who burned a church full of people look like a piker, huh? ;0)
Oh, and IIRC, they put his head on display on the city gate, didn't they? I forget, exactly...
Well, you know, they didn't have MTV back then...if they did, they'd have a show called Pimp My Execution
Here are a few quick links jsut to show that I am not a paranoid, Gibson hater. But now I really, really have to do some work so will add more links when possible.
This guy likes BRaveheart (I actually liked the film too but not his anti-britness)
http://www.drinkfromthefurrycup.com/candy/1.shtml
"So my opinion of the film then? Well the actual movie is most enjoyable and you shouldn't notice as the time flies by (three hour movie). However the feel of the movie is a little too much like "The last of the Mohicans" (1992), and I feel that "The Patriot" suffers because of this (sorry The last of the Mohicans was better). The general flow if the film was a little predictable, for example within two seconds of meeting our villain we know he must survive for a final apocalyptic battle with Mel. "
"On a more personal note; what is it with Mel Gibson and movies in which British chaps get a right kicking? Is it just me or has Mel Gibson been in just about every movie to feature the Brits losing a battle, Braveheart for example features Mel happily wading into Brits with a giant sword. Never mind, just my tupence."
http://www.leonardite.com/microscope/gibson.html
This guy staes his opinons humourously and should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Most Brits do believe Gibson hates us.
Unreal. And they were still doing that just 28 years prior to my own grandmother's birth.
Which is too bad, because I can't see any valid reason why anyone would hate the British - their cooking, yes, but not as people... ;0)
...we were hanging people here, as well as engaging in tarring and feathering, horse whipping, etc. American Indians were doing some nasty stuff as well.
We're not so far from the brutal as people think.
What do ya mean "were"? Why, I recall... /DreamySigh
People today complain about the violence of video games, movies or professional sports. They forget just how far we've come from public executions where rooms with the best views were rented for big bucks.
Yeah, everyone loves to live day to day within the thin veneer of "civilization", but the undercurrent is still pretty savage.
Point taken - but why does that sound better to me than having genitals cut off, being disemboweled, beheaded, and quartered?
Umm.. because you are kinky, but not THAT kinky?
I have to get to work or who knows what fate will await me...it's been really fun. Thanks!
You nailed it. : )
LOL - best exercise caution...your boss might be a closet Brit! ; )
It was a good guys-bad guys fictional film and the Brits are the bad guys. The Church scene never happened, and I can understand taking umbrage at that one. Tarleton may have been called "the butcher", but to my knowledge there's no basis to portray him as killing women, children, or prisoners. But Mel exaggerated the good guy to. Francis Marion married once, after the war I believe, was kind of an unpleasant French fellow who never had any kids and owned slaves morphed into a near pacifist family man stirred to action by his son's murder. It's a movie, a gooder good guy beats a badder bad guy.
Chad, I think the Indians the Gibson character massacred were Mohawks.
BTW, interesting that in filming Master and Commander the Americans turn into French. Didn't want to show Brits shooting at us.
Well, they were Iroquois, certainly, but not Mohawk - Cherokee, I believe (who are Iroquoian whether they like it or not)...
Right. I have found some reltaively balanced statements by Mel about the British so I am happy to take back allegations that he said bad things in interviews.
However I do stand by my original post that Britain was surprised to find him not blaming us for Christ's death because when someone makes two films in a row where the British are the villainous bad guys and also the losers
you tend to think maybe he has issues with the British.
I think if he had made two films in a row where American's where shown as the baddies you might think the same.
http://www.tiscali.co.uk/entertainment/film/interviews/mel_gibson.html
"Somebody has to be, I mean what can I say? You go to any
country and you'll find somebody has done something
horrible to somebody else," he says, before adding with a
smile. "We're giving the Germans a break."
On a more serious note, Gibson adds: "There were actually
some really horrible things done, not just by the British
to the colonialists but between the colonialists, the
loyalists and the rebels."
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