[TopQuark]

Yes, Jews were there--and they're welcome to make their own movie.

There is such as thing as a dialoge. You do not have to shut up jsut because I speak.

In this country we often say that response to speech is more speech. You do not appear to have accepted that.

But this is Gibson's vision based on the Gospels. He's got the right to express it without others daring to question YOu may have been born here but your views are grossly unAmerican. You can speak but it is everyone's right to question. You must've worked for the Inquisition for too long.

his political correctness No one asks him to be politically correct.

or the historicity of texts sacred to all Christians. Once again, he is not creating texts, and RETELLING may be done differently.

As for the texts, when taught literally, has enticed great the mobs for centuries to kill Jews. Apparently, you condone that.

It is true Jews have suffered persecution. But persecution is not unique to the Jews. No one said it was.

In the French Revolution 300,000 Catholics were deliberately slaughtered for their faith in just one region of France. Yes. But you will not find a single group of people now living that has suffered 90% loss in just five years --- as Jews in Poland, for instance.

Nor will you find the duration of persecution and georgraphic scope remotely similar to any other group. There is one group that is comparable on the second dimension -- Roma (Gypsies).

All other peoples who suffered as much as Jews have been wiped out (Indians of Argentina, for instance). You are an apologist and do not even attempt to adhere to principles when you address this issue. And, you cannor evne see how plain you are: why, for instance did you bring up the issue of persecution? I did not. It has nothing to do with the topic. You brought it up because YOU are tired of hearing about Jewish suffering, which must of course be exaggerated because your Church would never permit or participate in it. Well, that's the bias you choose to have. Look at the history of Catholics in England whose priests were hunted down for the crime of saying Mass and Catholics were forced to convert. Yeh, compare that to expelling from England not just the rabbis but the entire Jewish population in 1190 --- and not a Jew has been seen their until mid-1500s!

This is the sad story of the human race and its intolerance, Yeh, right. Tell us also that putting people in the oven is suffering as much as not having enough to eat. What a nice sensitive soul you are.

Yeh, and Holocaust was a little misunderstanding, I know. Who among us doesn't suffer, after all. I myself, hurt my pinky the other day.... That is what you essentially say. And all the while call yourself a Christian.

[ultima ratio]

Those who oppose Gibson and his film do more than speak--they attempt to poison the atmosphere by lies and innuendoes. They have threatened Gibson and made demands that he change his film even before it was completed. There has been an overt attempt to blackball this film, to prevent its distribution and to smear its profoundly Christian content with the false charge of anti-Semitism. A 47page screed against the film has already been sent to film critics in all major newspapers. That is more than speech or dialogue, that is a declaration of war.

Your charge that I am working "for the Inquisition" is interesting in itself, insofar as you seem to feel no need to restrain your own anti-Catholic hostility. In any case, your claim that the telling of the Passion has incited mobs for centuries is another of those received opinions that gets bruited about without proof. Still another even more egregious is the absolutely hateful assertion that Christianity itself led to the Holocaust. This is a smear that is casually propagated inside the Jewish community and in the secular press as well. In fact, Christianity had nothing to do with Hitler. The attempt by Jewish historians and intellectuals to make the connection--and even to smear the pope who did more than anyone alive to rescue Jews from the Holocaust--can only inspire further mutual mistrust and suspicion between the two religions.

The trump card with you guys is always the Holocaust--as if Christians were the cause of it. I don't accept this at all. It was the doing of a secularist evil--of the same sort that killed 300,000 French Catholics in a brief span of time in the French Revolution; the same that inspired Stalin to engineer a phony famine to starve 10million Ukrainians even while the graneries were full to capacity in the Ukraine. It is secularism gone mad--socialism that brooks no interference--that taught Hitler how to murder masses with souless impunity. Dostoievsky warned about this in Brothers Karamazov generations earlier: where there is no God, anything is permissible--even mass murder. In Russia, in fact, devout Christians were the first to be murdered by the hundreds of thousands.