Posted on 02/27/2004 3:40:31 AM PST by ejdrapes
A FEW years ago, Mel Gibson got himself into an argument after uttering a series of crude remarks that were hostile to homosexuals. Now he has made a film that principally appeals to the gay Christian sado-masochistic community: a niche market that hasn't been sufficiently exploited. If you like seeing handsome young men stripped and tied up and flayed with whips, The Passion Of The Christ is the movie for you. Some people used to go to Ben-Hur deliberately late, and just watch the chariot race while skipping the boring quasi-Biblical stuff. Alas, that isn't possible with this film. Along with the protracted torture comes a simple-minded but nonetheless bigoted version of the more questionable bits of the Gospels. It's boring all right - much of the film is excruciatingly tedious - but it also manages to be extraordinarily nasty. Gibson claims that the Holy Ghost spoke through him in the directing of this movie, and that everything in it is from the Bible. I very much doubt the first claim, and I can safely say that the second one is false. The Bible does not have an encounter between Jesus and a sort of Satanic succubus figure in the Garden of Gethsemane. The Bible does not have a raven pecking out the eye of one of the crucified thieves. The Bible does not have Judas pursued to his suicide by a horde of supernatural and sinister devil-children. Moreover, whatever the Bible may say, the Roman authorities in Jerusalem were not minor officials in a Jewish empire, compelled to obey the orders of a gang of bloodthirsty rabbis. It was Rome that was boss. Indeed, Pontius Pilate was later recalled by the Emperor Tiberius for the extreme brutality with which he treated the Jewish inhabitants (and you had to be quite cruel to get Tiberius to raise his eyebrows). YET Gibson is evidently obsessed with the Jewish question, and it shows in his film. It also shows when he's off-screen. Invited by Peggy Noonan - a sympathetic conservative interviewer - in Reader's Digest to say what he thought of the Holocaust, Gibson replied with extreme cold-ness that a lot of people were killed in the Second World War and no doubt some of them were Jews. Shit happens, in other words. He doesn't seem to grasp the point that the war was started by a political party which believed in a Jewish world conspiracy. He doesn't go as far as his father, who says that the Holocaust story is "mostly fiction" and that there were more Jews at the end of the war than there were at the beginning, but he does say that his old man has "never told me a lie". And he does say that he bases his film on the visions of the Crucifixion experienced by a 19th-century German nun, Anne-Catherine Emmerich, who believed that the Jews used the blood of Christian children in their Passover rituals. (In case you have forgotten, the setting of the film is the Jewish Passover.) Yesterday, as the movie opened, a Pentecostal church in Denver, Colorado, put up a big sign on its marquee saying: "Jews Killed The Lord Jesus." Nice going. In order to keep up this relentless propaganda pressure, Gibson employs the cheap technique of the horror movie director. Just as you think things can't get any worse, he shoves in a gruesome surprise. The flogging scene stops, and you think: "Well, that's over." And then the sadistic guards pick up a new kind of flagellating instrument, and start again. The nails go through the limbs, one by one, and then, for an extra touch, the cross is raised, turned over and dropped face-down with its victim attached, so that the nails can be flattened down on the other side. The vulg-arity and sensationalism of this would be bad enough if there wasn't a continual accompaniment of jeering, taunting Jews who want more of the same. The same cynical tactic has been applied to the marketing of the movie. Gibson is well known to be a member of a Catholic extremist group that rejects the Pope's teachings and denounces the Second Vatican Council (which, among other things, dropped the charge that all Jews were Christ-killers). He went to some trouble to spread alarm in the Jewish community, which rightly suspected that the film might revive the old religious paranoia. HE showed the film at the Vatican, and then claimed that the Pope had endorsed it - a claim that the Vatican has flatly denied, but then every little helps. Then he ran a series of screenings for right-wing fundamentalists only, and refused to show any tapes to anyone who wasn't a religious nut. (It took me ages to get around the ban and get hold of a pirated copy, and I was writing for the Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair.) Having secured a huge amount of free publicity in this way, and some very lucrative advance block bookings from Christian fundamentalist groups, Gibson now talks self-pityingly about how he has risked his fortune and his career, but doesn't care if he "never works again" because he's done it all for Jesus. The clear message I get from that is that he'll be boycotted by sinister Hollywood Jews. So it's a win-win for him: big box office or celebrity martyrdom. With any luck, a bit of both. How perfectly nauseating. In a widely publicised concession, Gibson said that he'd removed the scene where the Jewish mob cries out that it wants the blood of Jesus to descend on the heads of its children's children. This very questionable episode - it is mentioned in only one of the four gospels - has in fact not been cut. Only the English subtitle has gone. (The film is spoken in Aramaic and Latin, though Roman soldiers actually spoke a dialect of Greek.) So when the film is later shown, in Russia and Poland, say, or Egypt and Syria, there will be a ready-made propaganda vehicle for those who fancy a bit of torture and murder, with a heavy dose of Jew-baiting thrown in. Gibson knows very well that this will happen, and he'll be raking it in from exactly those foreign rights to the film. So my advice is this. Do not go. Leave it to the sickoes who like this sort of thing, and don't fill the pockets of the sicko who made it.I DETEST THIS FILM ..WITH A PASSION
This is the truth of the war on terror most gov's are not willing to face.
wether Jihadi go active and kill infidel....the majority of Islam stands by the flags and the script.
To deny this..is to deny all..and they can't.
Lying and deception are not offensive principles ..they are to be used like tools to defeat the infidel.
so..how do you reason with a juggernaut machine which supports your demise..whether its done in actuallity..or by tacit approval by the onlooker.
In southern Iraq..a few Shia clerics have enlarged themselves with their new freedom..and what has occured is chilling.
thousands and thousands of emotional jihadi wearing green head bands..chanting death too...
Hizbullah was the first kodak of this Hitler brownshirts thingy in the early 80's.....today it pours into the vacumn in Iraq.
This is the same dynamic which has been in Africa...has spawned or embraced Mahdism..and lead to the deaths of millions.
If this crowd gets WMD...look out.
its not in their psychy to feel sorry for the death of anyone in the way....muslims are expunged in great numbers if they are seen as non commited to the great cause.
The war on terror has a home front..it is the mosque.
Hitchens is not apparently objective: witness his overtly political biased judgment against Mother Teresa's beatification:
Mommie Dearest
The pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Oct. 20, 2003, at 1:04 PM PT
[During the deliberations over the Second Vatican Council, under the stewardship of Pope John XXIII, MT (Mother Teresa) was to the fore in opposing all suggestions of reform. What was needed, she maintained, was more work and more faith, not doctrinal revision. Her position was ultra-reactionary and fundamentalist even in orthodox Catholic terms. Believers are indeed enjoined to abhor and eschew abortion, but they are not required to affirm that abortion is "the greatest destroyer of peace," as MT fantastically asserted to a dumbfounded audience when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize *. Believers are likewise enjoined to abhor and eschew divorce, but they are not required to insist that a ban on divorce and remarriage be a part of the state constitution, as MT demanded in a referendum in Ireland (which her side narrowly lost) in 1996.… ]
Every week observant Jews celebrate the holiday of the Sabbath, commemorating the creation of the world, and once a year, other holidays centered around more recent events in our history, such as our escape from slavery in ancient Egypt.
Given this, it should not be surprising that we also remember that in 1555, Pope Paul IV published a Bull that stressed that we, the "Christ-killers," were by nature slaves and should be so treated, or that in 1581, Pope Gregory XIII said that our guilt regarding Jesus' death grew deeper with time, requiring our perpetual slavery. We also remember the anti-Jewish quotas at US universities that persisted into the early 20th Century.
In fact, there are Jews alive today who remember having the "christ killer" epithet hurled at them while either fleeing from or recieving a beating by zealous Christian bullies.
Now, I do recognize the pronounced irony in this position, the Church simultaneously stating that Jesus Christ "freely suffered death for us in complete and free submission to the will of God, his Father," and that "by his death he has conquered death, and so opened the possibility of salvation to all men,"1 while on the other hand reviling Jews for our supposed role in his death, and that "christ killer" has no place in a modern understanding of Christianity.
But I don't think that it is entirely unjustified, given the place of that epithet in living memory and recent history (less than 500 years ago), for Jews to express concern about how people who have never read the Catholic Catechism and don't even really understand their professed faith might interpret this film, or about what kind of overt or subtextual message is presented in the film.
That expression of concern isn't an accusation.
Personally, I tend to agree with the JPFO press release - there's people out there who, film or no film, will hate Jews and want to do us harm. Our so-called Jewish leaders should focus on the real threats to Jews, such as Arab fundamentalism, the Palestinian Authority, and Saudi Arabia, rather than on Mel Gibson and his cinematic profession of Christian faith.
I want to see this movie!! I'm not sure I can handle the gore.
And the point of this article is religious intolerance?
Exactly!
I don't see it that way at all, and his comparison with the Islamic situation is entirely appropriate. Christians have the same moral obligation to refute charges of anti-Semitism in this matter as Muslims have a responsibility to inform a fearful world about the true nature of the mainstream faith. For that matter, I think Mel Gibson has an obligation to clear the air about the difference between his ethnic beliefs and those of his wack-job father.
I'm glad that Hitchens is pointing out what has worried me about this film, though. Namely, how is this film going to be seen in other countries? Here in the U.S., where there's both a strong religious sentiment and extremely little history of real, violent, anti-semitism, the film's not going to do much to inflame things, and it will well serve a large audience.
But how is it going to be seen in Germany, in Poland, in Russia, in France, countries with long histories of anti-semitism and regular additions to that history? Will it be used as a tool by those forces, as it could be, especially when it comes out on DVD and VHS, and anyone can cut their own version to highlight an agenda.
I'm not saying that Mel shouldn't have made the movie. He should make whatever he wants, just like I should be able to make a movie that's two hours of a child being raped and tortured in front of her parents in a Baghdad basement. That one would probably do some people some good, too. But I can't be surprised when I learn other people are watching it with a different state of mind.
Well, haven't we all noticed the long lines of gay sad-masochistic Christians at all the screenings and showings of The Passion? Sheesh. I didn't need to read past this opener.
I do agree with you about that, and about the suffering of Jews under Hitler. However, I would like you as a Jew, and other Jews to condemn the killing of Christians under Arab, and Moslem majority governments. The sympathy that you get from Christians about your holocaust should be appreciated and matched with support and sympathy towards the Holocaust of Christians in the Sudan, Indonesia, Egypt,…
All I'm asking is that Mel be forthright about telling us how his beliefs differ from his father's. This has nothing to do with generational guilt, but direct parental influence.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.