<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/21/arts/21RICH.html?ex=1064721600&en=7126a
37552fcf278&ei=5062>
FRANK RICH The Greatest Story Ever Sold
Then Gibson expressed his feelings about Rich. "I want to kill him," he
said. "I want his intestines on a stick. . . . I want to kill his dog." �
The New Yorker, Sept. 15
PETA members may be relieved to learn that I do not have a dog.
As for the rest of Mel Gibson's threats, context is all: the guy is a
movie star. Movie stars expect to get their own way. They are surrounded
by sycophants, many of them on the payroll. Should a discouraging word
somehow prick the bubble of fabulousness in which they travel, even
big-screen he-men can turn into crybabies. Mr. Gibson's tirade sounded
less like a fatwa from the Ayatollah Khomeini than a tantrum from Sinatra
in his cups.
My capital crime was to write a column on this page last month reporting
that Mr. Gibson was promoting his coming film about the crucifixion, "The
Passion," by baiting Jews. As indeed he has. In January, the star had
gone on "The O'Reilly Factor" to counter Jewish criticism of his
cinematic account of Jesus's final hours � a provocative opening volley
given that no critic of any faith had yet said anything about his movie
(and wouldn't for another three months). Clearly he was looking for a
brawl, and he hasn't let up since. In the New Yorker profile, Mr. Gibson
says that "modern secular Judaism wants to blame the Holocaust on the
Catholic Church," a charge that Abraham H. Foxman, of the Anti-Defamation
League, labels "classic anti-Semitism." Mr. Gibson also says that he
trimmed a scene from "The Passion" involving the Jewish high priest
Caiaphas because if he didn't do so "they'd be coming after me at my
house, they'd come to kill me."
Who is this bloodthirsty "they" threatening to martyr our fearless hero?
Could it be the same mob that killed Jesus? Funny, but as far as I can
determine, the only death threat that's been made in conjunction with
"The Passion" is Mr. Gibson's against me. The New Yorker did, though,
uncover one ominous threat against the star: "He's heard that someone
from one of his hangouts, the Grand Havana Room, a Beverly Hills smoking
club, said that he'd spit on him if he ever came in again." Heard from
whom? What is the identity of that mysterious "someone"? What do they
smoke at that "smoking club"? Has the Grand Havana Room been infiltrated
by Madonna's Kabbalah study group? I join a worried nation in praying for
Mr. Gibson's safety.
His over-the-top ramblings are, of course, conceived in part to sell his
product. "Inadvertently, all the problems and the conflicts and stuff �
this is some of the best marketing and publicity I have ever seen," Mr.
Gibson told The New Yorker. That's true � with the possible exception of
the word "inadvertently" � and I realize that I've been skillfully roped
into his remarkably successful p.r. juggernaut. But I'm glad to play my
cameo role � and unlike Bill O'Reilly, who sold the film rights to one of
his books to Mr. Gibson's production company, I am not being paid by him
to do so.
What makes the unfolding saga of "The Passion" hard to ignore is not so
much Mr. Gibson's playacting fisticuffs but the extent to which his
combative marketing taps into larger angers. The "Passion" fracas is
happening not in a vacuum but in an increasingly divided America fighting
a war that many on both sides see as a religious struggle. While Mr.
Gibson may have thought he was making a biblical statement, his partisans
are turning him into an ideological cause.
The lines are drawn on seethepassion.com, the most elaborate Web site
devoted to championing Mr. Gibson. There we're told that the debate over
"The Passion" has "become a focal point for the Culture War which will
determine the future of our country and the world." When this site
criticizes The Times, it changes the family name of the paper's publisher
from Sulzberger to "Schultzberger." (It was no doubt inadvertent that Mr.
O'Reilly, in a similar slip last week, referred to the author of a New
Republic critique of Mr. Gibson, the Boston University theologian Paula
Fredrikson, as "Fredrickstein.") This animus is not lost on critics of
"The Passion." As the A.D.L.'s Rabbi Eugene Korn has said of Mr. Gibson
to The Jewish Week, "He's playing off the conservative Christians against
the liberal Christians, and the Jews against the Christian community in
general."
To what end? For the film's supporters, the battle is of a piece with the
same blue state-red state cultural chasm as the conflicts over the Ten
Commandments in an Alabama courthouse, the growing legitimization of
homosexuality (Mr. Gibson has had his innings with gays in the past) and
the leadership of a president who wraps public policy in religiosity and
called the war against terrorism a "crusade" until his handlers
intervened. So what if "modern secular" Jews � whoever they are � are
maligned by Mr. Gibson or his movie? It's in the service of a larger
calling. After all, Tom DeLay and evangelical Christians can look after
the Jews' interests in Israel, at least until Armageddon rolls around
and, as millennialist theology would have it, the Jews on hand either
convert or die.
Intentionally or not, the contentious rollout of "The Passion" has
resembled a political, rather than a spiritual, campaign, from its start
on "The O'Reilly Factor." Since the star belongs to a fringe church that
disowns Vatican II and is not recognized by the Los Angeles Roman
Catholic archdiocese, his roads do not lead to Rome so much as
Washington. It was there that he screened a rough cut of the movie to
conservative columnists likely to give it raves � as they did.
The few Jews invited to "Passion" screenings by Mr. Gibson tend to be
political conservatives. One is Michael Medved, who is fond of describing
himself in his published "Passion" encomiums as a "former synagogue
president" � betting that most of his readers will not know that this is
a secular rank falling somewhere between co-op board president and
aspiring Y.M.H.A. camp counselor. When non-right-wing Jews asked to see
the film, we were turned away � thus allowing Mr. Gibson's defenders, in
a perfect orchestration of Catch-22, to say we were attacking or trying
to censor a film we "haven't seen." This has been a constant theme in the
bouquet of anti-Semitic mail I've received since my previous column about
"The Passion."
I never called the movie anti-Semitic or called for its suppression. I
did say that if early reports by Catholic and Jewish theologians alike
were accurate in stating that "The Passion" revived the deicide charge
against Jews, it could have a tinderbox effect abroad. The authorities I
cited based their criticisms on a draft of the movie's screenplay. (The
most forceful critic of the movie has been Sister Mary Boys, of the Union
Theological Seminary in New York.) I have since sought out some of those
who have seen the movie itself, in the same cut praised by Mr. Gibson's
claque this summer. They are united in believing, as one of them puts it,
that "it's not a close call � the film clearly presents the Jews as the
primary instigators of the crucifixion."
Mr. Gibson would argue that he is only being true to tradition, opting
for scriptural literalism over loosey-goosey modern revisionism. But by
his own account, he has based his movie on at least one revisionist
source, a 19th-century stigmatic nun, Anne Catherine Emmerich, notable
for her grotesque caricatures of Jews. To the extent that there can be
any agreement about the facts of a story on which even the four Gospels
don't agree, his movie is destined to be inaccurate. People magazine
reports he didn't even get the depiction of the crucifixion itself or the
language right ("The Passion" is in Latin, Aramaic and Hebrew, not the
Greek believed to have been the lingua franca of its characters). Like
any filmmaker, Mr. Gibson has selectively chosen his sources to convey
his own point of view.
If the film does malign Jews, should it be suppressed? No. Mr. Gibson has
the right to release whatever movie he wants, and he undoubtedly will,
whether he finds a studio to back him or rents theaters himself. The
ultimate irony may be that Jews will help him do so; so far the only
studio to pass on the movie is Fox, owned by a conservative non-Jew,
Rupert Murdoch. But Mr. Gibson, forever crying censorship when there
hasn't been any, does not understand that the First Amendment is a
two-way street. "He has his free speech," Mr. Foxman says. "I guess he
can't tolerate yours and mine."
As for Mr. Gibson's own speech in this debate, it is often as dishonest
as it is un-Christian. In the New Yorker article, he says that his
father, Hutton Gibson, a prolific author on religious matters, "never
denied the Holocaust"; the article's author, Peter J. Boyer, sanitizes
the senior Gibson further by saying he called the Holocaust a "tragedy"
in an interview he gave to the writer Christopher Noxon for a New York
Times Magazine article published last March. Neither the word "tragedy"
nor any synonym for it ever appeared in that Times article, and according
to a full transcript of the interview that Mr. Noxon made available to
me, Hutton Gibson said there was "no systematic extermination" of the
Jews by Hitler, only "a deal where he was supposed to make it rough on
them so they would all get out and migrate to Israel because they needed
people there to fight the Arabs. . . ." (This is consistent with Hutton
Gibson's public stands on the issue; he publishes a newsletter in which
the word Holocaust appears in quotes.)
Then again, Mel Gibson's publicist, Alan Nierob, also plays bizarre games
with the Holocaust. He has tried to deflect any criticism of the Gibsons
by identifying himself in both The New York Post and The New Yorker as "a
founding member of the national Holocaust Museum." That's not a trivial
claim. The founders of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington are an elite donors' group specifically designated as such;
they gave a minimum of a million dollars each and are inscribed in
granite on the museum's wall. Mr. Nierob is not among them. Presumably he
was instead among the 300,000 who responded to the museum's first
direct-mail campaign for charter members. That could set you back at
least 25 bucks.
Mr. Gibson has told the press that he regards "The Passion" as having
actually been directed by the Holy Ghost. If the movie is only half as
fanciful as its promotional campaign, I'd say that He has a lock on the
Oscar for best director. A Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for Mr.
Gibson himself, though, may be something of a reach.
------
Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now
doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. It is the same
thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the
liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the
Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry
directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything
suffered by any minority in history.
-- Pat Robertson
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