The Protocols of Mel Gibson

Is there anything antisemitic about Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion"? Perhaps a better question might be: is there anything about it that isn't antisemitic? It might be impolite to criticize such a big-name celebrity and to dredge up his family past, but it's not as though he were doing anything to distance himself from his father's evil ideas. Katha Pollitt writes for The Nation:

[H]igh-end reviewers like the New York Times's A.O. Scott and Newsweek's David Ansen have given Gibson a pass on a movie that could safely be shown at the Leni Riefenstahl Memorial Film Festival. ... Gibson claims that there are good Jews and bad Jews in the movie, as in the Gospels. This is true, but disingenuous: In The Passion, the high priest Caiaphas and his faction are not just bad, they fit neatly into ancient Christian stereotypes... Gibson claims he's only telling the story as written in the Gospels, which he calls eyewitness accounts (historians say no). ... Yet when called on his inaccuracies and distortions, Gibson claims artistic license. ... Why does Gibson dress Mary and Magdalene in what look like nun's habits, if not to turn these two Jewish women into good Catholics avant la lettre? And why does he show an earthquake splitting the temple interior as Christ expires (in the Bible, a curtain is torn), if not to justify as God's vengeance the historical destruction of the temple by the Romans a few decades later and all the sufferings of the Jewish people since?

It's a mystery to me why the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has given this crude and kitschy film a thumbs up ("deeply personal work of devotional art...the Jewish people are at no time blamed collectively for Jesus' death"). Gibson has violated just about every precept of the conference's own 1988 "Criteria" for the portrayal of Jews in dramatizations of the Passion (no bloodthirsty Jews, no rabble, no use of Scripture that reinforces negative stereotypes of Jews, etc.). Even stranger is the enthusiasm for the film among Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists, who seem not to realize how specifically Catholic Gibson's theology is. A generation ago, "Bible-believing" Protestants would have been up in arms over, among other "popish heresies," the quasi-divine role given to Mary and the reverence for Christ's blood ... Do evangelicals not have theology anymore--anything goes as long as it's "conservative," and puts Jesus on top?

To call the defenses of Gibson's film "lame" would be granting them far more credit and power than they deserve. "Lame" doesn't even begin to describe how bad and, in some cases, how disingenuous they really are. Unfortunately, most Christians who see the film won't be aware of what's really going on, how their religious beliefs are being manipulated, or of the background these debates have.

Read More:

• Roman Catholicism
• Antisemitism
• News and Commentary on Mel Gibson's The Passion