Falling into the 'Passion' pit

By Michael Medved

Jerusalem Post | Feb. 19, 2004


Every day, Israel faces new attacks from terrorists determined to
murderJewish children. In France, synagogues burn, cemeteries face
desecration, and leading rabbis urge their followers to shun kippot
inpublic. In every part of the globe, the militantly secular,
America-hating Left makes incongruous common cause with Islamic
fundamentalism in circulating poisonous anti-Semitic canards, including
ludicrous charges of Jewish conspiracies behind banking, media,
"neo-conservative" foreign policy, and even the devastating attacks
of9/11.

In the midst of this alarming eruption of anti-Jewish sentiment, some
usually level-headed commentators have reached the preposterous
conclusion that this is the perfect moment for a ferocious new debate
with our Christian neighbors on the eternal question "Who really
killedJesus?"

The fact that my otherwise savvy friend Rabbi Shmuley Boteach believes
that we have any chance at all of winning this debate reflects
appallingly poor judgment. And the determination by Boteach and many
others to conduct the argument in an aggressive and ultimately insulting
way at this precarious moment in history represents a far greater spur
to anti-Semitism than any mere motion picture from Hollywood even a
sure-bet box office blockbuster like Mel Gibson's The Passion of the
Christ.

For the record, let me make clear that I agree with Boteach that the
Christian scriptures provide an often unreliable, occasionally
contradictory account of the persecution and execution of Jesus of
Nazareth.

If I believed that the Gospels represented an unfailingly accurate
report of the events of two thousand years ago, I'd be a Christian, not
a Jew.

In defending Mel Gibson and his movie from hysterical and destructive
charges of anti-Semitism, I have never suggested that the film portrays
historical truth any more than one must argue that popular Moses movies,
from The Ten Commandments to The Prince of Egypt, offer a precise and
incontrovertible account of the Biblical story of the Exodus.

The only relevant question about The Passion of the Christ (which
Boteach acknowledges he hasn't even seen) is whether or not its
portrayal of the last hours of Jesus falls within the mainstream of
Christian interpretation and finds support within the Gospel text.

The enthusiastic embrace of this movie by leaders of every Christian
denomination, including the leading Catholic authorities, provides a
definitive answer to that question and renders the specific attacks by
Boteach largely irrelevant.

In fact, all of the most controversial scenes and lines of dialogue stem
directly from the Gospels, chapter and verse. This means that critics of
the movie inevitably train their fire on Saints Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
John rather than "Saint" Mel.

Of course, Jewish observers retain a perfect right to challenge sacred
Christian texts or to denounce the altogether conventional
interpretation of those texts by a major filmmaker, but one might
reasonably inquire what possible purpose such arguments can serve.

By what right do Boteach and his many outspoken allies in the Jewish
community demand that Mel Gibson and his innumerable supporters among
Protestant and Catholic clergy should reject their own religious
tradition to accept a Jewish version of the death of their savior?

After many centuries of Christian persecution of Jews, we have finally
won the unquestioned right to reject the Gospel claims and yet live in
peace with our gentile neighbors. But this precious right to deny the
accuracy of New Testament texts does not somehow empower us to insist
that our Christian fellow citizens must join us in that denial.

For reasons that defy rational explanation, Boteach insists upon picking
an ugly public fight with believing Christians who view their own sacred
books in the same way the rabbi views the Torah as the inerrant word of
God. To characterize elements of the Gospels as "fabrications" and
"cheap frauds," as Boteach does in one of his columns, hardly helps the
cause of Jewish-Christian cooperation.

He says that we must engage in this poisonous dispute in order to turn
aside the mother of all blood libels and to absolve ourselves of charges
of deicide. But this logic only holds if one accepts an unbreakable
association between today's Jews and the corrupt Roman collaborator
Caiphas, high priest in the Temple at the time of Jesus.

I refuse to accept the offensive notion that my working relationship
with Christian colleagues depends upon their holding priestly
authorities of 2,000 years ago blameless in the death of their Lord. Mel
Gibson has repeatedly asserted his impassioned acceptance of
contemporary Church teaching that today's Jews bear no blood guilt
whatever, no inherited blame, for the decisions which the Sadducees may
(or may not) have made in the first century.

Boteach's contention that our security and dignity today demand that
Christians reject part of their own scripture to "clear" ancient Judean
leaders from significant guilt in Christ's death represents a mad,
arrogant obsession.

All leading contemporary theologians, Protestant as well as Catholic,
echo Gibson's position that we bear no present-day responsibility for
the cruel events that culminated in the crucifixion. Only Boteach
embraces the utterly untenable assertion that defending ourselves
requires a retroactive defense of Caiphas.

The most pressing issue regarding the current controversy is what
exactly Mel Gibson's attackers hope to accomplish with their
sky-is-falling denunciations of his work. He paid for the film himself
(to the tune of $25 million) precisely because he wanted to realize his
own religious vision without compromise.

This commitment hardly represents an act of hatred or fanaticism but a
statement of the highest artistic aspiration.

Having seen the film, it's obvious that he's succeeded in creating a
cinematic work of undeniable immediacy and power. It is not, by the way,
about "the Jews" but rather about one particular Jew worshiped by Gibson
(and two billion others) as the messiah and the deity incarnate.

As I have written in numerous venues (including "Christianity Today," in
a current article), Jews will not enjoy this movie, but we ought to
recognize it wasn't made for us and it doesn't focus on us. The Passion
of the Christ counts as a project of the Christians, by the Christians,
and for the Christians.

It will open on more than 2,000 screens on February 25 and will draw
literally tens of millions of eager filmgoers, regardless of calls for a
boycott by Shmuley Boteach and others.

The inevitable success of the film makes it an especially foolish
strategy for Jewish organizations and individuals to continue expending
energy and credibility in denouncing it. This posture makes us look both
mean-spirited and, finally, powerless and irrelevant.

We also fall into the devastating trap of "crying wolf." When
anti-Semitic depredations fail to materialize as predicted in response
to this movie, it will make it far more difficult to mobilize concern
over genuine dangers in the years to come.

Above all, the misguided agony over The Passion of the Christ serves as
a tragic distraction at a time when we need unity and allies more than
ever before. Let us never forget that the menacing recent wave in
anti-Semitism in the Middle East and around the world arises from the
Islamic community and the anti-religious Left, not (so far, at least)
from traditional Christians.

In this context, the challenge to Christian orthodoxy implicit in the
more intemperate attacks on Mel Gibson's movie serves no constructive
purpose and works to foment, rather than deflect, anti-Semitic
attitudes. When facing an onrushing express train (like this
sure-to-be-popular movie), it makes little sense to stand on the track
in the middle of a railroad trestle holding up a hand and pleading,
"Stop!"

Or, to put it in even more commonsensical terms, when you've already
placed yourself in a deep hole, it's a good idea to stop digging.

[Medved, a film critic, author, and nationally syndicated radio talk
show host in the US, is co-founder and former longtime president of
thePacific Jewish Center in Venice, California].

...  and remember the people shredder?

Britain & Australia Hoaxed - the CIA or Mossad?

Not a shred of evidence 

[British] Spectator 21F04

[BUT WHO PLANTED THE STORY?]

Did Saddam Hussein really use industrial shredders to kill his enemies?
Brendan O'Neill is not persuaded that he did Forget the no-show of
Saddam Hussein's WMD. Even George Bush no longer believes that they are
there. Ask instead what happened to Saddam's 'people shredder', into
which his son Qusay reportedly fed opponents of the Baathist regime. Ann
Clwyd, Labour MP for Cynon Valley and chair of Indict, a group that has
been campaigning since 1996 for the creation of an international
criminal tribunal to try the Baathists, wrote of the shredder in the
Times on 18 March - the day of the Iraq debate in the House of Commons
and three days before the start of the war. Clwyd described an Iraqi's
claims that male prisoners were dropped into a machine 'designed for
shredding plastic', before their minced remains were 'placed in plastic
bags' so they could later be used as 'fish food'. Sometimes the victims
were dropped in feet first, reported Clwyd, so they could briefly behold
their own mutilation before death.

Not surprisingly the story made a huge impact. Two days after Clwyd's
article was published, the Australian Prime Minister John Howard
addressed his nation to explain why he was sending troops to support the
coalition in Iraq; he talked of the Baathists' many crimes, including
the 'human-shredding machine' that was used 'as a vehicle for putting to
death critics of Saddam Hussein'. Clwyd received an email from the US
deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, who expressed admiration for
her work and invited her to meet him at the Pentagon. Her Times article
on the shredder is still on the US State Department's website, under the
heading 'Issues of International Security'.

Others, too, made good use of the story. Andrew Sullivan, the
British-born journalist who writes a weekly column from Washington for
the Sunday Times, said Clwyd's report showed 'clearly, unforgettably,
indelibly' that 'the Saddam regime is evil' and that 'leading
theologians and moralists and politicians' ought to back the war. The
Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips wrote of the shredder in which
'bodies got chewed up from foot to head', and said: 'This is the evil
that the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Anglican bishops
refuse to fight.' In the Telegraph, Mark Steyn used the spectre of the
shredder to chastise the anti-war movement: 'If it's a choice between
letting some carbonated-beverage crony of Dick Cheney get a piece of the
Nasiriyah soft-drinks market or allowing Saddam to go on feeding his
subjects feet-first into the industrial shredder for another decade or
three, then the "peace" activists will take the lesser of two evils -
i.e., crank up the shredder.'

In his book Allies: The United States, Britain, Europe and the War in
Iraq, published in December 2003, William Shawcross wrote of a regime
that 'fed people into huge shredders, feet first to prolong the agony'.
Earlier this month, Trevor Kavanagh, political editor of the Sun,
claimed that 'British resistance to war changed last year when we
learned how sadist Saddam personally supervised the horrific torture of
Iraqis. Public opinion swung behind Tony Blair as voters learned how
Saddam fed dissidents feet first into industrial shredders.'

Nobody doubts that Saddam was a cruel and ruthless tyrant who murdered
many thousands of his own people (at least 17,000 according to Amnesty;
290,000 according to Human Rights Watch) and that the vast majority of
Iraqis are glad he's gone. But did his regime have a human-shredding
machine that made mincemeat of men? The evidence is far from compelling

The shredding machine was first mentioned in public by James Mahon, then
head of research at Indict, at a meeting at the House of Commons on 12
March. Mahon had just returned from northern Iraq, where Indict
researchers, along with Ann Clwyd, interviewed Iraqis who had suffered
under Saddam's regime. One of them said Iraqis had been fed into a
shredder. 'Sometimes they were put in feet first and died screaming. It
was horrible. I saw 30 die like this.... On one occasion I saw Qusay
Hussein personally supervising these murders.' In subsequent interviews
and articles, Clwyd said this shredding machine was in Abu Ghraib
prison, Saddam's most notorious jail.

What was done to corroborate the Iraqi's claims? Apparently nothing.
Indict refuses to tell me the names of the researchers who were in Iraq
with Mahon and Clwyd; and, I am told, Mahon, who no longer works at
Indict, 'does not want to speak to journalists about his work with us'.
But Clwyd tells me: 'We heard it from a victim; we heard it and we
believed it.' So nothing was done to check the truth of what the victim
said, against other witness statements or other evidence for a shredding
machine? 'Well, no,' says Clwyd. '[Indict researchers] didn't have to do
that; they were just taking witness statements.'

But surely, before going public with so shocking a story, facts ought to
have been checked and double-checked? Clwyd clearly doesn't think so.
'We heard it from someone who had been released from the Abu Ghraib
prison....I heard his account of what went on in the prison. I was there
when [Indict's] cross-examination of the witness took place, and I am
satisfied from what I heard that shredding was a method of execution. We
knew he wasn't making it up.'

This is all that Indict had to go on - uncorroborated and quite amazing
claims made by a single person from northern Iraq. When I suggest that
this does not constitute proof of the existence of a human shredder,
Clwyd responds: 'We heard a victim say it; who are you to say that chap
is a liar?' Yet to call for witness statements to be corroborated before
being turned into the subject of national newspaper articles is not to
accuse the witnesses involved of being liars; it is to follow good
practice in the collection of evidence, particularly evidence with which
Indict hopes to 'seek indictments by national prosecutors' against
former Baathists.

An Iraqi who worked as a doctor in the hospital attached to Abu Ghraib
prison tells me there was no shredding machine in the prison. The Iraqi,
who wishes to remain anonymous, worked at Abu Ghraib in late 1997 and
early 1998; he left Iraq in 2002 and now lives in Britain, where he is
taking further medical examinations so that he can practise as a doctor
here. He describes Saddam's regime as 'very, very terrible, one of the
worst regimes ever', and Abu Ghraib prison as 'horrific'. Part of a
doctor's job at Abu Ghraib was to attend to those who had been executed.
'We had to see to the dead prisoners, to make sure that they were dead.
Then we would write a death certificate for them.' Doctors did not
witness executions; after an execution had taken place the victim would
be 'dropped into a kind of hole, and the doctor would go downstairs with
the policemen or the security guards, into the hole, to confirm the
death'.

Did he ever attend to, or hear of, prisoners who had been shredded?
'No.' Did any of the other doctors at Abu Ghraib speak of a shredding
machine used to execute prisoners? 'No, no, never.' He says: 'The method
of execution was hanging; as far as I know that was the only form of
execution used in Abu Ghraib. Maybe sometimes there were shootings, but
I think these were rare.' However, the doctor tells me that he did once
hear a story about a shredding machine, from a friend who had nothing to
do with Abu Ghraib - but in the version he heard, the shredder was in
'one of Saddam's main palaces'. Does he think this was a rumour, or an
accurate description of a method of execution used in Saddam's palaces?
'Because of what the Saddam regime was like, anything is possible,' he
says. 'It might be a rumour, it might be true.'

Cryptically, Ann Clwyd tells me: 'I heard other people talk about a
shredding machine, but I can't tell you who they are.' However, one
other person who talked about a shredder was Kenneth Joseph, 

an American who claimed to have visited Iraq as an antiwar human

 shield before concluding that he was wrong and the war was right. 

Joseph's Damascene conversion was first reported by United Press 

International (UPI) on 21 March. He told Arnaud de Borchgrave,

 UPI's editor-at-large, that what he had heard in Iraq had 'shocked 

me back to reality', that Iraqis' tales 'of slow torture and killing 

made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, 

feet first so they could hear their screams as their bodies got chewed 

up'. He also claimed to have 'made it across the border' with 14 hours

 of uncensored video containing interviews with Iraqis.

Yet many have since questioned Joseph's claims. When Carol Lipton, an
American journalist, investigated his story in April for CounterPunch,
she reported that 'none of the human shield groups whom I contacted had
ever heard of Joseph'. She also noted that 'incredibly, nowhere has a
single photo or segment from [Joseph's] 14 hours of interviews been
published'. These discrepancies led some to speculate whether the
Reverend Sun Myung Moon played a part in 'the Joseph story'. Moon, head
of the Unification Church (Moonies), owns UPI. Private Eye suggested
that Joseph's story was 'a propaganda fabrication by right-wingers
associated with the Revd Moon's Unification Church'. Even Johann Hari, a
pro-war columnist on the Independent who wrote a sycophantic account of
Joseph's conversion, has since declared that Joseph 'was probably a
bullshitter'.

Clwyd insists that corroboration of the shredder story came three months
after her first Times article, when she was shown a dossier by a
reporter from Fox TV. On 18 June, Clwyd wrote a second article for the
Times, describing a 'chillingly meticulous record book' from Saddam's
notorious Abu Ghraib prison, which described one of the methods of
execution as 'mincing'. Can she say who compiled this book? 'No, I
can't.' Where is it now? 'I don't know.' What was the name of the Fox
reporter who showed it to her? 'I have no idea.' Did Clwyd read the
entire thing? 'No! It was in Arabic! I only saw it briefly.' Curiously,
there is no mention of the book or of 'mincing' as a method of execution
on the Fox News website. Robert Zimmerman, a spokesman for Fox News in
New York, tells me: 'That story does not ring a bell with our foreign
editor here, and it is something you expect would ring a bell. It sounds
like something we would have gone to town with, in terms of promotion
and PR.'

And there you have the long and short of the available evidence for a
human-shredding machine - an uncorroborated statement made by an
individual in northern Iraq, hearsay comments made by someone widely
suspected of being a 'bullshitter' (who, like the Australian Prime
Minister, made his comments about the shredder shortly after Clwyd first
wrote of it in the Times), and a record book, in Arabic, that mentions
'mincing' but whose whereabouts are presently unknown. Other groups have
no recorded accounts of a human shredder. A spokesman at Amnesty
International tells me that his inquiries into the shredder story 'drew
a blank'. 'We checked it with our people here, and we have no
information about a shredder.' Widney Brown, deputy programme director
of Human Rights Watch, says: 'We don't know anything about a shredder,
and have not heard of that particular form of execution or torture.'

It remains to be seen whether this uncorroborated story turns out to be
nothing more than war propaganda - like the stories on the eve of the
first Gulf war of Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait taking babies from incubators
and leaving them to die on hospital floors. What can be said, however,
is that the alleged shredder provided those in favour of the war - by no
means an overwhelming majority in Britain last March - with a useful
propaganda tool. The headline on Ann Clwyd's 18 March story in the Times
was: 'See men shredded, then say you don't back war'.

© 2004 The Spectator.co.uk