Gotta see it, Fred, Gotta see it!

During a lunch-time screening of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ at the Norwood cinema complex I was surprised to see just on 17 elderly individuals take their seats. It promised to be an exclusive screening of this much talked-about film.

As the screen lit up and sound filled the theatre I tried to block out anything I had absorbed up to this point about the film, thereby implementing a somewhat watered-down version of the scientific method.

I wished to view the film as objectively as possible without falling into some cliché-laden conceptual prison from which desired release requires dissembling, if not outright lying. I also tried to concentrate on the spoken words rather than focus on the English sub titles.

The dark and gloomy opening scene depicts a group of men among some trees worrying about something, and soon there emerges the Protagonist who figuratively wrestles with an androgynous figure - female face but male voice. It is obvious that here we have a psychological problem unfolding. Great mental anguish ensues - the hallmark of wrestling within oneself rather than scapegoating and hitting out physically so befitting a person who is conscious of growing up and meeting life’s challenges, both physical and mental.

The Protagonist moves among his group of male followers and displays compassion. Through various flash-backs we receive more information about his life before he became concerned with matters of belief, of love and of this other world – the world of our Heavenly Father. We see him extending his compassion and protection towards a Woman against a mob about to stone her to death. We see him as a young carpenter making a sturdy table, something his Mother delights in, especially when he says to her that tables are the future. Such flashbacks are idyllic mother-child relationship scenes that reinforce the primacy of womanhood. It also depicts a creative but non-materialistic level of reflection on the meaning of life.

And then raw physical action begins – the mild and gentle man faces a contingent of armed men who have been ordered by the authorities to apprehend him. How did they find him? Simple – betrayal, and money changed hands for the information needed to identify the man. The elderly men who made up the group that gave the order to bring the protagonist before them look worried. This man who worries them has blasphemed, has challenged their authority – and that is not to be tolerated, no matter what. So here we have a group of men, the temple rulers, who wish to silence a man walking around the countryside saying things about them that is not nice.

A parallel comes to mind here with an old English law that punished anyone for gossiping about the landed gentry – ‘spreading false news’ was considered a criminal matter, which until 1992 was on the books in Canada . It was removed when Ernst Zündel won his appeal against the Jewish group that tried to silence him. Eleven years later, Zündel finds himself again in Canadian custody, already having spent over twelve months in solitary confinement. His crime? He refuses to believe in the ‘Holocaust’!

The apprehension scene is brutal – but also delicate. Resistance is only at the hands of those around the Protagonist who himself remains passive. Indeed, he extends empathy to one of the men who had come to take him in. A sword had cut his ear off and the protagonist cups his healing hand over the wound.

As the Protagonist is brought into the temple confines, outside his Mother begs soldiers on horseback to get him out of there because he had not done anything wrong. The soldiers report the matter to a likeable man who is the Administrator of the province. His clean shaven face indicates he does not need the mask of a beard to hide his facial lines that reveal so much of what is going on inside the head.

Beaten and bruised the Protagonist stands before his accusers where more beatings are inflicted upon him.

Interestingly, during the inquisition a number of the old men voice dissent, but they are smartly escorted out of the hall. Dissent within one’s own realm needs to be suppressed – desperately so, it seems.

The decision to find the Protagonist guilty of an offence is a foregone conclusion and this legally offensive procedure is reflected in what the Administrator says when the Protagonist is brought before him by the old temple men.

The administrator rhetorically asks the elderly men if it is usual for them to severely beat up anyone they don’t like without guilt first being formally established. Their leader replies that the Protagonist is guilty of blasphemy – that’s enough for them because he has condemned himself out of his own mouth.

The Administrator’s own wife reflects knowledge of the Protagonist’s doings – he has a reputation for being holy - and attempts to influence her husband to intervene and let him go. The Administrator advises the old men to take their troublemaker to their own king, which they do. Unfortunately for the old men their hedonistic king has a clear moment and assesses the Protagonist as innocent of any crime.

 So back to the Administrator, and agreement is reached that the Protagonist will be given a severe beating, though not enough to kill him.

The horrible torture scene lasts a long time and I wondered if anyone could actually withstand such physical assault on the body without the mind switching on the unconscious button that usually is automatically activated when our body suffers unbearable pain. The message is clear – the Protagonist has by then already transcended his physical existence.

The torturers are shown to delight in their task, and only towards the end do some of them reach breaking point, as do the onlookers of this grizzly spectacle, including those who may have harboured some secret liking for such voyeuristic sport. The human factor operates within this scene and it is its measure that prevents it from degenerating into one of excess violence.

The children-murder horrors currently playing out in a Belgian court intrude into my mind. Here on the screen we see the depiction of an individual suffering public horrors, yet in Belgium there was a private revolting horror show out of public view until now of a man imprisoning and killing pre-pubescent girls for his own personal gratification.

I found the passivity of the onlookers in the film disturbing because I wanted to go there and say: Enough of this flogging, stop it!

We see again the Protagonist’s mother passively crying and observing the pain her son is absorbing. After he is taken away to be displayed before the Administrator, with her cloth  she wipes up his flesh and blood.

 The Administrator beholds the man – ecce homo - and concludes that he deserves to live, but the old men refuse to take him back, and in a wild frenzy cry for him to be crucified.

As it is an annual custom for the Administrator to release prisoners, he decides to ask the temple men if they would like a murderer or the Protagonist released. The crowd is now baying for the Protagonist’s death because that is their leader’s wish, and the crowd cries out that the murderer should be released – which grotesquely happens.

The Administrator has had enough of this rabble and literally washes his hands of the matter – and so hands over the Protagonist to the rabble thus condemning the mild and gentle reflective man to be crucified.

We then watch in graphic detail how the Protagonist carries his own huge and heavy wooden cross along the streets – then with vital help from a man pulled out of the crowd, who is ordered to help carry the cross with him, we agonize as the Protagonist’s physical strength fades. Inevitable physical collapse is graphically captured, but the Protagonist’s mind is still there and the body flinches to life again. Considering what has been shown on television these past decades, this brutality is not excessive.

The actual hammering in of the nails into the hands and feet is also graphically depicted, including the turning over of the cross so that the nail ends can be bent over.

The Mother with the shunned Woman by her side approaches the three crosses. The dialogue between the crucified on either side of the Protagonist furthers the internal argument that climaxes when the Protagonist cries out why his Heavenly Father has forsaken him.

A storm wells up around the hilltop and the soldiers scatter, one of them before he, too, runs off, hurriedly pierces the protagonist’s side. Visual depiction of the escaping eternal life force is effectively contrasted with the concurrent temple’s destruction – and that final scene where the androgynous person disintegrates. Death has been conquered, transcendence guaranteed.

The film succeeds in its stated aim of objectifying Christ’s final twelve hours.  Mel Gibson has created a masterwork that has de-mystified a mystery, that takes the innocence out of the pillar of Christianity. There will be consequences; the most important one is not so-called ‘antisemitism’ breaking out all over the world but rather a maturational process that will strike individuals by having viewed the film. 

For decades, for a life-time perhaps, millions of individuals have cherished this crucial part of their belief system as something private and confidential, something extremely personal – not to be discussed openly, certainly not to be represented in public. Symbolically this basic tenet of Christianity’s belief system is represented in one of the world’s most distinguished forms - the crucifix.

Although some hapless whit has claimed that the crucifix has been superseded by consumerism’s ultimate symbol, MacDonald’s M, the crucifix still stands firm for most believing Christians. In fact, take away this crucial symbol and all Christians may as well revert to Judaism.

Christianity, especially in its European form gave the woman equality she did not have before. The Nordic ideal of courtly love, of male-female balance, is absorbed by the Christian emphasis in honouring Mary as the mother of Jesus.  Mel Gibson has in his film clearly focused on this important aspect of human nature, and perhaps also making an indirect comment about feminism by making the Devil an androgynous individual.

Those individuals who feel anger at anything Jewish on account of viewing the film will need to grow up a little more and begin to realize that the foundations of Christianity are Jewish conceptual foundations. These primitive and underdeveloped roots are, of course,  re-fashioned into an inspirational and life-giving force whose conceptual framework is all inclusive and life-giving, rather than life-denying. So much according to the ideal of Christianity.

Any Jew who feels aggrieved by this film remains blind to the realities upon which the ‘Christian revolution’ is based: a rejection of excessive legalism and materialism at the expense of the Passion.

In the film Mel Gibson indicates there is dissent among the Jewish ranks – from within the temple and on the streets. But he also shows the brutality with which any such dissent is silenced and unhesitatingly smashed.

Did the Jews kill Christ? They asked for his death when Rome offered them a compromise by flogging the life out of him – but not kill him. But that was not enough for the Jews and they wanted Christ crucified. An offer was made to trade Christ’s life with that of a condemned murderer’s life. The Jews asked that the murderer be released – and thereby sealed Christ’s fate.

Perhaps we can be thankful to the hatred-blinded Jews that in their baseness they lusted for blood, thereby giving the world something to fight against in the form of Christianity.

Interestingly, the Revisionists can clearly identify with the film’s basic message: for fear of the Jews. The question is had Pontius Pilate not bent to the Jewish pressure would that have resolved the issues that were so much alive at that time? Perhaps, but most likely not because the Jewish mentality here is a problem. The dialectic framework needs to be analyzed but there is no room for that here.

Angry Jews who felt power slip from them through the success of this non-Jewish inspired, this Christian-made film, have a right to be concerned. The many protests over the film have devalued the once-powerful name-calling word: antisemite!

To date Gibson has not found anyone in France to distribute the film, and French distributors are waiting to see how the film is received in other European countries set to start screening in April. There is the fear that the film will generate anti-Jewish sentiments. It may, but it need not, not unless it is actually in the interest of the Jews to fan so-called ‘antisemitism’.

After all, anyone whose conceptual framework claims that victimhood is their lot will need scapegoats to continue to exist. Such individuals thrive on being victims, and here the ‘Holocaust’ plays a major role in the self-identification of the Jews: they are expecting a ‘Holocaust’;  they are experiencing a ‘Holocaust’;  they are just emerging from a ‘Holocaust’.

Fredrick Töben

4 March 2004

‘The Movie.’  

Written by the four Apostles. Directed and Produced by Mel Gibson.

Yesterday morning at 9.30 I picked up Fredrick Toben in my 1976 Volvo (previously his; such is the generosity of the man), and off we went to carry out several tasks that needed to be taken care of.  Routine tasks such as calling in at the post office, returning several copies of his latest book to the printer to have them retrimmed, and talking to a prospective sponsor for the publication of my new book Daylight Corroboree.

            As usual the conversation got underway with the two of us comparing notes on how respectively broke we each were.  Fredrick underlined his straightened circumstances by lamenting that he had not even sufficient money to go and see ‘The Movie.’  And I, too could see little prospect of being able to afford the luxury of a visit to the cinema in the foreseeable future.

            Oddly enough though, although there had been no further discussion on the topic, at 12.50pm we found ourselves seated in a theatre at the Norwood Cinema Complex watching that which we had feared we would be unable to, by virtue of sacrificing lunch.

            Well, I must say that our decision was thoroughly vindicated with both of us agreeing afterwards that Mel’s movie certainly beat the Hell out of a cheese sandwich and a cappuccino.  Whereas the finest lunch is soon forgotten, there can be little doubt that Mister Gibson’s film provides us with not only a new perspective in our quest to better understand the human condition, but I would go as far as to say, a new platform mounted on thick concrete.

            We are all familiar with the story of the mock trial and crucifixion of the Christ, but now for the first time it has been presented to us in a pure and unsanitized form.  The dilemma of Pilate, the Roman Governor of Judea , the intractability of the High Priest Caiaphus, and the mindless collective will of the hysterical mob are all portrayed uncompromisingly. As a concession to equal opportunity, both Satan and Herod are depicted as androgynous. But the cowardly brutality that we witness on the screen not only speaks volumes about the great forces of evil that influence the thoughts and actions of mankind, but it also speaks to us of the unshakable imperative to the maintenance of human authority over all religious constructs. Put simply, there can be absolutely no room for the presence of a messiah within the materialistic cosmology of organised religion. If a genuine messiah were to appear within our midst today, the church would need to neutralise him immediately either by execution or consignment to prison or a madhouse, in order to save itself from oblivion.

A welcome omission from this movie are the syrupy American accents that have characterised Hollywood ’s renditions of ‘historical events’ in the past, and had many of us feeling like reaching for the bucket. Gibson’s decision to have the dialogue delivered in Aramaic and Latin worked well in assisting his audience to suspend disbelief. 

For those who take the Christ literally to be the Son of God and the Saviour of Mankind and for those who see him more as a Symbolic figure; an exemplar of compassion and forgiveness, we can now add superhuman strength and resolve to the equation, for Mel Gibson has spurned the lamb and offered us in its place, a lion.        

John Bayley

4 March 2004

Ota's review of The Passion of the Christ

 Renewal, PO Box 4333, University of Melbourne - 3052 Australia

For as long as I can recall, the fact that some film is meant to be based on the Bible has been a turn-off. I don’t say this because I’m not a Christian. I’m not a communist, either, but Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin is a great movie despite its propaganda. Not so any Christian films that I can recall. Nope, they’ve invariably been appalling – featuring sanitised, caricatured, and above all unconvincing characters and dialogue. They were meant to evoke some sense of awe, and boy, did the effort show! In fact,  the only sense of awe they ever gave me came from seeing Charlton Heston’s body at its (sadly long-past) peak.

Doesn’t it seem strange that a religion commanding so many believers can't make a half-decent film about its own founders? Even Cecil B de Mille's second stab at the task, in 1956, was plodding. Compare it to Leni Riefenstahl's stunning 1935 paean to her god! You might as well compare Elton John’s insipid tribute to Princess Di with Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance.

Why is it that the Christian story doesn’t seem to work on film? It has inspired wonderful music,  and some of the greatest literature in our language. So why not film?

Part of the problem, no doubt, is the Christian inversion of the heathen view of the human body as an emblem of divine perfection. In Christian thinking (to use the word loosely), the body is a study in shame and humiliation. Yet any film other than the most mechanical nature doco is intimately involved with the human body. A film either accepts the body, including its animal needs and nature, or rejects it – at least to the extent of keeping it freshly showered, deodorised, covered up, safe, unthreatening. Films that take this second course when the plot demands otherwise are invariably unconvincing.

Yes, as you no doubt imagined, this is a lead-in to my views on Mel Gibson’s The Passion. Well, to be more precise, on the hysterical media response to The Passion.

In all the pre-release controversy, there seemed to be only one important question: Was this film going to be bad for the Jews? So, as you will remember, just about every Christian priest and Jewish rabbi who could string more than three words together was asked to comment on this vital question. And what did they tell us? Nothing but flaccid platitudes. The correct answer ought to have been obvious to anyone who isn’t a Jew or a Christian. The Christian Gospels portray the Jews as baying like wild animals for Jesus’ blood So if The Passion stuck to its sources that’s exactly what it would have to show. Anything less and it would be ducking what the media, at least, said was The Big Issue.

Then for months we had the sad sight of Mel Gibson ducking and weaving, trying on the one hand to appease the Jews and on the other to arouse a latter-day crusade of fundie Christians to protect him. His pathetic cries for help reached their lowest point when the media finally Googled that Mel’s dad is a "holocaust revisionist". (Where have these people been? Mel’s dad has spent decades trying to tell people what he thinks really happened in places like Auschwitz, as any mature-age Mel fan in Australia would know.)

Well, that side of the controversy is over at last. Mel has released a reportedly bowdlerised cut of his film. Leading Hollywood producers have publicly vowed to destroy his career. Christian fundies have booked out whole cinemas to support their hero. Mel himself is now a much richer man than he was, although perhaps much less wealthy than he might have been if he had kept his lens capped.

This debate has since moved on. Now the critics are panning the bloodshed, gore, and brutality of The Passion. Given that the film is supposed to be about a bloke being whipped half to death, then nailed to a cross and having a spear poked through him, I can’t really see what else it can do other than show … well, say, a bloke being whipped half to death, then nailed to a cross and having a spear poked through him. Or have I missed something?

"Gruesome imagery and tasteless violence" thundered one local critic, in tones that would have been more appropriate to Saving Private Ryan. We’ve even had accounts in the daily papers of ladies fainting in the cinemas and having to be given reviving glasses of water by staff. (No mention yet of getting out the smelling salts, or of cutting loose the poor dears’ corsets, but I’m an eternal optimist.)

Now this is supposed to be an opinion column, and by this stage you might well be thinking: "OK, Ota, but where do you stand on all this?" Aha! I thought so!

First, the core meaning of Christianity is that Jesus died in a gruesome and degrading manner to atone for "the sins of humanity". (True, we don’t believe that, but they do – and there’s nothing wrong with showing a bit of intellectual respect.) A film that is true to that core meaning, in other words a truly Christian movie, simply has to depict the central event in the Christian story. And as I said earlier, if it doesn’t acknowledge both the beauty and the frailty of the human body it will not be believable. So congratulations to our Christian neighbours for finally getting a bit of genuine Christian cinema.

Yet there haven’t been many genuine Christian voices among the reviewers. One of the few in the wilderness was Michael Novak, a world-renowned theologian. To help you savour the depths of modern Christian theology, here is an extract from his at times almost unintelligible review:

"I have never sat in the presence of a religious film with anything like the power of The Passion.. At the end I wanted to weep, to be silent and to commune with my God, on whom my sins had heaped such afflictions. From the opening scene, it is clear that God’s will governs the last 12 hours of Christ’s suffering and death, and that He is called, not by his own will, but his Father’s, to die for my sins. I am not certain how the film-maker achieved this effect, but from the opening instant I felt personally drawn into recognition of my own responsibility for what was to come."

Forget all the theological mumbo-jumbo. Just bear in mind that this award-winning scholar doesn’t even know how a film has managed to manipulate his emotions! How naïve are these people? Hint to Michael Novak: evocative music helped, and so did Caleb Deshanel’s stylish camera work. Some pretty good actors didn’t hurt, either.

Here’s another extract:

"The Passion ... is a wondrously wrought work of art, a kind of prayer all its own. It achieves what I would have thought impossible. It makes one forget art, and think of the Lord and his suffering and one’s own sins. It brings one to awe for one’s fellow man, fellow sufferer, fellow weakling. And it brings one to one’s knees."

I defy anyone to explain precisely what Novak’s words here really mean. Obviously he wants to get down on his knees and grovel, but only as a result of seeing a film whose techniques he admits he can’t even understand! His wish to grovel is therefore emotional, not spiritual or intellectual.

All I can suggest is that if Novak is ever in Sydney, he can look me up. As a special favour to such a distinguished theologian I will buy a nice whip, and use it to bring him to his knees. He can then celebrate the difference between my glorious heathen body, formed in the image of our gods, and his own shame-filled Christian body. At least he will know how I "created this effect". Maybe he will even have fun – for once.

----- Original Message -----

 The Second Front and Mel Gibson's Movie

 Professor Patrick McNally

 Adolf Hitler desperately wanted to avoid a second front against the West because a simultaneous two-front war would repeat the disaster of WWI. He wanted at least passive acceptance from the West for his war against Russia, but England and France did not give it to him. Finally his hatred and impatience just got the better of him and he ended up in ignominious defeat. It is argued here that today's Judeo-Nazis are committing something akin to the fatal mistake of the German Nazis.

  Zionists knew that any "Jews only" state carved out of Palestine would require a foreign patron as a sugar daddy to subsidize and protect it. The list of sucker states recruited to fill this dubious function has included Turkey, England, Soviet Russia, France, the United Nations, and the all-time heavyweight Uncle Sucker of them all, the United States of Amnesia.

  The Zionist political and military invasion of Palestine always had the potential makings of a wider anti-Islamic religious crusade because the Zionists never committed themselves to any fixed borders.

  Thus, these are the two fronts the Zionists always faced: 1.) the Palestinians who had the "crazy, anti-Semitic" idea that a bunch of privileged Jewish bigots from Vienna, Berlin, etc. did not have the nright to expropriate, expel, or exterminate them. 2.) some patron-sucker state that had to be bribed, blackmailed, or bullshited into paying for the "Jews only" ethnocracy [ = the rule of a self-chosen ethnic group over all others] by forking over boatloads of money and sacrificing battalions of human cannon fodder and lots of its own political credibility.

  On the Palestinian front, the Zionists have been stale-mated and stymied. Even with an overwhelming predominance of military technology the Israelis cannot silence the native-born Palestinians.

  So here we have the Judeo-Nazis bogged down on their anti-Islamic  front and what do they do on their crucially important Christian front? Just as Adolf Hitler wanted and expected England and France to support him on his anti-Soviet front, today's Judeo-Nazis want and receive lots of support from their guilt-ridden Christian stooges. That is why we are incessantly inundated with so much nonsense about a mythical Judeo-Christian tradition.

The Pat Robotsons and Jerry Foulmouths of the world do not know the first thing about Judaism and Christianity. The first thing about these two religions is that there is an Old Testament and a New Testament. "Old" as in "old car" and "new" as in "new car." And this finally and directly brings us to Mel Gibson's watered down version of the New Testament narration of Jesus' Passion and to the suicidal tirades of the Self-Chosen People's self-appointed big mouth, Pope Abe the Fox.

  Apparently nobody told Pope Abe that the support of brain-dead American Gentiles is still crucial for the survival of Israel's "Jews only" phoney ethnocracy and for the success of its very real "Drang nach dem Osten." [Drive to the East!] Many more Gentiles have to fight and die for Israel in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and only the war G-d Yahweh out of the Book of Joshua knows where else. Many more boatloads of the sinking dollar have to be shipped over to keep Israel afloat. Many more cartons of military secrets still have to be stolen by as yet unidentified Jonathan Pollards. Many more UN resolutions protesting Israel's lawlessness still have to be vetoed. And our American congress, the finest that AIPAC money can buy, still has to run a lot of interference for Israel's Pandora's box of crackpot criminal schemes.

  Poor Abe! He really blew it and let out of the bag the dirty little secret of Judeo-Nazi hatred and contempt for anything and everything Christian. Christianity is not now being anti-Semitic, but for Abe and his ilk the very being of Christianity is everywhere and always "anti-Semitic." Even the philo-Semitic Nietzsche said that Jews are the greatest haters in history. And that hate is directed most intensely and intently at anything connected to the name of Jesus. The Talmud teaches that Jesus is boiling away in excrement in hell and his mother was a whore. Whow! Not much of a basis there for ecumenical dialogue and touchy-touchy feely-feely brotherhood of man and fatherhood of God stuff there. The Talmud is light years removed from the great respect that the Koran has for Jesus and His mother. What are these hyper-stupid Christians doing fighting in Zionized Judaism's big dirty anti-Islamic war?

  The other tentacles of Judeo-Nazi influence in America must be really pissed at Pope Abe for making such a mountain out of such a molehill. The Dennis Ross-Martin Indyk cabal of traitors controlling Bill Clinton did such a slick job of bamboozling everyone into thinking that Ehud Barak had actually offered the Palestinians a state. What a fantastic snowjob of blaming the victims! The Richard Perle-Paul Wolfowitz neocon traitors' nest got Baby Bush to invade Iraq for Israel, then Bushwhacked the sphincter, and has now left the helpless turd holding the bag. And now it looks like Baby Bush will join his Daddy, Peanuts Carter, and Jerry Ford as one-shot unre-electables because they all somehow displeased America's Israel-firsters.

  At any rate, congratulations and thanks to Pope Abe the Fox for helping to make the Mel Gibson film a smashing commercial success and perhaps thereby contributing to an awakening of Christian pride that will end the cowardly and self-destructive support for Israel's insanely evil race war against the Palestinians and its Book-of-Joshua-type religious war against our fellow monotheistic religion of Islam.

  Come home, America! Pull the plug on the Judeo-Nazi ethnocracy!

Hating the Jews
Mona Charen
March 2, 2004

It grieves me to object to Mel Gibson's movie because I know that millions of Christians in this country and around the world will be moved and possibly even transformed by it -- and that is a welcome thing. As a Jew, I can unhesitatingly declare that the world would be a better place if it contained more believing Christians.

And yet Gibson has seeded his film with images of Jewish guilt and perfidy that will fall on fertile anti-Semitic soil around the world. Most audiences in the United States will doubtless see the film as it was intended -- as a depiction of universal guilt in the crucifixion and universal salvation because of it. But in light of the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe and elsewhere around the globe, it's a safe bet that it will not be so perceived abroad.

After 40 years of quiescence, Jew-hatred has blossomed anew in Europe. As Gabriel Schoenfeld details in his careful and learned exploration of the subject, "The Return of Anti-Semitism," the influx into Europe of Muslims from the Middle East has transformed the landscape. Muslim immigrants are responsible for a wave of terror attacks against Jews and synagogues in Europe.

"From east to west, the list of incidents in April 2002 alone is too long to summarize. In the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, some 50 youths chanting, "Kill the kikes," descended on the city's central synagogue on a Saturday evening, broke 20 windows and beat the director of the religious school with stones. In Greece, Jewish cemeteries were vandalized in what the press termed ‘anti-Jewish acts of revenge,' and the Holocaust memorial in Salonika, a city whose 50,000 Jews had been rounded up and deported to Nazi death camps in 1943, was defaced with Palestinian slogans. ... In the heart of democratic Europe, one particular scene of violent anti-Israel demonstrations was Amsterdam. ... Jewish memorials in Berlin were defaced with swastikas. A synagogue was spray-painted with the words, ‘Six million is not enough.' ... In Tuzla, 1,500 demonstrators carried placards reading, ‘Sharon and Hitler: Two Eyes in the Same Head,' and, ‘Israel -- The Real Face of Terrorism' ... in Dublin, the banners, several featuring swastikas superimposed over Stars of David, read, ‘Stop the Palestinian Holocaust.'"

There has been a change in Europe's intellectual landscape, as well. A transposition has taken place. Once the province of the right -- in Europe and the United States -- anti-Semitism has moved to the left. Expressions of anti-Semitism that would earn instant condemnation if committed by skinheads or neo-Nazis can issue from the lips of Europe's leftists with barely a ripple of protest from anyone.

At a London dinner party, France's ambassador to Great Britain, Daniel Bernard, opined that "the current troubles in the world were all because of ‘that shitty little country Israel.'" A Swedish newspaper offered that Judaism "is a particularly warlike and murderous teaching or ‘religion.'" The editor of an Anglican church's official newspaper laments that, "Whenever I print anything sympathetic to Israel, I get deluged with complaints that I am Zionist and racist." In Italy, the liberal newspaper La Stampa ran an editorial cartoon that depicted the infant Jesus looking up from his manger at the turret of an Israeli tank and pleading, "Don't tell me they want to kill me again."

Petronella Wyatt, writing in the London Spectator in 2001, noted how frequently she hears that "the Jews are to blame for everything." Wyatt reported that a prominent Englishman, a life peer active in human rights campaigns, told her, "Well, the Jews have been asking for it, and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last."

Schoenfeld addresses the argument, heard in the United States constantly, that it is impossible to criticize Israel without being labeled an anti-Semite: "It depends on the criticism. Many such criticisms are legitimate. Many others, however, knowingly based on unabashed exaggerations and outright lies, are of the same stripe of ‘criticism' that Jews drain the blood of children or a hundred similar libels."

The anti-Semitism in the Muslim world, it need hardly be added, is downright Hitlerian in intensity.

There is a seemingly unquenchable thirst to vilify Jews, to deny them their humanity, to strip them of their history and to transform them -- at least in propaganda -- into oppressors rather than oppressed. It is a sentiment that has a 3,000-year head of steam and apparently cannot be derailed by something as trivial as the Holocaust. Mel Gibson might have thought more about that before making his film in the way he did.