"This is the classic language of contemporary Holocaust deniers,
from David Irving to Mr. Gibson's own father, Hutton Gibson, a
prominent anti-Semitic author and activist."

-Frank Rich on Mel Gibson's alleged minimizing of the World
War II Jewish tragedy



Mel Gibson Forgives Us for His Sins

Frank Rich

New York Times | March 7, 2004

Thank God - I think. Mel Gibson has granted me absolution for my
sins. As "The Passion of the Christ" approached the $100 million
mark, the star appeared on "The Tonight Show," where Jay Leno asked
if he would forgive me. "Absolutely," he responded, adding that his
dispute with me was "not personal." Then he waxed philosophical: "You
try to perform an act of love even for those who persecute you, and I
think that's the message of the film."

Thus we see the gospel according to Mel. If you criticize his film
and the Jew-baiting by which he promoted it, you are persecuting him -
 all the way to the bank. If he says that he wants you killed, he
wants your intestines "on a stick" and he wants to kill your dog -
such was his fatwa against me in September - not only is there
nothing personal about it but it's an act of love. And that is indeed
the message of his film. "The Passion" is far more in love with
putting Jesus' intestines on a stick than with dramatizing his godly
teachings, which are relegated to a few brief, cryptic flashbacks.
With its laborious build-up to its orgasmic spurtings of blood and
other bodily fluids, Mr. Gibson's film is constructed like nothing so
much as a porn movie, replete with slo-mo climaxes and pounding music
for the money shots. Of all the "Passion" critics, no one has nailed
its artistic vision more precisely than Christopher Hitchens, who
on "Hardball" called it a homoerotic "exercise in lurid
sadomasochism" for those who "like seeing handsome young men stripped
and flayed alive over a long period of time."

If "The Passion" is a joy ride for sadomasochists, conveniently
cloaked in the plain-brown wrapping of religiosity, does that make it
bad for the Jews? Not necessarily. As a director, Mr. Gibson is no
Leni Riefenstahl. His movie is just too ponderous to spark a pogrom
on its own - in America anyway. The one ugly incident reported on Ash
Wednesday, in which the Lovingway United Pentecostal Church posted a
marquee reading "Jews Killed the Lord Jesus," occurred in Denver,
where the local archbishop, Charles Chaput, had thrown kindling on
the fire by promoting the movie for months. Whether "The Passion"
will prove quite as benign in Europe and the Arab world is a story
yet to be told. It can't be coincidence that France, where Jacques
Chirac has of late called for "zero tolerance" of anti-Semitism, was
the only country where the film lacked a distributor until this week,
when a Tunisian producer declared it was his "duty as a Muslim who
believes in Jesus" to remedy that terrible lapse.

But speaking as someone who has never experienced serious bigotry, I
must confess that, whatever happens abroad, the fracas over "The
Passion" has made me feel less secure as a Jew in America than ever
before.

My quarrel is not with most of the millions of Christian believers
who are moved to tears by "The Passion." They bring their own deep
feelings to the theater with them, and when Mr. Gibson pushes their
buttons, however crudely, they generously do his work for him,
supplying from their hearts the authentic spirituality that is
missing in his jamboree of bloody beefcake. Jews, after all, can
overcompensate for mediocre filmmaking in exactly the same way; even
the schlockiest movies about the Holocaust (Robin Williams as "Jakob
the Liar," anyone?) will move some audiences to tears by simply
evoking the story's bare bones in Hollywood kitsch.

What concerns me much more are those with leadership positions in the
secular world - including those in the media - who have given Mr.
Gibson, "The Passion" and its most incendiary hucksters a free pass
for behavior that is unambiguously contrived to vilify Jews.
Start with the movie itself. There is no question that it rewrites
history by making Caiaphas and the other high priests the prime
instigators of Jesus' death while softening Pontius Pilate, an
infamous Roman thug, into a reluctant and somewhat conscience-
stricken executioner. "The more benign Pilate appears in the movie,
the more malignant the Jews are," is how Elaine Pagels describes Mr.
Gibson's modus operandi in The New Yorker this week. As if that
weren't enough, the Jewish high priests are also depicted as grim
sadists with bad noses and teeth - Shylocks and Fagins from 19th-
century stock. (The only Jew with a pretty nose in this Judea is
Jesus.) Yet in those early screenings that Mr. Gibson famously threw
for conservative politicos in Washington last summer and fall, not a
person in attendance, from Robert Novak to Peggy Noonan, seems to
have recognized these obvious stereotypes, let alone spoken up about
them in their profuse encomiums to the film.

Nor do some of these pundits seem to recognize Holocaust denial when
it is staring them in the face. In an interview in the current
Reader's Digest, Ms. Noonan asks Mr. Gibson: "The Holocaust happened,
right?" After saying that some of his best friends "have numbers on
their arms," he responds: 

"Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War
is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people.
Some of them were Jews in concentration camps." 

Yes, mistakes
happened, atrocities happened, war happened, some of the victims were
Jews. This is the classic language of contemporary Holocaust deniers,
from David Irving to Mr. Gibson's own father, Hutton Gibson, a
prominent anti-Semitic author and activist. Their rhetorical strategy
is to diminish Hitler's extermination of Jews by folding those deaths
into the war's overall casualty figures, as if the Holocaust were an
idle byproduct of battle instead of a Third Reich master plan for
genocide. Rather than challenge Mel Gibson on this, Ms. Noonan merely
reinforces his junk history. 

"So the point is that life is tragic and
it is full of fighting and violence, mischief and malice," she
replies.

No, that is not the point of the history of the Holocaust.
Of course, if a Jew points out such callousness, or reports on how
Mr. Gibson exploited a gravely ill Pope as a shill for his movie, he
is not practicing journalism or trying to clarify the historical
record. He is instead "rabidly anti-Christian," as James Dobson of
Focus on the Family is fond of describing Jews who raise questions
about Mr. Gibson. The message is clear: Jews who criticize a poor,
defenseless multimillionaire movie star and his film are behaving
much as Caiaphas and his cronies do in "The Passion" itself. There's
a consistency of animus here.

There is also a mighty strange inversion of reality. America is 82
percent Christian, and 60 percent of the population believes the
Bible is historical fact. (The Jewish population is 2 percent.) The
president of the United States has endorsed Jesus as his favorite
philosopher, and Mr. Gibson's movie had almost as large an opening
week as "The Lord of the Rings." The star has won his battle. He's
hotter than ever in Hollywood, a town whose first commandment is that
you never argue with a hit. ("If Hitler did a movie with these
numbers, we'd give him his next deal," one Jewish mogul told me in a
phone conversation this week.) So by what stretch of the imagination
is Mr. Gibson so aggrieved that he can go on "The Tonight Show,"
purport to be a victim and not be laughed at by Mr. Leno or anyone
else? For all his talk of "suffering" for his art, it's hard to see
exactly how Mr. Gibson has suffered. His production company is even
licensing necklaces ($12.99 or $16.99, take your pick) that feature
replicas of the nails used in the film's Crucifixion.

Of late, however, the star has racheted up the volume of his
complaints, floating insinuations out of the "Protocols of the Elders
of Zion." Speaking of his critics to Diane Sawyer of ABC, Mr. Gibson
said: "It's only logical to assume that conspiracies are everywhere,
because that's what people do. They conspire. If you can't get the
message, get the man." So who is in this dark, fearful conspiracy?
The only conspirator mentioned by name in that interview was me. But
Ms. Sawyer never identified me as Jewish, thereby sanitizing Mr.
Gibson's rant of its truculent meaning. (She did show a picture of
me, though, perhaps assuming that my nose might give me away.)
Bill O'Reilly was not so circumspect when he returned to this same
theme last week, asking an editor from Variety why Mr. Gibson has
taken so much heat for his film. After beating around the burning
bush for a while, Mr. O'Reilly said: "I'm asking this question
respectfully. Is it because that the major media in Hollywood and a
lot of the secular press is controlled by Jewish people?" With
respect like this, Jews hardly need any disrespect. Besides, the idea
that Jews control the media is disproved by Mr. Gibson's own media
campaign. Just as he kept most Jewish journalists out of early
screenings of "The Passion," so he cherrypicks his interviewers now.
No Jewish journalist on network television (and there are some) has
been permitted to question him thus far - a press manipulation by Mr.
Gibson's flacks that is worthy of further investigation.

The vilification of Jews by Mr. Gibson, his film and some of his
allies, unchallenged by his media enablers, is not happening in a
vacuum. We are in the midst of an escalating election-year culture
war in which those of "faith" are demonizing so-called "secularists"
(for which read any Jews critical of Mr. Gibson and their fellow
travelers, liberals). Politicians, we are learning, seem increasingly
eager to wrap themselves in "The Passion of the Christ" as a handy
signal to indicate they are opposed to all those "secularists" whose
conspiracy is undermining all that right-thinking Americans hold near
and dear. Predictably enough, both the president and Mrs. Bush have
publicly indicated their desire to see Mr. Gibson's film. But when
even Connecticut's John Rowland, a scandal-ridden governor facing
impeachment, starts to rave about "The Passion" in public
("Unbelievable!" "Breathtaking!"), as he did last weekend, it's clear
that we're witnessing the birth of a phenomenon. You come away from
this whole sorry story feeling that Jesus died in "The Passion of the
Christ" so cynics, whether seeking bucks or votes, could inherit the
earth.