Forgotten Christians

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Posted by Angela on September 09, 2004 at 11:10:17:

Forgotten Christians
Not all displaced Palestinians are Muslims.
By Anders Strindberg
Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” is playing to full houses in the Syrian capital Damascus. Watching it here turns out to be much the same as watching it on opening night in New York—customarily rowdy moviegoers observe a reverent silence, the usual sound of candy wrappers is replaced by sobbing and gasping, and, at the end of it all, the audience files out of the theater in silence and contemplation. Many of those watching the movie on this occasion are Palestinian Christian refugees whose parents or grandparents were purged from their homeland—the land of Christ—at the foundation of Israel in 1948. For them the movie has an underlying symbolic meaning not easily perceived in the West: not only is it a depiction of the trial, scourging, and death of Jesus, it is also a symbolic depiction of the fate of the Palestinian people. “This is how we feel,” says Zaki, a 27-year old Palestinian Christian whose family hails from Haifa. “We take beating after beating at the hands of the world, they crucify our people, they insult us, but we refuse to surrender.”
At the time of the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, it is estimated that the Christians of Palestine numbered some 350,000. Almost 20 percent of the total population at the time, they constituted a vibrant and ancient community; their forbears had listened to St. Peter in Jerusalem as he preached at the first Pentecost. Yet Zionist doctrine held that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Of the 750,000 Palestinians that were forced from their homes in 1948, some 50,000 were Christians—7 percent of the total number of refugees and 35 percent of the total number of Christians living in Palestine at the time.
In the process of “Judaizing” Palestine, numerous convents, hospices, seminaries, and churches were either destroyed or cleared of their Christian owners and custodians. In one of the most spectacular attacks on a Christian target, on May 17, 1948, the Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate was shelled with about 100 mortar rounds—launched by Zionist forces from the already occupied monastery of the Benedictine Fathers on Mount Zion. The bombardment also damaged St. Jacob’s Convent, the Archangel’s Convent, and their appended churches, their two elementary and seminary schools, as well as their libraries, killing eight people and wounding 120.
Today it is believed that the number of Christians in Israel and occupied Palestine number some 175,000, just over 2 percent of the entire population, but the numbers are rapidly dwindling due to mass emigration. Of those who have remained in the region, most live in Lebanon, where they share in the same bottomless misery as all other refugees, confined to camps where schools are under-funded and overcrowded, where housing is ramshackle, and sanitary conditions are appalling. Most, however, have fled the region altogether. No reliable figures are available, but it is estimated that between 100,000 and 300,000 Palestinian Christians currently live in the U.S.
The Palestinian Christians see themselves, and are seen by their Muslim compatriots, as an integral part of the Palestinian people, and they have long been a vital part of the Palestinian struggle. As the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem, the Reverend Riah Abu al-Assal has explained, “The Arab Palestinian Christians are part and parcel of the Arab Palestinian nation. We have the same history, the same culture, the same habits and the same hopes.”
Yet U.S. media and politicians have become accustomed to thinking of and talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one in which an enlightened democracy is constantly forced to repel attacks from crazy-eyed Islamists bent on the destruction of the Jewish people and the imposition of an Islamic state. Palestinians are equated with Islamists, Islamists with terrorists. It is presumably because all organized Christian activity among Palestinians is non-political and non-violent that the community hardly ever hits the Western headlines; suicide bombers sell more copy than people who congregate for Bible study.
Lebanese and Syrian Christians were essential in the conception of Arab nationalism as a general school of anti-colonial thought following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th century. During the 1930s, Hajj Amin al-Hussein, the leader of the Palestinian struggle against the British colonialists, surrounded himself with Christian advisors and functionaries. In the 1950s and ’60s, as the various factions that were to form the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) emerged, some of the most prominent militants were yet again of Christian origin. For instance, George Habash, a Greek Orthodox medical doctor from al-Lod, created the Arab Nationalists’ Movement and went on to found the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Naif Hawatmeh, also Greek Orthodox, from al-Salt in Jordan, founded and still today heads up the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Among those better regarded in the West, Hannan Ashrawi, one of the Palestinian Authority’s most effective spokespersons, is a Christian.
In fact, over the decades, many of the rank and file among the secular nationalist groups of the PLO have been Christians who have seen leftist nationalist politics as the only alternative to both Islamism and Western liberalism, the former objectionable because of its religiously exclusive nature, the latter due to what is seen by many as its inherent protection of Israel and the Zionist project.
Among the remnant communities in Palestine, most belong to the traditional Christian confessions. The largest group is Greek Orthodox, followed by Catholics (Roman, Syrian, Maronite, and Melkite), Armenian Orthodox, Anglicans, and Lutherans. There is also a small but influential Quaker presence. These communities are centered in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Beit Jala, Beit Sahour, and Ramallah.
For them, the conflict with Israel is quite obviously not about Islamism contra enlightenment but simply about resistance against occupation. To be sure, there have been periods of tension between the Christian communities and members of the Islamist groups, yet to many Christian Palestinians the Islamist movements have emerged by default as the heroes in the conflict with Israel. Following the incremental atrophy of leftist ideals, the Islamists are seen as the only ones who are willing and able to fight the occupation. The Lebanese Hezbollah, widely seen as a nonsectarian organization that is able to cooperate with people of all faiths, is particularly admired both among the refugees in Lebanon as well as those who remain in Palestine. “We have received far more support and comfort from the Hezbollah in Lebanon than from our fellow Christians in the West,” remarked one Christian Palestinian refugee in Damascus. “I want to know, why don’t the Christians in the West do anything to help us? Are the teachings of Jesus nothing but empty slogans to them?”
This is a justified and important question, but the answer is not straightforward. The Catholic Church has, in fact, long argued for an end to the Israeli occupation and for improvement of the Palestinians’ situation. The leaders of the Eastern Orthodox churches have taken similar, often more strongly worded positions. Likewise, many Lutheran and Calvinist churches run organizations and programs that seek to ease the suffering of the Palestinians and draw attention to the injustices with which they are faced. Usually working within strictly religious frames of reference, however, their impact on the political situation has been minimal.
This political limitation has not applied to those parts of the Evangelical movement that have adopted Zionism as a core element of their religious doctrine. Christian Zionists in the U.S. are currently organized in an alliance with the pro-Israel lobby and the neoconservative elements of the Republican Party, enabling them to put significant pressure on both the president and members of Congress. In fact, they are among the most influential shapers of policy in the country, including individuals such as Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell, and groups such as the National Unity Coalition for Israel, Christians for Israel, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, and Chosen People Ministries.
Christian Zionism is an odd thing on many levels. A key tenet of Christian Zionism is absolute support for Israel, whose establishment and existence, it is believed, heralds Armageddon and the second coming of Christ. The politically relevant upshot of this is that without Israel’s expansion there can be no redemption, and those who subscribe to this interpretation are only too eager to sacrifice their Palestinian fellow Christians on the altar of Zionism. They do not want to hear about coreligionists’ suffering at the hands of Israel.
Israeli and Jewish American leaders have until recently kept their distance from the Christian Zionist movement. But Beltway alliance politics coupled with a sharp turn to the right among American Jewish organizations since Israel began its onslaught on Palestinians in September 2000, has driven them into each other’s arms.
One of the most potent forces behind the Evangelical Zionist influence in Washington is Tom DeLay, leader of the Republican majority in the House. DeLay insists that his devotion to Israel stems from his faith in God, which allows him a clear understanding of the struggle between good and evil. Be that as it may, he is also able to cash in financially and politically from his position. Part of DeLay’s growing influence within the Republican Party stems from the fact that his campaign committees managed to raise an impressive $12 million in 2001-2002. Washington Post writer Jim VandeHei suggested, “In recent years, DeLay has become one of the most outspoken defenders of Israel and has been rewarded with a surge of donations from the Jewish community.”
In Oct. 2002, Benny Elon, Sharon’s minister of tourism and a staunch advocate of a comprehensive purge of Palestinians from the Holy Land, appeared with DeLay at the Washington convention of the Christian Coalition. Crowds waved Israeli flags as Elon cited Biblical authority for this preferred way of dealing with the pesky Palestinians. DeLay, in turn, received an enthusiastic welcome when he called for activists to back pro-Israel candidates who “stand unashamedly for Jesus Christ.” In July 2003, Tom DeLay traveled to Israel and addressed the Knesset, telling the assembled legislators that he was an “Israeli at heart.” The Palestinians “have been oppressed and abused,” he said, but never by Israel, only by their own leaders. DeLay received a standing ovation.
Christians find themselves under the hammer of the Israeli occupation to no less an extent than Muslims, yet America—supposedly a Christian country—stands idly by because its most politically influential Christians have decided that Palestinian Christians are acceptable collateral damage in their apocalyptic quest. “To be a Christian from the land of Christ is an honor,” says Abbas, a Palestinian Christian whose family lived in Jerusalem for many generations until the purge of 1948. “To be expelled from that land is an injury, and these Zionist Christians in America add insult.”
Abbas is one of the handful of Palestinian Christians that could be described as Evangelical, belonging to a group that appears to be distantly related to the Plymouth Brethren. Cherishing the role of devil’s advocate, I had to ask him, “Is the State of Israel not in fact the fulfillment of God’s promise and a necessary step in the second coming of Christ?” Abbas looked at me briefly and laughed. “You’re kidding, right? You know what they do to our people and our land. If I thought that was part of God’s plan, I’d be an atheist in a second.”
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Anders Strindberg is an academic and a journalist specializing in Mideast politics.

A Friend’s Lament
How Israel Lost, Richard Ben Cramer, Simon & Schuster, 307 pages
By Scott McConnell
In this snappily written book, Richard Ben Cramer argues that Israel has been corrupted by its 37-year-long occupation of the Palestinian territory on the West Bank and Gaza. The occupation has diverted the country from its historic mission—providing “a place where Jews could live the best life … in accordance with their values”—to something less ambitious and admirable. Its energies and spirit sapped by measures to control an embittered foreign population, Israeli life has begun to coarsen. Some of the consequences are internal: domestic assaults, road-rage killings, school violence, are now part of the social texture. The once appealing smallness of the country, Israel as a modern village in which everyone felt mutually connected, is now gone. Gone too are such noble aspirations as the doctrine of “purity of arms” through which the army tried hard to avoid harming innocent Arab civilians; some of today’s top commanders don’t even pretend to care. Cramer writes with great empathy about the life Israel has inflicted on the Palestinians, a captive people, shut off from all foreign contacts, locked into a hopelessly uneven contest against one of the best armies in the world.
Though seldom voiced in the United States, such arguments are expressed often by Israelis unreconciled to Likud’s policies. In Cramer’s colloquial American idiom, they are sharp and refreshing. The “How Israel Lost” of the title sets down a challenge for admirers of Begin, Shamir, Netanyahu, and Sharon (including, it is now clear, George W. Bush) who would deny that Israel has suffered meaningful loss at all. But Cramer recalls how luminous Israel’s reputation used to be in the United States and in much of the world, and that clearly has been lost. Was that reputation entirely deserved? “A land without people for a people without land”—this was the most commonly heard shorthand for the Zionist project 40 or 50 years ago. It was popularized in the movie “Exodus,” with Paul Newman as a Jewish underground fighter and “shiksa-goddess Eva Marie Saint as his home-from-the-holocaust honey” (a clause which could come with a “don’t try this yourself” warning). But the “land without people” slogan was an element of what Cramer calls “hasbarah”—Hebrew for “explaining” or spin—and one of the Jewish state’s most successful exports. This bit of hasbarah was a work of genius, as deeply burrowed into the American subconscious in the 1950s and ’60s as (Cramer puckishly notes) “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should.” Back then, most of America felt part of Israel’s venture.
That sentiment is almost entirely gone. Relatively few believe the land of Palestine was “without people”—and while there is scant perception of moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians, no Israeli (or American) leader is now likely to say, as Golda Meir once did, “There are no Palestinians.” Yes, Golda, there are, several million in the West Bank or dispersed throughout the world, many with the keys and title deeds to what were once their families’ homes.
Cramer discovered this for himself in the late ’70s, as the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Mideast correspondent. He arrived buying into the whole hasbarah package but as he looked around him it began to wear off. He began to write in his paper about the Arabs—who were, quite often, hospitable, dignified, rational, and oppressed. Above all, they were there. His pieces earned him a Pulitzer prize … and several campaigns by committees of Jews trying to lose him his job. “Is it really Ibn Cramer? ” they would ask.
The argument of this book is drawn mostly through the portraits and stories of individual Jews and Arabs. Cramer has a real gift for bringing to life the people caught up in the endless struggle—even, or indeed especially those whose politics are not his own. His portraits are usually sympathetic (Mariam Farhat, the “mother of martyrs, ” a Palestinian woman who has raised several suicide bombers, is an exception); some, like that of Menachem Furman, a charismatic leader a West Bank settlement, are exquisite. The portrait of Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, an ultra-orthodox Jew who has organized the ultra-orthodox haredim to gather body parts of the victims of terror bombings for ritually proper burial, seemed to me journalism as an act of love.
Nonetheless, the backdrop to all these conversations is an occupation that impinges on Palestinian life at every level—shutting off three million largely innocent people. When Sharon completes his fence, Palestinian encirclement will be complete. The most banal journey in the West Bank is determined by Israeli military checkpoints. Cramer describes the trip of one Palestinian man who sets out to visit his elderly mother thirty miles away. He wants to avoid the checkpoints (which can take hours), so he tacks back and forth, up a riverbed, through a town, six separate taxis for the journey. Finally near the end, he climbs up a pile of stones to find an Israeli half-track and a soldier with a machine gun on the other side. Ordered to pull up his shirt to show he wasn’t carrying a bomb, the Palestinian just froze. “Shy?” the soldier asked. “No, I am ashamed,” was the reply. The soldier shrugged and let him pass—the man, whose journey had taken four hours, happened to be the newly appointed Palestinian minister of labor.
Arabs stopped at the checkpoints aren’t always as fortunate as the minister. There is the elderly headmaster of a Palestinian school whom the Israelis regularly force to strip—in order to humiliate him in front of his students. As a Russian Israeli manning the checkpoints explains, “Because the bad attitude—you know? If they are acting like they are good, and we are the bad one. Then, you must show them control.” Then there are other incidents, as when a Palestinian talks back in too fluent Hebrew, protesting against the soldiers who were throwing rocks at his rented car to amuse themselves. For his protest, he was shot in the head at close range.
Two poignant stories function as bookends, demonstrating how the conflict has worn down the morals of both sides. One is Kandil’s, just a boy when the Israeli troops entered his village in June 1967. He noted to his surprise that the Jews didn’t have tails, as he had been taught. Indeed, they seemed friendly enough, and within months Kandil and his friends used to cross the Green Line to play soccer with Israeli kids on a nicely leveled field. He later found employment at an Israeli nature reserve, learned to read and write Hebrew. When the second Intifada erupted , he ignored warnings to stop working for the “Zionist occupier.” One day he was told to report to Palestinian Authority headquarters in Ramallah, where he was taken in and beaten daily for two weeks and hung from a hook during the evenings. Finally he signed a blank sheet paper, which was turned into a confession for informing on Palestinian militants. He was rescued only when Israeli tanks entered Arafat’s compound in 2002.
The parallel tale, similar in spirit though mercifully lacking the sheer brutality, is that of Yossi, an Israeli art dealer from Tel Aviv. With his wife pregnant, Yossi was tempted by the prospect of subsidized housing in one of the new settlements near Jerusalem. But he didn’t quite fit in, preferring not to go out in the evening with his fellow settlers and shoot holes in the hot-water tanks of his Arab neighbors for amusement. An artistic type, he also he didn’t want a pre-fab house, but one built of stone, by craftsmen. He befriended the Arab artisans who lived nearby. As punishment for this fraternization, the settlement moved his trailer outside the fence. But Yossi found he could get along fine with the Palestinians—eventually proposing that the settlement create a joint kindergarten for Jews and Arabs. It was roughly at this point that the settler kids began saying “the house is unclean” and killed Yossi’s ducks and geese—finally his new house was burned down. Harassment and arson quite clearly do not equal torture, but the two tales are driven by a quite parallel emotion.
During the 1980’s, Cramer said he was optimistic about a peaceful solution. Israel could give up the territories, which would involve a fight with other Jews—the right-wing settlers—but they then were few in number. Or it could try to kill or expel millions of Arabs, which was “a tad Nazi-ish.” Or it could hang on to the land and develop a policy of apartheid. The logic of the first choice was compelling—however, a conflict with other Jews was distasteful. But abrupt end of the Cold War and the arrival of a million “Jewish” immigrants from the Soviet Union suddenly made option three possible, at least for a while, and that is what the state has done.
Yet Cramer believes a peace is still possible. Palestinians are not especially religious and not committed to religious-based Jew-hatred; the conflict is entirely about land. Widespread anti-Israeli terrorism began only after Israel committed itself to a wholesale policy of expanding settlements, assassinations, and land appropriation—that is when expansion of Israeli settlement of the West Bank became the driving impulse of the Jewish state.
Cramer is one of the very few authors to deflate the myth of Ehud Barak’s “perfect” peace offer at Camp David in 2000 —97 percent of the land, an offer that Arafat rejected as “less than a Bantustan, for your information.” Arafat and his cronies usually appear as self-serving thugs in Cramer’s narrative, and yet on this question the PA chairman had a point. What Barak offered was to keep 6 percent of the West Bank, give the Palestinians 3 percent from some Israeli desert. The so-called nation of Palestine was to consist of three separate ghettoes, each walled off by Israeli checkpoints and bases—so a citizen of “Palestine” couldn’t go about his country without Israeli permission. In addition, Israel proposed to keep military bases on the far (Jordan) side of “Palestine” and control of the aquifers and the new nation’s scarce water supply. Cramer acidly comments that the Barak proposal would have allowed Israel to continue the occupation policy under another name, “Palestine.”
And yet, since the issue is territory (and honor), compromise remains possible. It would center on a slogan everyone knows would be a winner—Give Back the Land. Not the land “except for the settlements,” or the land “except for the bases,” but all of it. Of course one can hear all the think-tank experts decrying the idea as simplistic or worse. But I am with Cramer here—such a step would transform the Middle East (and America’s now wretched image there) —and make Israel a better country as well.
This is a wonderful book, courageous and honest—though courage and honesty hardly suffice to make a book good. Cramer has brought Israelis and Arabs alive in his pages, effortlessly passing on to the reader his own deep affections. He writes as a Jew and lover of Israel, but is utterly persuasive in his argument that the occupation is gobbling up the soul of the state.
The Passion and Its Enemies
The campaign against the movie bespeaks deeper animus.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
At the Latin Mass at old St. Mary’s, the church was packed and the line outside the confessional was unusually long. “The Passion,” I thought to myself. And so it was. “Worshipers Take ‘Passion’ Back to Church,” was the headline in that Sunday’s Washington Times. The sub-head ran: “Mel Gibson’s film is inspiring parishioners to join congregations, go ‘back to the faith.’”
Thirty million Americans have seen “The Passion of the Christ.” According to Gallup, two-thirds of the nation intends to see the film in a theater or on DVD. By Good Friday, the crowds should be enormous. For this movie is a religious experience, a masterpiece, a work of art of immense power. The images of Christ and his Mother are burned forever into the imaginations of those who see it. “It is as it was,” said the Holy Father in Rome.
Though it is a Catholic film that faithfully replicates the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, the Stations of the Cross, the Seven Last Words, with allusions to the Eucharist and the war between Satan and the Mother of God, as Tom Piatak writes in Chronicles, evangelical Christians are as moved as traditional Catholics. It is an ecumenical moment. For once, Christians have come together, not to denounce some blasphemous filth funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, but in celebration and praise of an inspired work of art.
And despite the dire warnings of the Anti-Defamation League, not one synagogue has been torched, nor one American Jew assaulted. Yet still the attacks come. Not since D.W. Griffith portrayed the Klan as heroic defenders of white womanhood in “The Birth of a Nation” has a movie been so reviled.
“[A] wasted exercise in sadomasochism,” writes Al Neuharth. “A repulsive masochistic fantasy, a sacred snuff film” that uses “classically anti-Semitic images,” rants Leon Wieseltier in the New Republic. “A sickening death trip,” says David Denby in the New Yorker. “It is sick,” writes James Carroll in the Boston Globe, “a blood libel against the Jewish people,” echoes Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times, “Jew-baiting,” says William Safire in the New York Times, “fascistic,” agrees Richard Cohen in the Washington Post. Daniel Goldhagen, author of A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, calls “The Passion” “a sadomasochistic, orgiastic display that demonizes Jews as it degrades those who revel in viewing the horror.” Gibson, Goldhagen writes, “restores a blood-drenched Christian culture of death.”
And here is the New York Times’ Frank Rich, ten days after the Ash Wednesday opening:
With its laborious buildup 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 ... called it a homoerotic ‘exercise in lurid masochism’ for those who ‘like seeing handsome young men stripped and flayed alive over a long period of time.’
That “The Passion of the Christ” is loved by Christians and loathed by such as these is a measure of the breadth of our religious divide.
But why all this venom against a movie these writers knew by then that millions of Christians had taken to their hearts? To vent, to insult, to provoke? Having failed to have the film censored, banned, or boycotted, some are now crossing a forbidden frontier to commit hate crimes against Christianity. They have begun to attack the Gospels as responsible for the Holocaust.
In a Washington Post column titled “Gibson’s Blood Libel,” Charles Krauthammer links the crucifixion story to “a history of centuries of relentless, and at times savage, persecution of Jews in Christian lands.” For 2000 years, he says, the Catholic Church taught that “the Jews were Christ killers.” Only at Vatican II did Rome take responsibility for the “baleful history” that came out of the “central story” of the Gospels.
The blood libel that this story [of the crucifixion] affixed upon the Jewish people had led to countless Christian massacres of Jews and prepared Europe for the ultimate massacre—6 million Jews systematically murdered in six years—in the heart, alas, of a Christian continent. It is no accident Vatican II occurred just two decades after the Holocaust, indeed in its shadow.
But Krauthammer stands truth on its head. Not until the ideas of Rousseau, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud had poisoned the soul of Europe and Christianity had lost the continent did Hitler and Stalin come to power to work their evil will upon Christians and Jews. Hitler learned his hatreds in Viennese gutters, not Catholic schools. Speaking of blood libels, has there been one greater than Krauthammer’s accusation that the Gospel of Jesus Christ paved the way to Auschwitz?
Krauthammer echoes Richard Cohen who says the movie is “anti-Semitic ... in the way portions of the New Testament are—an assignment of blame that culminated in the Holocaust.”
Both columns are of a piece with the slanders of Pius XII. Credited by one Jewish historian with saving 800,000 Jews, praised by the Rabbi of Rome, publicly mourned on his death by Golda Meir, Pius XII, too, has fallen victim to the blood libel that he was “Hitler’s Pope.”
Krauthammer and Cohen have picked up the new line advanced by Eli Wiesel, that Nazis and Christians in the Holocaust were one and the same.
[A]ll the Jews were victims, and all the killers were Christians. They didn’t become killers in a vacuum. They emerged from a certain civilization, teaching, and tradition of hate. They’re an example of what happens to people who learn to hate, and that’s a Christian problem.
Krauthammer repeatedly invokes Nazi analogies. Mel Gibson’s defense of his film about Christ reminds him of Leni Riefenstal’s defense of her films about Hitler. He calls Gibson’s interpretation of the Gospels “spectacularly vicious.” Why “vicious”? Because Gibson places the High Priest Caiaphas at the scourging, and this cannot be found in the Gospels.
But this is to cavil on the ninth part of a hair. According to Mark 15:31-32, “the chief priests” were mocking Christ at the foot of the cross, even as he was dying:
In like manner also the chief priests mocking, said with the scribes one to another: He saved others; himself he cannot save. Let Christ the King of Israel come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe.
Does Krauthammer contend that Caiaphas was not central to the plot to have Christ killed? If so, his argument is not with Mel but with Matthew 26:2-3:
Then were gathered together the chief priests and ancients of the people into the court of the high priest, who was called Caiaphas: And they consulted together, that by subtlety they might apprehend Jesus and put him to death.
Something not clear here, Charles? And if Caiaphas conspired to kill Jesus, is it artistic injustice to have him observe the scourging he had brought about?
What motive did the religious establishment have? Consider these lines from Matthew 23, spoken by Christ right in the face of the Pharisees who had repeatedly sought to entrap him:
Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you devour the houses of widows, praying long prayers. For this you shall receive the greater judgment .... Blind guides who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel .... Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you are like to whited sepulchres, which outwardly appear to men beautiful, but within are full of dead men’s bones, and of all filthiness .... So you outwardly indeed appear to men just; but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity .... Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees ... you are the sons of them that killed the prophets.You serpents, you generation of vipers, how will you flee from the judgment of hell?
This probably did not go down all that well at the Temple. And Jesus acted upon his words (Matthew 21:12-13):
And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the chairs of them that sold doves. And he saith to them: It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but you have made it a den of thieves.
The Scribes, Pharisees, and chief priest had every reason to hate Jesus and want him dead. Is this so difficult to understand? And did not the mob assembled by the high priests seek the death of Christ?
Here is Matthew 27:22-25:
Pilate saith to them: What shall I do then with Jesus that is called Christ? They all said: Let him be crucified. The governor said to them: Why, what evil hath he done? But they cried out the more, saying: Let him be crucified. And Pilate seeing that he prevailed nothing, but that rather a tumult was made; taking water washed his hands before the people saying: I am innocent of the blood of this just man; look you to it. And the whole people answering, said: His blood be upon us and upon our children.
Krauthammer is also upset with the appearances of Satan in the film. “Satan appears four times. Twice, this sinister, hooded, androgynous embodiment of evil is found ... where? Moving among the crowd of Jews.”
But Satan first appears besides Jesus as he undergoes the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, alone. When Satan appears in the crowd, it is to observe Christ suffering, his scourging at the pillar by Romans, or to stare across at his Mother as she watches her Son carrying the cross up Calvary. If Satan is in a crowd, it has to be a Jewish crowd. Jerusalem was a Jewish city. The only Romans are Pilate and his soldiers.
As for the repellent term “Christ killers,” Krauthammer mouths myths he must have heard down at shul. As a cradle Catholic, I never heard this term until a Jewish friend told me this was what we Catholics were taught in our schools. But this crude blasphemous phrase is not one devout nuns of the 1940s or 1950s or Catholics of the Holy Name Society would ever use. It is a term ascribed to us by those who never knew us.
Krauthammer refers to the “baleful history” of the Crucifixion story. What did the Crucifixion give mankind? Salvation, the opening of the gates of heaven, Western civilization, the greatest art, architecture, music, painting, sculpture, cathedrals and churches in history, the idea that all men are children of God and that each has an innate worth and dignity, which puts limits on the power of any state—and an end to slavery.
No Cross, no Christianity. No Christianity, no West. No West, no freedom, no human rights, no America. Where does Krauthammer think our civilization and culture came from?
In her column “Hating the Jews,” Mona Charen accuses Gibson of seeding “his film with images of Jewish guilt and perfidy.” But how can one tell the story of how Christ was betrayed by Judas for 30 pieces of silver, how the scribes and Pharisees and high priest plotted against Him, how the crowd cried “Give us Barabas,” and “Let Him be crucified!”, how Pilate cravenly capitulated—without having a touch of “guilt and perfidy”?
What is the attachment of columnists in 2004 to a high priest of the first century A.D.? Why the Caiaphas Defense Fund? Is it not possible to accept that after Jesus berated the scribes and Pharisees in front of the people they might want to kill him? Is it not possible that the high priest would plot the death of so charismatic and threatening a figure?
What these writers are saying is that it is fine to say Pilate ordered the crucifixion, and the Romans did it, but anti-Semitic to say Caiaphas was the prime mover in the Passover plot. Yet, for Caiaphas to be innocent, the Gospels must be myths or lies. My film is anti-Semitic only if the Gospels are anti-Semitic, says Gibson.
Exactly the point, says Stanley Kauffmann of the New Republic: “‘The Passion’ is anti-Semitic, because the Gospels themselves are anti-Semitic—in the sense of fixing Jewish responsibility for the Crucifixion.” Abe Foxman agrees: “the Gospels, if taken literally, can be very damaging.” But what if the Gospels “taken literally” are true?
To Boston University’s Paula Fredriksen, an apostate Catholic and convert to Judaism, “anti-Semitism has been integral to Christianity.” In the Toronto Globe & Mail, Donald Akinson writes, “To film a literal version of the Gospel of John is like filming a faithful version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
With folks who believe this, dialogue seems pointless. For they are saying that Christianity is anti-Semitic at its root and either we rewrite the Gospels to eradicate any “perfidy” by the Jewish authorities who delivered Christ to Pilate, or we are colluding in anti-Semitism and responsible for its consequences. If being faithful to the Christian imperative to tell the Gospel truth about the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ is, to non-Christians and post-Christians, to spread anti-Semitism, our conflict is irreconcilable.
Yet a point bears repeating. Though Jewish leaders did conspire to put Jesus to death, this does not mean, has never meant, that all Jews were or are culpable in his death, or even that the Jewish establishment knew Christ was the Son of God. Common sense suggests they did not believe it—as does Christ himself from the Cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
And while many whose hatred for “The Passion” knows no bounds are Jewish, other Jewish writers—Michael Medved, Don Feder, Matt Drudge, Paul Gottfried—have urged their co-religionists and ethnic kinsmen to control the hysteria. Rabbi Daniel Lapin of Toward Tradition accuses Foxman and the ADL of “driving a wedge between American Jews and Christians.” But Rabbi Lapin seems a voice crying in the wilderness. For Ms. Charen puts “The Passion” in the context of the following events: an assault on a Kiev synagogue by thugs yelling “Kill the Kikes,” the desecration of a Jewish cemetery in Greece, the French Ambassador in London blurting out at a dinner party that Israel is a “shitty little country.”
But is it really fair to include Gibson’s film in this litany? Is it wise to keep up this vendetta against a movie that Christians have embraced, when millions of these Christians give uncritical loyalty to Israel?
Safire rails that “The Passion” is the “bloodiest, most brutal example of sustained sadism ever presented on the screen ... reveling in savagery to provoke outrage and cast blame ...”
The villains at whom the audience’s outrage is directed are the actors’ playing bloodthirsty rabbis and their rabid Jewish followers. This is the essence of the medieval ‘passion play’ preserved in pre-Hitler Germany at Oberammergau, a source of the hatred of all Jews as ‘Christ killers.’
But this is nonsense. The only people who come away from this film in “outrage” are those who went into it in outrage. Even Foxman, who slipped into a preview, acknowledges as much:
As the lights came up, the silence was etched with stifled sobs and tears. The 3,000 Christian pastors, leaders, students and others who attended the preview of the film’s graphic portrayal of the events leading up to the Crucifixion were visibly moved by the images that brought them closer than they may have ever been to bearing witness to the Passion of Jesus.
Does this sound like the “kind of sentiment we would expect from Christians ready to act on their latent anti-Semitism?” asks Dr. William Donohue of the Catholic League. That brings us to the heart of the matter. Though we all see the same movie, we hear and see different messages. Where they see Caiaphas, perfidy, and anti-Semitism, we see Christ, his suffering, and what salvation cost. As Bruce Anderson writes in the Spectator, Christians do not focus on the characters that so captivate Safire, Charen, and Krauthammer.
[T]he horror does not come from the artist’s imagination. It comes from the self-sacrifice of the son of God who, after preaching to and living among the poor and the outcast, endured a felon’s humiliating death. Mocked for His pretensions to kingship, He revealed the nature of His Kingdom by embracing His Cross.
For centuries, Christians have read the Gospel story of the passion and death of Christ in Holy Week. Yet, never has there been a pogrom in America. America is not the Russia of Alexander III. But if these writers truly believe millions of Christians have sat through two hours of endless “Jew-baiting” and failed to recognize it, what does that tell us about what they think of our intelligence, our sensitivity, our decency?
Safire twice refers to Oberammergau and calls it a Jew-baiting passion play “preserved in pre-Hitler Germany, a source of the hatred of all Jews as ‘Christ killers.’” The famous Oberammergau passion play dates back to 1633 and the Thirty Years War when villagers in this tiny Alpine town were spared from the Black Plague and vowed to give thanks to their God by producing a play on his passion and death, once every ten years. It is a six-hour thing of beauty known to Catholics worldwide, few of whom have ever seen it. Were that play a cause of the Holocaust, why was there no Holocaust in the centuries when Catholic kings ruled the Holy Roman Empire? Why did it happen only after the Hitler came to power and Europe was convulsed in the worst war in its history, 300 years after the play was first performed? Blaming a six-hour play, put on once every ten years, by 2,000 amateur actors, in a tiny town of 5,000 buried in the Tyrolean Alps, for Hitler’s pogrom against the Jews is so preposterous it calls up the old adage: “Anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals.”
To Safire, Catholicism leads straight to the Holocaust. The line from Matthew, “Let his blood be upon us and our children,” he writes, has led to “millenniums of persecution, scapegoating and ultimately mass murder that flowed partly from its malign repetition.” This was “finally addressed by the Catholic Church after the defeat of Nazism.”
In 1965’s historic Second Vatican Council during the papacy of Pope Paul VI, the church decided that while some Jewish leaders and their followers had pressed for the death of Jesus, “still, what happened in his passion cannot be charged against all Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor the Jews of today.”
That was a sea change in the doctrinal interpretation of the Gospels, and the beginning of major interfaith progress
This statement is historically and patently false. Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II document to which Safire refers, is not any “sea change in the doctrinal interpretation of the Gospels.” It is a reaffirmation of traditional Catholic teaching for the benefit of Jewish groups that requested it.
Christianity and the Church have always taught it was our sins that put Christ on the Cross. As Legionary Father Thomas Williams, dean of the school of theology at Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University in Rome, a consultant to Gibson’s film, tells the National Catholic Register:
[T]he fathers of the Second Vatican Council didn’t see themselves as reversing any prior teachings on this question [of Jewish responsibility for Christ’s death]. The council categorically reaffirmed perennial Catholic teaching that all of humanity’s sins, and the sins of Christians in particular, are responsible for Christ’s death, as stated, inter alia, in the catechism of the Council of Trent.
Gibson drives the point home with brutal force as he plays the Roman soldier who hammers the first nail into the palm of Christ. His message is reaffirmed in the penultimate scene described in America by Lloyd Baugh, S.J.,
In a physically static but morally dynamic representation of the Pieta, Mary stares not at the dead Jesus but directly into the camera, and therefore directly at the viewer .... This shot, lasting a long 20 seconds, invites the viewers to enter the narrative and assume their responsibility, as sinners, for the death of this Jesus, who the film repeatedly makes clear has died for our sins. Gibson here is saying, more strongly than any other director has done, that it is not the Jewish people who killed Jesus; every one of us sinful human beings is responsible for his death.
This is why, at film’s end, men and women sit in stunned silence or sob. Gibson has charged us with moral complicity in the suffering and death of the Son of God we have just witnessed in all its horror. That is why we are moved. But for Mona Charen, it is all just another attempt to blame the Jews: “There is a seemingly unquenchable thirst to vilify Jews, to deny them their humanity, to strip them of their history and to transform them—in propaganda—into oppressors rather than oppressed.”
Give it a rest, Mona.
This is a film in which every heroic figure is a Jew: Jesus, his Mother, Mary Magdalene, the Apostles Peter and John, St. Veronica who wipes his face on the road to Calvary, Simon of Cyrene who, though first bitter at being conscripted to carry Christ’s cross, is soon trying to lift the burden from his shoulders. Jewish members of the councils are heard at the court proceedings crying out against a “travesty ... a beastly travesty.” At the crucifixion, a member of the Jewish council, most likely Joseph of Arimathea, is seen helping take Christ down from the cross. Along the road to Calvary, the women of Jerusalem weep openly. The entire film underscores the words of Christ (John 4:22) to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, “Salvation is from the Jews.”
If there is any “unquenchable thirst to vilify,” it would appear to be on the part of those who cannot stop vilifying Mel Gibson. What has this man done but defend himself and his film against the most savage charges ever leveled at a work of art? As for Ms. Charen’s suggestion that Jews are “oppressed,” one must ask: When have Jews ever been oppressed in this country?
In World War II, millions perished at the hands of the Nazis. A horrific and historic atrocity about which we are regularly reminded. But in that 20th century tens of millions of Christians—Armenians, Mexicans, Spaniards, Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Poles, Chinese, Hungarians, Cubans, Vietnamese, Sudanese, Timorese—were martyred for their faith by Communists, Nazis, and Islamic fanatics. No nation, no race, no people have cornered the market on suffering. Nor on oppression. As there were renegade Catholics in Hitler’s Reich, so there were atheistic Jewish Bolsheviks like Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin’s man in the Ukraine, who were as guilty of genocide as Heinrich Himmler.
Author Gertrude Himmelfarb asks how Christians would react if “a Hollywood so notoriously populated by Jews” made a film about how Jews were falsely accused and put to death during the Spanish Inquisition. But the event in 1481 Ms. Himmelfarb brings up is not remotely comparable to the Crucifixion that is the central event in 2000 years of Christendom. As for her admonition that we stop coarsening the culture by going “over the edge” with films rooted in violence and sadism, is Ms. Himmelfarb asking for a moratorium on movies about the Holocaust?
Frank Rich, who has reviled Gibson and his film since he first heard of it, now frets for his safety: “‘The Passion’ has made me feel less secure as a Jew in America than ever before.” Well, Frank, if you were not insulting millions of Christians by telling them a beloved film about their Savior is a homoerotic “jamboree of bloody beefcake” and calling the Pope “a shill,” you might not be at risk of having your lights punched out.
A decade ago, Irving Kristol warned his kinsmen and co-religionists not to antagonize a huge friendly Christian majority by using the courts to de-Christianize the country. Jews who wish to maintain their separate and unique religious and ethnic character ought not be in the vanguard of those seeking to prevent Christians from maintaining the Christian character of their country, said Kristol. He added pungently:
One can easily understand the attractiveness of this vision to Jews. What is less easy to understand is the chutzpah of American Jews in publicly embracing this dual vision. Such arrogance is, I would suggest, a particularly Jewish form of political stupidity.
Kristol subtly titled his piece, “On the Political Stupidity of the Jews.”
Yet still the questions arise. Why do a handful of writers continue to rage that the film is a moral atrocity, a horror, the product of a deranged or anti-Semitic mind? Why do they hate “The Passion of the Christ” so?
The answer I believe may be found in words this writer spoke at the Republican convention, 12 years ago: “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”
Those who hate “The Passion” are, almost all, on the other side in that war. They hate the movie and the messenger, and, as they admit, the “central story” of the Gospels, the Crucifixion of Christ. Why? Because if “The Passion” is true to the Gospels and the Gospels are themselves true, then there is a painful truth to be faced. It is found in John 1:11, inside “The Last Gospel” of the Tridentine mass Mel Gibson attends. “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.” Admittedly, that is a hard message to hear.
Safire quotes Christ (Matthew 10:34) as saying: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.” But Christ is using a metaphor here, the meaning of which follows:
For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s enemies shall be they of his own household.
Again and again, Christ refers to this coming divide between those who will follow him and those who will reject him. “He who is not with me is against me; and he who does not gather with me scatters” (Luke 11:23).
The venom spewed at “The Passion of the Christ,” only testifies to the truth of the Savior’s warning, “As the world has hated me, so also it will hate you.” Braveheart has led and won a great victory in the crusade that is the culture war that will determine the fate of the civilization that came out of what happened on Calvary and on that first Easter morning.

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: Forgotten Christians : Not all displaced Palestinians are Muslims. : By Anders Strindberg : Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” is playing to full houses in the Syrian capital Damascus. Watching it here turns out to be much the same as watching it on opening night in New York—customarily rowdy moviegoers observe a reverent silence, the usual sound of candy wrappers is replaced by sobbing and gasping, and, at the end of it all, the audience files out of the theater in silence and contemplation. Many of those watching the movie on this occasion are Palestinian Christian refugees whose parents or grandparents were purged from their homeland—the land of Christ—at the foundation of Israel in 1948. For them the movie has an underlying symbolic meaning not easily perceived in the West: not only is it a depiction of the trial, scourging, and death of Jesus, it is also a symbolic depiction of the fate of the Palestinian people. “This is how we feel,” says Zaki, a 27-year old Palestinian Christian whose family hails from Haifa. “We take beating after beating at the hands of the world, they crucify our people, they insult us, but we refuse to surrender.” : At the time of the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, it is estimated that the Christians of Palestine numbered some 350,000. Almost 20 percent of the total population at the time, they constituted a vibrant and ancient community; their forbears had listened to St. Peter in Jerusalem as he preached at the first Pentecost. Yet Zionist doctrine held that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Of the 750,000 Palestinians that were forced from their homes in 1948, some 50,000 were Christians—7 percent of the total number of refugees and 35 percent of the total number of Christians living in Palestine at the time. : In the process of “Judaizing” Palestine, numerous convents, hospices, seminaries, and churches were either destroyed or cleared of their Christian owners and custodians. In one of the most spectacular attacks on a Christian target, on May 17, 1948, the Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate was shelled with about 100 mortar rounds—launched by Zionist forces from the already occupied monastery of the Benedictine Fathers on Mount Zion. The bombardment also damaged St. Jacob’s Convent, the Archangel’s Convent, and their appended churches, their two elementary and seminary schools, as well as their libraries, killing eight people and wounding 120. : Today it is believed that the number of Christians in Israel and occupied Palestine number some 175,000, just over 2 percent of the entire population, but the numbers are rapidly dwindling due to mass emigration. Of those who have remained in the region, most live in Lebanon, where they share in the same bottomless misery as all other refugees, confined to camps where schools are under-funded and overcrowded, where housing is ramshackle, and sanitary conditions are appalling. Most, however, have fled the region altogether. No reliable figures are available, but it is estimated that between 100,000 and 300,000 Palestinian Christians currently live in the U.S. : The Palestinian Christians see themselves, and are seen by their Muslim compatriots, as an integral part of the Palestinian people, and they have long been a vital part of the Palestinian struggle. As the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem, the Reverend Riah Abu al-Assal has explained, “The Arab Palestinian Christians are part and parcel of the Arab Palestinian nation. We have the same history, the same culture, the same habits and the same hopes.” : Yet U.S. media and politicians have become accustomed to thinking of and talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one in which an enlightened democracy is constantly forced to repel attacks from crazy-eyed Islamists bent on the destruction of the Jewish people and the imposition of an Islamic state. Palestinians are equated with Islamists, Islamists with terrorists. It is presumably because all organized Christian activity among Palestinians is non-political and non-violent that the community hardly ever hits the Western headlines; suicide bombers sell more copy than people who congregate for Bible study. : Lebanese and Syrian Christians were essential in the conception of Arab nationalism as a general school of anti-colonial thought following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th century. During the 1930s, Hajj Amin al-Hussein, the leader of the Palestinian struggle against the British colonialists, surrounded himself with Christian advisors and functionaries. In the 1950s and ’60s, as the various factions that were to form the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) emerged, some of the most prominent militants were yet again of Christian origin. For instance, George Habash, a Greek Orthodox medical doctor from al-Lod, created the Arab Nationalists’ Movement and went on to found the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Naif Hawatmeh, also Greek Orthodox, from al-Salt in Jordan, founded and still today heads up the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Among those better regarded in the West, Hannan Ashrawi, one of the Palestinian Authority’s most effective spokespersons, is a Christian. : In fact, over the decades, many of the rank and file among the secular nationalist groups of the PLO have been Christians who have seen leftist nationalist politics as the only alternative to both Islamism and Western liberalism, the former objectionable because of its religiously exclusive nature, the latter due to what is seen by many as its inherent protection of Israel and the Zionist project. : Among the remnant communities in Palestine, most belong to the traditional Christian confessions. The largest group is Greek Orthodox, followed by Catholics (Roman, Syrian, Maronite, and Melkite), Armenian Orthodox, Anglicans, and Lutherans. There is also a small but influential Quaker presence. These communities are centered in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Beit Jala, Beit Sahour, and Ramallah. : For them, the conflict with Israel is quite obviously not about Islamism contra enlightenment but simply about resistance against occupation. To be sure, there have been periods of tension between the Christian communities and members of the Islamist groups, yet to many Christian Palestinians the Islamist movements have emerged by default as the heroes in the conflict with Israel. Following the incremental atrophy of leftist ideals, the Islamists are seen as the only ones who are willing and able to fight the occupation. The Lebanese Hezbollah, widely seen as a nonsectarian organization that is able to cooperate with people of all faiths, is particularly admired both among the refugees in Lebanon as well as those who remain in Palestine. “We have received far more support and comfort from the Hezbollah in Lebanon than from our fellow Christians in the West,” remarked one Christian Palestinian refugee in Damascus. “I want to know, why don’t the Christians in the West do anything to help us? Are the teachings of Jesus nothing but empty slogans to them?” : This is a justified and important question, but the answer is not straightforward. The Catholic Church has, in fact, long argued for an end to the Israeli occupation and for improvement of the Palestinians’ situation. The leaders of the Eastern Orthodox churches have taken similar, often more strongly worded positions. Likewise, many Lutheran and Calvinist churches run organizations and programs that seek to ease the suffering of the Palestinians and draw attention to the injustices with which they are faced. Usually working within strictly religious frames of reference, however, their impact on the political situation has been minimal. : This political limitation has not applied to those parts of the Evangelical movement that have adopted Zionism as a core element of their religious doctrine. Christian Zionists in the U.S. are currently organized in an alliance with the pro-Israel lobby and the neoconservative elements of the Republican Party, enabling them to put significant pressure on both the president and members of Congress. In fact, they are among the most influential shapers of policy in the country, including individuals such as Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell, and groups such as the National Unity Coalition for Israel, Christians for Israel, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, and Chosen People Ministries. : Christian Zionism is an odd thing on many levels. A key tenet of Christian Zionism is absolute support for Israel, whose establishment and existence, it is believed, heralds Armageddon and the second coming of Christ. The politically relevant upshot of this is that without Israel’s expansion there can be no redemption, and those who subscribe to this interpretation are only too eager to sacrifice their Palestinian fellow Christians on the altar of Zionism. They do not want to hear about coreligionists’ suffering at the hands of Israel. : Israeli and Jewish American leaders have until recently kept their distance from the Christian Zionist movement. But Beltway alliance politics coupled with a sharp turn to the right among American Jewish organizations since Israel began its onslaught on Palestinians in September 2000, has driven them into each other’s arms. : One of the most potent forces behind the Evangelical Zionist influence in Washington is Tom DeLay, leader of the Republican majority in the House. DeLay insists that his devotion to Israel stems from his faith in God, which allows him a clear understanding of the struggle between good and evil. Be that as it may, he is also able to cash in financially and politically from his position. Part of DeLay’s growing influence within the Republican Party stems from the fact that his campaign committees managed to raise an impressive $12 million in 2001-2002. Washington Post writer Jim VandeHei suggested, “In recent years, DeLay has become one of the most outspoken defenders of Israel and has been rewarded with a surge of donations from the Jewish community.” : In Oct. 2002, Benny Elon, Sharon’s minister of tourism and a staunch advocate of a comprehensive purge of Palestinians from the Holy Land, appeared with DeLay at the Washington convention of the Christian Coalition. Crowds waved Israeli flags as Elon cited Biblical authority for this preferred way of dealing with the pesky Palestinians. DeLay, in turn, received an enthusiastic welcome when he called for activists to back pro-Israel candidates who “stand unashamedly for Jesus Christ.” In July 2003, Tom DeLay traveled to Israel and addressed the Knesset, telling the assembled legislators that he was an “Israeli at heart.” The Palestinians “have been oppressed and abused,” he said, but never by Israel, only by their own leaders. DeLay received a standing ovation. : Christians find themselves under the hammer of the Israeli occupation to no less an extent than Muslims, yet America—supposedly a Christian country—stands idly by because its most politically influential Christians have decided that Palestinian Christians are acceptable collateral damage in their apocalyptic quest. “To be a Christian from the land of Christ is an honor,” says Abbas, a Palestinian Christian whose family lived in Jerusalem for many generations until the purge of 1948. “To be expelled from that land is an injury, and these Zionist Christians in America add insult.” : Abbas is one of the handful of Palestinian Christians that could be described as Evangelical, belonging to a group that appears to be distantly related to the Plymouth Brethren. Cherishing the role of devil’s advocate, I had to ask him, “Is the State of Israel not in fact the fulfillment of God’s promise and a necessary step in the second coming of Christ?” Abbas looked at me briefly and laughed. “You’re kidding, right? You know what they do to our people and our land. If I thought that was part of God’s plan, I’d be an atheist in a second.” : ___________________________________________________ : Anders Strindberg is an academic and a journalist specializing in Mideast politics. : A Friend’s Lament : How Israel Lost, Richard Ben Cramer, Simon & Schuster, 307 pages : By Scott McConnell : In this snappily written book, Richard Ben Cramer argues that Israel has been corrupted by its 37-year-long occupation of the Palestinian territory on the West Bank and Gaza. The occupation has diverted the country from its historic mission—providing “a place where Jews could live the best life … in accordance with their values”—to something less ambitious and admirable. Its energies and spirit sapped by measures to control an embittered foreign population, Israeli life has begun to coarsen. Some of the consequences are internal: domestic assaults, road-rage killings, school violence, are now part of the social texture. The once appealing smallness of the country, Israel as a modern village in which everyone felt mutually connected, is now gone. Gone too are such noble aspirations as the doctrine of “purity of arms” through which the army tried hard to avoid harming innocent Arab civilians; some of today’s top commanders don’t even pretend to care. Cramer writes with great empathy about the life Israel has inflicted on the Palestinians, a captive people, shut off from all foreign contacts, locked into a hopelessly uneven contest against one of the best armies in the world. : Though seldom voiced in the United States, such arguments are expressed often by Israelis unreconciled to Likud’s policies. In Cramer’s colloquial American idiom, they are sharp and refreshing. The “How Israel Lost” of the title sets down a challenge for admirers of Begin, Shamir, Netanyahu, and Sharon (including, it is now clear, George W. Bush) who would deny that Israel has suffered meaningful loss at all. But Cramer recalls how luminous Israel’s reputation used to be in the United States and in much of the world, and that clearly has been lost. Was that reputation entirely deserved? “A land without people for a people without land”—this was the most commonly heard shorthand for the Zionist project 40 or 50 years ago. It was popularized in the movie “Exodus,” with Paul Newman as a Jewish underground fighter and “shiksa-goddess Eva Marie Saint as his home-from-the-holocaust honey” (a clause which could come with a “don’t try this yourself” warning). But the “land without people” slogan was an element of what Cramer calls “hasbarah”—Hebrew for “explaining” or spin—and one of the Jewish state’s most successful exports. This bit of hasbarah was a work of genius, as deeply burrowed into the American subconscious in the 1950s and ’60s as (Cramer puckishly notes) “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should.” Back then, most of America felt part of Israel’s venture. : That sentiment is almost entirely gone. Relatively few believe the land of Palestine was “without people”—and while there is scant perception of moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians, no Israeli (or American) leader is now likely to say, as Golda Meir once did, “There are no Palestinians.” Yes, Golda, there are, several million in the West Bank or dispersed throughout the world, many with the keys and title deeds to what were once their families’ homes. : Cramer discovered this for himself in the late ’70s, as the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Mideast correspondent. He arrived buying into the whole hasbarah package but as he looked around him it began to wear off. He began to write in his paper about the Arabs—who were, quite often, hospitable, dignified, rational, and oppressed. Above all, they were there. His pieces earned him a Pulitzer prize … and several campaigns by committees of Jews trying to lose him his job. “Is it really Ibn Cramer? ” they would ask. : The argument of this book is drawn mostly through the portraits and stories of individual Jews and Arabs. Cramer has a real gift for bringing to life the people caught up in the endless struggle—even, or indeed especially those whose politics are not his own. His portraits are usually sympathetic (Mariam Farhat, the “mother of martyrs, ” a Palestinian woman who has raised several suicide bombers, is an exception); some, like that of Menachem Furman, a charismatic leader a West Bank settlement, are exquisite. The portrait of Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, an ultra-orthodox Jew who has organized the ultra-orthodox haredim to gather body parts of the victims of terror bombings for ritually proper burial, seemed to me journalism as an act of love. : Nonetheless, the backdrop to all these conversations is an occupation that impinges on Palestinian life at every level—shutting off three million largely innocent people. When Sharon completes his fence, Palestinian encirclement will be complete. The most banal journey in the West Bank is determined by Israeli military checkpoints. Cramer describes the trip of one Palestinian man who sets out to visit his elderly mother thirty miles away. He wants to avoid the checkpoints (which can take hours), so he tacks back and forth, up a riverbed, through a town, six separate taxis for the journey. Finally near the end, he climbs up a pile of stones to find an Israeli half-track and a soldier with a machine gun on the other side. Ordered to pull up his shirt to show he wasn’t carrying a bomb, the Palestinian just froze. “Shy?” the soldier asked. “No, I am ashamed,” was the reply. The soldier shrugged and let him pass—the man, whose journey had taken four hours, happened to be the newly appointed Palestinian minister of labor. : Arabs stopped at the checkpoints aren’t always as fortunate as the minister. There is the elderly headmaster of a Palestinian school whom the Israelis regularly force to strip—in order to humiliate him in front of his students. As a Russian Israeli manning the checkpoints explains, “Because the bad attitude—you know? If they are acting like they are good, and we are the bad one. Then, you must show them control.” Then there are other incidents, as when a Palestinian talks back in too fluent Hebrew, protesting against the soldiers who were throwing rocks at his rented car to amuse themselves. For his protest, he was shot in the head at close range. : Two poignant stories function as bookends, demonstrating how the conflict has worn down the morals of both sides. One is Kandil’s, just a boy when the Israeli troops entered his village in June 1967. He noted to his surprise that the Jews didn’t have tails, as he had been taught. Indeed, they seemed friendly enough, and within months Kandil and his friends used to cross the Green Line to play soccer with Israeli kids on a nicely leveled field. He later found employment at an Israeli nature reserve, learned to read and write Hebrew. When the second Intifada erupted , he ignored warnings to stop working for the “Zionist occupier.” One day he was told to report to Palestinian Authority headquarters in Ramallah, where he was taken in and beaten daily for two weeks and hung from a hook during the evenings. Finally he signed a blank sheet paper, which was turned into a confession for informing on Palestinian militants. He was rescued only when Israeli tanks entered Arafat’s compound in 2002. : The parallel tale, similar in spirit though mercifully lacking the sheer brutality, is that of Yossi, an Israeli art dealer from Tel Aviv. With his wife pregnant, Yossi was tempted by the prospect of subsidized housing in one of the new settlements near Jerusalem. But he didn’t quite fit in, preferring not to go out in the evening with his fellow settlers and shoot holes in the hot-water tanks of his Arab neighbors for amusement. An artistic type, he also he didn’t want a pre-fab house, but one built of stone, by craftsmen. He befriended the Arab artisans who lived nearby. As punishment for this fraternization, the settlement moved his trailer outside the fence. But Yossi found he could get along fine with the Palestinians—eventually proposing that the settlement create a joint kindergarten for Jews and Arabs. It was roughly at this point that the settler kids began saying “the house is unclean” and killed Yossi’s ducks and geese—finally his new house was burned down. Harassment and arson quite clearly do not equal torture, but the two tales are driven by a quite parallel emotion. : During the 1980’s, Cramer said he was optimistic about a peaceful solution. Israel could give up the territories, which would involve a fight with other Jews—the right-wing settlers—but they then were few in number. Or it could try to kill or expel millions of Arabs, which was “a tad Nazi-ish.” Or it could hang on to the land and develop a policy of apartheid. The logic of the first choice was compelling—however, a conflict with other Jews was distasteful. But abrupt end of the Cold War and the arrival of a million “Jewish” immigrants from the Soviet Union suddenly made option three possible, at least for a while, and that is what the state has done. : Yet Cramer believes a peace is still possible. Palestinians are not especially religious and not committed to religious-based Jew-hatred; the conflict is entirely about land. Widespread anti-Israeli terrorism began only after Israel committed itself to a wholesale policy of expanding settlements, assassinations, and land appropriation—that is when expansion of Israeli settlement of the West Bank became the driving impulse of the Jewish state. : Cramer is one of the very few authors to deflate the myth of Ehud Barak’s “perfect” peace offer at Camp David in 2000 —97 percent of the land, an offer that Arafat rejected as “less than a Bantustan, for your information.” Arafat and his cronies usually appear as self-serving thugs in Cramer’s narrative, and yet on this question the PA chairman had a point. What Barak offered was to keep 6 percent of the West Bank, give the Palestinians 3 percent from some Israeli desert. The so-called nation of Palestine was to consist of three separate ghettoes, each walled off by Israeli checkpoints and bases—so a citizen of “Palestine” couldn’t go about his country without Israeli permission. In addition, Israel proposed to keep military bases on the far (Jordan) side of “Palestine” and control of the aquifers and the new nation’s scarce water supply. Cramer acidly comments that the Barak proposal would have allowed Israel to continue the occupation policy under another name, “Palestine.” : And yet, since the issue is territory (and honor), compromise remains possible. It would center on a slogan everyone knows would be a winner—Give Back the Land. Not the land “except for the settlements,” or the land “except for the bases,” but all of it. Of course one can hear all the think-tank experts decrying the idea as simplistic or worse. But I am with Cramer here—such a step would transform the Middle East (and America’s now wretched image there) —and make Israel a better country as well. : This is a wonderful book, courageous and honest—though courage and honesty hardly suffice to make a book good. Cramer has brought Israelis and Arabs alive in his pages, effortlessly passing on to the reader his own deep affections. He writes as a Jew and lover of Israel, but is utterly persuasive in his argument that the occupation is gobbling up the soul of the state. : The Passion and Its Enemies : The campaign against the movie bespeaks deeper animus. : By Patrick J. Buchanan : At the Latin Mass at old St. Mary’s, the church was packed and the line outside the confessional was unusually long. “The Passion,” I thought to myself. And so it was. “Worshipers Take ‘Passion’ Back to Church,” was the headline in that Sunday’s Washington Times. The sub-head ran: “Mel Gibson’s film is inspiring parishioners to join congregations, go ‘back to the faith.’” : Thirty million Americans have seen “The Passion of the Christ.” According to Gallup, two-thirds of the nation intends to see the film in a theater or on DVD. By Good Friday, the crowds should be enormous. For this movie is a religious experience, a masterpiece, a work of art of immense power. The images of Christ and his Mother are burned forever into the imaginations of those who see it. “It is as it was,” said the Holy Father in Rome. : Though it is a Catholic film that faithfully replicates the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, the Stations of the Cross, the Seven Last Words, with allusions to the Eucharist and the war between Satan and the Mother of God, as Tom Piatak writes in Chronicles, evangelical Christians are as moved as traditional Catholics. It is an ecumenical moment. For once, Christians have come together, not to denounce some blasphemous filth funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, but in celebration and praise of an inspired work of art. : And despite the dire warnings of the Anti-Defamation League, not one synagogue has been torched, nor one American Jew assaulted. Yet still the attacks come. Not since D.W. Griffith portrayed the Klan as heroic defenders of white womanhood in “The Birth of a Nation” has a movie been so reviled. : “[A] wasted exercise in sadomasochism,” writes Al Neuharth. “A repulsive masochistic fantasy, a sacred snuff film” that uses “classically anti-Semitic images,” rants Leon Wieseltier in the New Republic. “A sickening death trip,” says David Denby in the New Yorker. “It is sick,” writes James Carroll in the Boston Globe, “a blood libel against the Jewish people,” echoes Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times, “Jew-baiting,” says William Safire in the New York Times, “fascistic,” agrees Richard Cohen in the Washington Post. Daniel Goldhagen, author of A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, calls “The Passion” “a sadomasochistic, orgiastic display that demonizes Jews as it degrades those who revel in viewing the horror.” Gibson, Goldhagen writes, “restores a blood-drenched Christian culture of death.” : And here is the New York Times’ Frank Rich, ten days after the Ash Wednesday opening: : With its laborious buildup 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 ... called it a homoerotic ‘exercise in lurid masochism’ for those who ‘like seeing handsome young men stripped and flayed alive over a long period of time.’ : That “The Passion of the Christ” is loved by Christians and loathed by such as these is a measure of the breadth of our religious divide. : But why all this venom against a movie these writers knew by then that millions of Christians had taken to their hearts? To vent, to insult, to provoke? Having failed to have the film censored, banned, or boycotted, some are now crossing a forbidden frontier to commit hate crimes against Christianity. They have begun to attack the Gospels as responsible for the Holocaust. : In a Washington Post column titled “Gibson’s Blood Libel,” Charles Krauthammer links the crucifixion story to “a history of centuries of relentless, and at times savage, persecution of Jews in Christian lands.” For 2000 years, he says, the Catholic Church taught that “the Jews were Christ killers.” Only at Vatican II did Rome take responsibility for the “baleful history” that came out of the “central story” of the Gospels. : The blood libel that this story [of the crucifixion] affixed upon the Jewish people had led to countless Christian massacres of Jews and prepared Europe for the ultimate massacre—6 million Jews systematically murdered in six years—in the heart, alas, of a Christian continent. It is no accident Vatican II occurred just two decades after the Holocaust, indeed in its shadow. : But Krauthammer stands truth on its head. Not until the ideas of Rousseau, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud had poisoned the soul of Europe and Christianity had lost the continent did Hitler and Stalin come to power to work their evil will upon Christians and Jews. Hitler learned his hatreds in Viennese gutters, not Catholic schools. Speaking of blood libels, has there been one greater than Krauthammer’s accusation that the Gospel of Jesus Christ paved the way to Auschwitz? : Krauthammer echoes Richard Cohen who says the movie is “anti-Semitic ... in the way portions of the New Testament are—an assignment of blame that culminated in the Holocaust.” : Both columns are of a piece with the slanders of Pius XII. Credited by one Jewish historian with saving 800,000 Jews, praised by the Rabbi of Rome, publicly mourned on his death by Golda Meir, Pius XII, too, has fallen victim to the blood libel that he was “Hitler’s Pope.” : Krauthammer and Cohen have picked up the new line advanced by Eli Wiesel, that Nazis and Christians in the Holocaust were one and the same. : [A]ll the Jews were victims, and all the killers were Christians. They didn’t become killers in a vacuum. They emerged from a certain civilization, teaching, and tradition of hate. They’re an example of what happens to people who learn to hate, and that’s a Christian problem. : Krauthammer repeatedly invokes Nazi analogies. Mel Gibson’s defense of his film about Christ reminds him of Leni Riefenstal’s defense of her films about Hitler. He calls Gibson’s interpretation of the Gospels “spectacularly vicious.” Why “vicious”? Because Gibson places the High Priest Caiaphas at the scourging, and this cannot be found in the Gospels. : But this is to cavil on the ninth part of a hair. According to Mark 15:31-32, “the chief priests” were mocking Christ at the foot of the cross, even as he was dying: : In like manner also the chief priests mocking, said with the scribes one to another: He saved others; himself he cannot save. Let Christ the King of Israel come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe. : Does Krauthammer contend that Caiaphas was not central to the plot to have Christ killed? If so, his argument is not with Mel but with Matthew 26:2-3: : Then were gathered together the chief priests and ancients of the people into the court of the high priest, who was called Caiaphas: And they consulted together, that by subtlety they might apprehend Jesus and put him to death. : Something not clear here, Charles? And if Caiaphas conspired to kill Jesus, is it artistic injustice to have him observe the scourging he had brought about? : What motive did the religious establishment have? Consider these lines from Matthew 23, spoken by Christ right in the face of the Pharisees who had repeatedly sought to entrap him: : Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you devour the houses of widows, praying long prayers. For this you shall receive the greater judgment .... Blind guides who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel .... Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you are like to whited sepulchres, which outwardly appear to men beautiful, but within are full of dead men’s bones, and of all filthiness .... So you outwardly indeed appear to men just; but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity .... Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees ... you are the sons of them that killed the prophets.You serpents, you generation of vipers, how will you flee from the judgment of hell? : This probably did not go down all that well at the Temple. And Jesus acted upon his words (Matthew 21:12-13): : And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the chairs of them that sold doves. And he saith to them: It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but you have made it a den of thieves. : The Scribes, Pharisees, and chief priest had every reason to hate Jesus and want him dead. Is this so difficult to understand? And did not the mob assembled by the high priests seek the death of Christ? : Here is Matthew 27:22-25: : Pilate saith to them: What shall I do then with Jesus that is called Christ? They all said: Let him be crucified. The governor said to them: Why, what evil hath he done? But they cried out the more, saying: Let him be crucified. And Pilate seeing that he prevailed nothing, but that rather a tumult was made; taking water washed his hands before the people saying: I am innocent of the blood of this just man; look you to it. And the whole people answering, said: His blood be upon us and upon our children. : Krauthammer is also upset with the appearances of Satan in the film. “Satan appears four times. Twice, this sinister, hooded, androgynous embodiment of evil is found ... where? Moving among the crowd of Jews.” : But Satan first appears besides Jesus as he undergoes the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, alone. When Satan appears in the crowd, it is to observe Christ suffering, his scourging at the pillar by Romans, or to stare across at his Mother as she watches her Son carrying the cross up Calvary. If Satan is in a crowd, it has to be a Jewish crowd. Jerusalem was a Jewish city. The only Romans are Pilate and his soldiers. : As for the repellent term “Christ killers,” Krauthammer mouths myths he must have heard down at shul. As a cradle Catholic, I never heard this term until a Jewish friend told me this was what we Catholics were taught in our schools. But this crude blasphemous phrase is not one devout nuns of the 1940s or 1950s or Catholics of the Holy Name Society would ever use. It is a term ascribed to us by those who never knew us. : Krauthammer refers to the “baleful history” of the Crucifixion story. What did the Crucifixion give mankind? Salvation, the opening of the gates of heaven, Western civilization, the greatest art, architecture, music, painting, sculpture, cathedrals and churches in history, the idea that all men are children of God and that each has an innate worth and dignity, which puts limits on the power of any state—and an end to slavery. : No Cross, no Christianity. No Christianity, no West. No West, no freedom, no human rights, no America. Where does Krauthammer think our civilization and culture came from? : In her column “Hating the Jews,” Mona Charen accuses Gibson of seeding “his film with images of Jewish guilt and perfidy.” But how can one tell the story of how Christ was betrayed by Judas for 30 pieces of silver, how the scribes and Pharisees and high priest plotted against Him, how the crowd cried “Give us Barabas,” and “Let Him be crucified!”, how Pilate cravenly capitulated—without having a touch of “guilt and perfidy”? : What is the attachment of columnists in 2004 to a high priest of the first century A.D.? Why the Caiaphas Defense Fund? Is it not possible to accept that after Jesus berated the scribes and Pharisees in front of the people they might want to kill him? Is it not possible that the high priest would plot the death of so charismatic and threatening a figure? : What these writers are saying is that it is fine to say Pilate ordered the crucifixion, and the Romans did it, but anti-Semitic to say Caiaphas was the prime mover in the Passover plot. Yet, for Caiaphas to be innocent, the Gospels must be myths or lies. My film is anti-Semitic only if the Gospels are anti-Semitic, says Gibson. : Exactly the point, says Stanley Kauffmann of the New Republic: “‘The Passion’ is anti-Semitic, because the Gospels themselves are anti-Semitic—in the sense of fixing Jewish responsibility for the Crucifixion.” Abe Foxman agrees: “the Gospels, if taken literally, can be very damaging.” But what if the Gospels “taken literally” are true? : To Boston University’s Paula Fredriksen, an apostate Catholic and convert to Judaism, “anti-Semitism has been integral to Christianity.” In the Toronto Globe & Mail, Donald Akinson writes, “To film a literal version of the Gospel of John is like filming a faithful version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” : With folks who believe this, dialogue seems pointless. For they are saying that Christianity is anti-Semitic at its root and either we rewrite the Gospels to eradicate any “perfidy” by the Jewish authorities who delivered Christ to Pilate, or we are colluding in anti-Semitism and responsible for its consequences. If being faithful to the Christian imperative to tell the Gospel truth about the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ is, to non-Christians and post-Christians, to spread anti-Semitism, our conflict is irreconcilable. : Yet a point bears repeating. Though Jewish leaders did conspire to put Jesus to death, this does not mean, has never meant, that all Jews were or are culpable in his death, or even that the Jewish establishment knew Christ was the Son of God. Common sense suggests they did not believe it—as does Christ himself from the Cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” : And while many whose hatred for “The Passion” knows no bounds are Jewish, other Jewish writers—Michael Medved, Don Feder, Matt Drudge, Paul Gottfried—have urged their co-religionists and ethnic kinsmen to control the hysteria. Rabbi Daniel Lapin of Toward Tradition accuses Foxman and the ADL of “driving a wedge between American Jews and Christians.” But Rabbi Lapin seems a voice crying in the wilderness. For Ms. Charen puts “The Passion” in the context of the following events: an assault on a Kiev synagogue by thugs yelling “Kill the Kikes,” the desecration of a Jewish cemetery in Greece, the French Ambassador in London blurting out at a dinner party that Israel is a “shitty little country.” : But is it really fair to include Gibson’s film in this litany? Is it wise to keep up this vendetta against a movie that Christians have embraced, when millions of these Christians give uncritical loyalty to Israel? : Safire rails that “The Passion” is the “bloodiest, most brutal example of sustained sadism ever presented on the screen ... reveling in savagery to provoke outrage and cast blame ...” : The villains at whom the audience’s outrage is directed are the actors’ playing bloodthirsty rabbis and their rabid Jewish followers. This is the essence of the medieval ‘passion play’ preserved in pre-Hitler Germany at Oberammergau, a source of the hatred of all Jews as ‘Christ killers.’ : But this is nonsense. The only people who come away from this film in “outrage” are those who went into it in outrage. Even Foxman, who slipped into a preview, acknowledges as much: : As the lights came up, the silence was etched with stifled sobs and tears. The 3,000 Christian pastors, leaders, students and others who attended the preview of the film’s graphic portrayal of the events leading up to the Crucifixion were visibly moved by the images that brought them closer than they may have ever been to bearing witness to the Passion of Jesus. : Does this sound like the “kind of sentiment we would expect from Christians ready to act on their latent anti-Semitism?” asks Dr. William Donohue of the Catholic League. That brings us to the heart of the matter. Though we all see the same movie, we hear and see different messages. Where they see Caiaphas, perfidy, and anti-Semitism, we see Christ, his suffering, and what salvation cost. As Bruce Anderson writes in the Spectator, Christians do not focus on the characters that so captivate Safire, Charen, and Krauthammer. : [T]he horror does not come from the artist’s imagination. It comes from the self-sacrifice of the son of God who, after preaching to and living among the poor and the outcast, endured a felon’s humiliating death. Mocked for His pretensions to kingship, He revealed the nature of His Kingdom by embracing His Cross. : For centuries, Christians have read the Gospel story of the passion and death of Christ in Holy Week. Yet, never has there been a pogrom in America. America is not the Russia of Alexander III. But if these writers truly believe millions of Christians have sat through two hours of endless “Jew-baiting” and failed to recognize it, what does that tell us about what they think of our intelligence, our sensitivity, our decency? : Safire twice refers to Oberammergau and calls it a Jew-baiting passion play “preserved in pre-Hitler Germany, a source of the hatred of all Jews as ‘Christ killers.’” The famous Oberammergau passion play dates back to 1633 and the Thirty Years War when villagers in this tiny Alpine town were spared from the Black Plague and vowed to give thanks to their God by producing a play on his passion and death, once every ten years. It is a six-hour thing of beauty known to Catholics worldwide, few of whom have ever seen it. Were that play a cause of the Holocaust, why was there no Holocaust in the centuries when Catholic kings ruled the Holy Roman Empire? Why did it happen only after the Hitler came to power and Europe was convulsed in the worst war in its history, 300 years after the play was first performed? Blaming a six-hour play, put on once every ten years, by 2,000 amateur actors, in a tiny town of 5,000 buried in the Tyrolean Alps, for Hitler’s pogrom against the Jews is so preposterous it calls up the old adage: “Anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals.” : To Safire, Catholicism leads straight to the Holocaust. The line from Matthew, “Let his blood be upon us and our children,” he writes, has led to “millenniums of persecution, scapegoating and ultimately mass murder that flowed partly from its malign repetition.” This was “finally addressed by the Catholic Church after the defeat of Nazism.” : In 1965’s historic Second Vatican Council during the papacy of Pope Paul VI, the church decided that while some Jewish leaders and their followers had pressed for the death of Jesus, “still, what happened in his passion cannot be charged against all Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor the Jews of today.” : That was a sea change in the doctrinal interpretation of the Gospels, and the beginning of major interfaith progress : This statement is historically and patently false. Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II document to which Safire refers, is not any “sea change in the doctrinal interpretation of the Gospels.” It is a reaffirmation of traditional Catholic teaching for the benefit of Jewish groups that requested it. : Christianity and the Church have always taught it was our sins that put Christ on the Cross. As Legionary Father Thomas Williams, dean of the school of theology at Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University in Rome, a consultant to Gibson’s film, tells the National Catholic Register: : [T]he fathers of the Second Vatican Council didn’t see themselves as reversing any prior teachings on this question [of Jewish responsibility for Christ’s death]. The council categorically reaffirmed perennial Catholic teaching that all of humanity’s sins, and the sins of Christians in particular, are responsible for Christ’s death, as stated, inter alia, in the catechism of the Council of Trent. : Gibson drives the point home with brutal force as he plays the Roman soldier who hammers the first nail into the palm of Christ. His message is reaffirmed in the penultimate scene described in America by Lloyd Baugh, S.J., : In a physically static but morally dynamic representation of the Pieta, Mary stares not at the dead Jesus but directly into the camera, and therefore directly at the viewer .... This shot, lasting a long 20 seconds, invites the viewers to enter the narrative and assume their responsibility, as sinners, for the death of this Jesus, who the film repeatedly makes clear has died for our sins. Gibson here is saying, more strongly than any other director has done, that it is not the Jewish people who killed Jesus; every one of us sinful human beings is responsible for his death. : This is why, at film’s end, men and women sit in stunned silence or sob. Gibson has charged us with moral complicity in the suffering and death of the Son of God we have just witnessed in all its horror. That is why we are moved. But for Mona Charen, it is all just another attempt to blame the Jews: “There is a seemingly unquenchable thirst to vilify Jews, to deny them their humanity, to strip them of their history and to transform them—in propaganda—into oppressors rather than oppressed.” : Give it a rest, Mona. : This is a film in which every heroic figure is a Jew: Jesus, his Mother, Mary Magdalene, the Apostles Peter and John, St. Veronica who wipes his face on the road to Calvary, Simon of Cyrene who, though first bitter at being conscripted to carry Christ’s cross, is soon trying to lift the burden from his shoulders. Jewish members of the councils are heard at the court proceedings crying out against a “travesty ... a beastly travesty.” At the crucifixion, a member of the Jewish council, most likely Joseph of Arimathea, is seen helping take Christ down from the cross. Along the road to Calvary, the women of Jerusalem weep openly. The entire film underscores the words of Christ (John 4:22) to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, “Salvation is from the Jews.” : If there is any “unquenchable thirst to vilify,” it would appear to be on the part of those who cannot stop vilifying Mel Gibson. What has this man done but defend himself and his film against the most savage charges ever leveled at a work of art? As for Ms. Charen’s suggestion that Jews are “oppressed,” one must ask: When have Jews ever been oppressed in this country? : In World War II, millions perished at the hands of the Nazis. A horrific and historic atrocity about which we are regularly reminded. But in that 20th century tens of millions of Christians—Armenians, Mexicans, Spaniards, Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Poles, Chinese, Hungarians, Cubans, Vietnamese, Sudanese, Timorese—were martyred for their faith by Communists, Nazis, and Islamic fanatics. No nation, no race, no people have cornered the market on suffering. Nor on oppression. As there were renegade Catholics in Hitler’s Reich, so there were atheistic Jewish Bolsheviks like Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin’s man in the Ukraine, who were as guilty of genocide as Heinrich Himmler. : Author Gertrude Himmelfarb asks how Christians would react if “a Hollywood so notoriously populated by Jews” made a film about how Jews were falsely accused and put to death during the Spanish Inquisition. But the event in 1481 Ms. Himmelfarb brings up is not remotely comparable to the Crucifixion that is the central event in 2000 years of Christendom. As for her admonition that we stop coarsening the culture by going “over the edge” with films rooted in violence and sadism, is Ms. Himmelfarb asking for a moratorium on movies about the Holocaust? : Frank Rich, who has reviled Gibson and his film since he first heard of it, now frets for his safety: “‘The Passion’ has made me feel less secure as a Jew in America than ever before.” Well, Frank, if you were not insulting millions of Christians by telling them a beloved film about their Savior is a homoerotic “jamboree of bloody beefcake” and calling the Pope “a shill,” you might not be at risk of having your lights punched out. : A decade ago, Irving Kristol warned his kinsmen and co-religionists not to antagonize a huge friendly Christian majority by using the courts to de-Christianize the country. Jews who wish to maintain their separate and unique religious and ethnic character ought not be in the vanguard of those seeking to prevent Christians from maintaining the Christian character of their country, said Kristol. He added pungently: : One can easily understand the attractiveness of this vision to Jews. What is less easy to understand is the chutzpah of American Jews in publicly embracing this dual vision. Such arrogance is, I would suggest, a particularly Jewish form of political stupidity. : Kristol subtly titled his piece, “On the Political Stupidity of the Jews.” : Yet still the questions arise. Why do a handful of writers continue to rage that the film is a moral atrocity, a horror, the product of a deranged or anti-Semitic mind? Why do they hate “The Passion of the Christ” so? : The answer I believe may be found in words this writer spoke at the Republican convention, 12 years ago: “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.” : Those who hate “The Passion” are, almost all, on the other side in that war. They hate the movie and the messenger, and, as they admit, the “central story” of the Gospels, the Crucifixion of Christ. Why? Because if “The Passion” is true to the Gospels and the Gospels are themselves true, then there is a painful truth to be faced. It is found in John 1:11, inside “The Last Gospel” of the Tridentine mass Mel Gibson attends. “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.” Admittedly, that is a hard message to hear. : Safire quotes Christ (Matthew 10:34) as saying: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.” But Christ is using a metaphor here, the meaning of which follows: : For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s enemies shall be they of his own household. : Again and again, Christ refers to this coming divide between those who will follow him and those who will reject him. “He who is not with me is against me; and he who does not gather with me scatters” (Luke 11:23). : The venom spewed at “The Passion of the Christ,” only testifies to the truth of the Savior’s warning, “As the world has hated me, so also it will hate you.” Braveheart has led and won a great victory in the crusade that is the culture war that will determine the fate of the civilization that came out of what happened on Calvary and on that first Easter morning.

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