Doing it by the book

Some critics have crucified Mel Gibson for the alleged anti-semitism of his film, The Passion Of The Christ. But the movie wouldn’t be authentic if it wasn’t anti-semitic.

By “authentic” I don’t mean historically accurate. There is no convincing evidence one way or the other whether Jesus ever existed. I think probably not. Had he really been real and working such wonders, surely some of the Roman historians meticulously recording the detail of daily life in the region would have noticed?
All we have is a later work of propaganda, the New Testament of the Bible. My point on authenticity is not that Gibson’s film wouldn’t be true if it wasn’t anti-semitic, but that it wouldn’t be true to the Bible .
Much has been made of Gibson’s agreement, under pressure from Jewish leaders in the US, to delete from the script the response of the Jewish multitude to Pilate’s disavowal of blame for sending Jesus to his death: “His blood be upon us and our children.” In fact, the sentence is deleted only from the sub-titles. It’s retained on the sound-track, spoken, or shouted, in Aramaic.
The pretend deletion of the line was an act of cowardice by Gibson. The quote is there in the Bible—-Matthew 27:25—-which Gibson says he is convinced is God’s truth.
The same sentiment is found in Luke (23:28-29), which records Jesus responding to wailing women he encounters as he hauls his cross towards Calvary: “Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me but for yourselves and your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never gave suck!’”
John (19:14-15) has it that, “(Pilate) said to the Jews, ‘Behold your King!’ They cried out, ‘Away with him, away with him, crucify him!’”
Mark (15:12-14) tells that the Jewish crowd barracked Pilate as he pleaded with them to accept Jesus’s release. When Pilate asked, “Why, what evil has be done,” they “shouted all the more, ‘Crucify him.’”
A script would be unbiblical which did not show the Jews demanding Jesus’s execution and accepting that responsibility for his death would pass down to their children in such a way as to make future generations wish that they had never been born.
Teachers of Catholicism, at least until the very recent past, systematically instructed small children to believe that the scattering of the Jews across the world and the persecutions they have endured are to be understood precisely as punishment for their killing of the Christ. I wouldn’t doubt that Protestant children were given the same message. From which it is but a small step to suggesting that the Holocaust was pay-back time.
The suggestion was given practical expression in Germany before and during the Holocaust. In “The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany,” Guenter Lewy recalled: “From the beginning until the end of Hitler’s rule, the bishops never tired of admonishing the faithful to accept his government as the legitimate authority to whom obedience had to be rendered...After the unsuccessful assassination attempt upon Hitler in Munich on November 8th 1939, Cardinal Bertram, in the name of the German episcopate, and Cardinal Faulhaber, for the Bavarian bishops, sent telegrams of congratulations to Hitler. The Catholic press all over Germany...spoke of the miraculous working of providence that had protected the Fuhrer.”
Even Hitler’s invasion of Catholic Poland won backing from the bishops: “We appeal to the faithful to join in ardent prayers that God’s providence may lead this war to blessed success.”
Pius XII, despite detailed knowledge of the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jewish people, opted to keep schtum.
It is commonly observed, and is the occasion of stern criticism, that Catholic leaders took this view despite the Nazis’ ferocious hatred of Jews. A more obvious interpretation is that they took this view because of the Nazis’ hatred of Jews.
Insofar as Gibson’s movie is anti-semitic, it’s accurately based on Christian teaching.

Gibson got the casting of Christ wrong. He gave Jim Caviezel, a Tridentine Catholic, the gig. Problem is, Caviezel’s white.
If Jesus existed, he was a Semite. Two thousand years ago, the Semites were a dark-skinned people with tight frizzy hair.
Moses, Buddha, Krishna and Mohammed were people of colour, too. There is no major religion which was founded by a white person. I commend this thought to any whites out there scourging themselves for white folks’ sins. At least none of us can be blamed for starting major religions.

Sir Bob Geldof was badly hit by Clare Short blurting out that the Brits had bugged “Kofi” in the run-up to Iraq.
On the day Clare the Clot erupted on “Today”, Tony Blair had been scheduled to announce a hi-powered, celeb-sprinkled commission for solving the problems of Africa. Sir Bob was waiting in the wings to give serious-faced interviews once Blair had named him as a member.
But there wasn’t a hack in the room who wanted to discuss anything other than the legality of the Iraq war and the bugging of the UN. And no current affairs slot blocked out space for any other issue for days afterwards.
In truth, though, Sir Bob might count himself lucky. He did manage on the following day to place a piece in the Guardian, conveying the cock-eyed thesis he’d have trumpeted if the publicity splurge hadn’t been stymied.
Even mild criticism of Sir Bob’s charitable efforts can invite the sort of appalled disbelief which betokens true moral panic. It remains an unspoken, even unspeakable, truth that the main result of Live Aid was to make comfortable people feel better about themselves.
Every major finance house in Britain and every institution operating to sustain the existing system of political and economic organisation, down to and including the Royal Family, signed up to Live Aid. That is to say, the very interests which ensure the continued immiseration of Africa rushed joyously to embrace Geldof’s initative. Just as Geldof and Bono are today given the glad hand when they arrive at gatherings of the WTO and IMF.
Does it never occur to them to wonder why the global orchestrators of injustice regard them as great men to have around?
In his Guardian piece, Geldof tells us that Blair’s commission will be “a report card back to the generation that, through a rock concert, found an issue nowhere on the global political agenda and forced it to the very top, where it has remained for 20 years.”
Does he seriously believe that, until Status Quo struck up “Rocking All Over the World” and word spread like wildfire that Prince Charles was tapping his foot, the issue of world poverty was “nowhere” on the global agenda? Oxfam hadn’t been founded, then?
The system which generates and regenerates vast disparity in the living standards of the people of the planet has come under sustained pressure over recent years. The masters of war and capitalism cannot meet other than in secluded locations, behind guns and barriers of steel. More often than not these days, Geldof and Bono are with them in their bolt-holes. In the fight against hunger and injustice, they are on the other side. Same as ever.