Passionate
split: New cross to bear for
neo-cons By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Increasingly split and defensive
over whether the United States must cooperate more with
the United Nations and Europe and whether Syria or Iran
should be "next" in the "war on terrorism", the
country's neo-conservative movement is now beset by a
new source of tension within its ranks - Mel Gibson's
film The Passion of the Christ.
As ticket
sales for the Australian superstar-filmmaker's gory,
blood-drenched cinematic interpretation of the last 12
hours of Jesus Christ's life surpassed the US$200
million mark less than two weeks after its Ash Wednesday
release, the debate over whether the movie is
anti-Semitic in its intent or effect has unexpectedly
split the neo-cons who, in pursuit of their strong
support for Israel's security, have made common cause
with the Christian Right for some 25 years.
The Passion, which could become the
biggest-grossing movie of 2004 and surely the biggest
ever with subtitles - the actors speak in Aramaic and
Latin - appears to have pushed some very influential
neo-conservatives over the edge.
Thus,
Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer last
weekend denounced the movie as a "blood libel" against
the Jews that challenges the Roman Catholic Church's
official doctrine that the group should not be held
responsible for the crucifixion and constitutes a
"singular act of inter-religious aggression".
Gibson "openly rejects the Vatican II teaching
and, using every possible technique of cinematic
exaggeration, gives us the pre-Vatican II story of the
villainous Jews", Krauthammer wrote, detailing the ways
the film in effect depicts the Jews, particularly their
high priest Caiaphas, as "Satan's own people".
Echoing the reviews of liberal critics,
Krauthammer added that Gibson's depiction of Pontius
Pilate as a reluctant and even compassionate executioner
defied both the Gospels themselves and everything that
historians have learned about the man.
Leon
Wieseltier, a neo-conservative critic at the New
Republic, found The Passion to be "without any
doubt an anti-Semitic movie. What is so shocking about
Gibson's Jews is how unreconstructed they are in their
stereotypical appearances and actions. These are not
merely anti-Semitic images; these are classically
anti-Semitic images."
The attacks from
Wieseltier and Krauthammer came in response not only to
the movie's release, but also to several articles by
their fellow neo-cons, who previewed the movie and
praised it as a major artistic achievement neither
intended nor likely to provoke anti-Semitism.
In
its current issue, American Enterprise, the monthly
publication of the neo-conservative American Enterprise
Institute (AEI), for example, published two reviews
hailing the movie. One is by nationally syndicated
culture critic Michael Medved, who admitted The
Passion was "a difficult film for any religiously
committed Jew to watch" - Medved is an Orthodox Jew -
but argued it "pointedly avoids ... inflammatory
stereotypes".
"The high priest and his followers
most certainly come across as vicious, self-important
and bloodthirsty, but they seem motivated by pomposity,
arrogance and insecurity rather than religious
corruption or ethnic curse," wrote Medved, who attacked
Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League
(ADL) for denouncing the movie before its release. His
article was titled "Crucifying Mel Gibson".
An
even more effusive review was published in Rupert
Murdoch's Weekly Standard. "It is the most powerful
movie I have ever seen," enthused Michael Novak, a
longtime Catholic neo-con based at AEI.
He
agreed The Passion "will not be easy for Jews to
watch", but insisted Gibson's depiction was fully
consistent with Vatican II teachings and "on the whole
... softens the Jewish elements of the Gospels' story
and ... places the onus [for his crucifixion] on the
Romans" - an observation that has been widely disputed
by other reviewers.
The movie "is not divisive
or dangerous for Jews", Novak asserted.
While
the debate over whether a film is anti-Semitic might
appear relatively trivial, that it is taking place
within the neo-conservative movement is not at all
irrelevant. Throughout the movement's roughly 35-year
history, the "Jewish factor", as Mark Gerson, author of
the adulatory The Neo-Conservative Vision labeled
it, marked the most important difference between
neo-cons and other conservatives.
In his 1995
hagiography, Gerson wrote that neo-conservatives -
Jewish and gentile - moved to the right largely out of
anger over the perceived failure of liberals adequately
to defend Israel and other domestic "Jewish" priorities
after the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict.
As a
result, they often depicted their enemies - mostly
liberals and leftists - as "anti-Semitic", or, in the
case of other Jews, as "self-haters".
"The
United Nations was anti-Semitic, the Third World was
anti-Semitic, the communists were anti-Semitic,
affirmative action was anti-Jewish if not anti-Semitic
... the new left was anti-Jew and probably anti-Semitic,
and vast sectors of the left might as well be
anti-Semitic, having decided that Jews were no longer
victims and sided with the terrorist enemies of Israel,"
Gerson, a neo-con himself, wrote.
Conversely,
neo-cons have often ignored or excused the anti-Semitism
of their right-wing allies, including leaders of the
Christian Right such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson,
whose staunch support for Israel (based on a particular
interpretation of the Bible) generally trumped their
anti-Semitic theology and prejudices.
As Irving
Kristol, the godfather of neo-conservatism, once wrote
about the fundamentalists' belief that Jews who did not
convert were damned, "it is their theology, but it is
our Israel".
While many neo-conservatives
probably would have ignored The Passion had it
been directed exclusively to the small, traditionalist,
pre-Vatican II Catholic constituency of the kind that
Gibson and his far more outspoken father hail from, the
fact that he marketed it aggressively to Christian
fundamentalists through their churches and Christian
Right leaders such as Robertson - with whom the neo-cons
have aligned themselves - threatens to raise new
questions about their political judgment, particularly
among US Jews, most of whom have remained liberal.
The distinctly negative turn that
neo-conservative reviews of The Passion have
taken since its release suggests that a process of
rethinking might already be under way within neo-con
ranks.
In a remarkable review published in
Sunday's Post, Gertude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol's wife
and an influential neo-con in her own right, declined to
accuse Gibson explicitly of anti-Semitism but proposed a
"thought experiment" to put his movie in perspective.
"How would we feel if a Hollywood producer (a
Hollywood so notoriously populated by Jews) made a film,
in the same 'over the edge' spirit vaunted by Gibson,
dramatizing another historical event - the
auto-da-fe in Spain in February 1481, for
example, in which six men and six women conversos
(Jewish converts to Christianity) were tortured and
burned alive at the stake, while richly robed prelates
triumphantly presided over the scene?
"Such a
film, taking its cue from Gibson, might utilize all the
devices of violence, sadism and malignity that he has
deployed so skillfully," Himmelfarb said.
Another possibility, she suggested, was a film
about the First Crusade and its spectacularly bloody
slaughter of the Muslim residents of Jerusalem, as
produced and directed by a Muslim.
"Some of us,
in recent times, have come to respect, even welcome,
religious enthusiasm - to welcome it in the public
square as well as in church," she went on. "But not if
it were to take this form, exploiting violence, ferocity
and sadism in the cause of religion."
But other
neo-cons, including Medved, still insist that Jews
should not attack the movie as anti-Semitic because it
risks alienating Christian fans, who are needed to
confront more dangerous enemies.
Anti-Israeli
sentiment and recent anti-Semitic attacks in Europe,
wrote Mark Steyn, North American columnist for Britain's
Telegraph Group in an article in Monday's Washington
Times, "should ... remind Jews of the current sources of
the world's oldest hatred, not just the Islamic world,
where talk of killing them all is part of the wallpaper,
but the radical secularists of modern-day Europe".
"If Jewish groups think Mel Gibson's movie and
evangelical Christians are the problem, they're picking
fights they don't need," Steyn added.
