'The Passion' and the Neocons

by Jim Lobe

Increasingly split and defensive over whether the United States has to cooperate more with the United Nations and the Europeans and whether Syria or Iran should be "next" in the war on terrorism, the neoconservative 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-born superstar's cinematic interpretation of the last 12 hours of Jesus Christ's life surpassed the 200-million-dollar-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 neocons 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 neoconservatives over the edge.

Thus, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer this weekend denounced the movie as a "blood libel" against the Jews that challenges the Catholic Church's official doctrine that the Jews should not be held responsible for the crucifixion and constitutes a "singular act of interreligious 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 effectively 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 neoconservative 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."

Wieseltier's and Krauthammer's attacks came in response not only to the movie's release, but also to several articles by their fellow neocons 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 neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), for example, published two reviews hailing the movie. One is by the nationally syndicated culture critic Michael Medved, who admitted that The Passion was "a difficult film for any religiously committed Jew to watch" (Medved is an Orthodox Jew), but that 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," according to 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 neocon based at AEI.

He agreed that The Passion "will not be easy for Jews to watch," but insisted that 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 or is not anti-Semitic may appear relatively trivial, the fact that it is taking place within the neoconservative movement is not trivial at all.

In his 1995 hagiography, The Neoconservative Vision, Gerson wrote that neoconservatives – Jewish and gentile – moved to the right largely out of anger over the perceived failure of liberals to adequately 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 neocon himself, wrote.

Conversely, neocons 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 neoconservatism, 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 neoconservatives 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 like Robertson – with whom the neocons 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 neoconservative reviews of The Passion have taken since its release suggest that a process of rethinking may already be underway within its ranks.

In a remarkable review published in Sunday's Washington Post, Gertude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol's wife and an influential neocon 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 triumphally 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," she 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 neocons, 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, according to Mark Steyn, the 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."

March 11, 2004

Jim Lobe is Inter Press Service's correspondent in Washington, DC.

Copyright © 2004 Inter Press Service

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