The best recent treatment is Frank Rich's column in the NYTImes. It summarizes the sequence of events fairly and accurately, its tone is reasonable, and it raises the questions that need to be raised. It also points out a bit of coded Jew-baiting which accompanied the publicity for the film, which no one else has noticed:
Jews have already been libeled by Mr. Gibson's politicized rollout of his film. His game from the start has been to foment the old-as-Hollywood canard that the "entertainment elite" (which just happens to be Jewish) is gunning for his Christian movie. But based on what? According to databank searches, not a single person, Jewish or otherwise, had criticized "The Passion" when Mr. Gibson went on Bill O'Reilly's show on Jan. 14 to defend himself against "any Jewish people" who might attack the film. Nor had anyone yet publicly criticized "The Passion" or Mr. Gibson by March 7, when The Wall Street Journal ran the interview in which the star again defended himself against Jewish critics who didn't yet exist. (Even now, no one has called for censorship of the film — only for the right to see it and, if necessary, debate its content.)Read the whole thing.
Whether the movie holds Jews of two millenniums ago accountable for killing Christ or not, the star's pre-emptive strategy is to portray contemporary Jews as crucifying Mel Gibson. A similar animus can be found in a new book by one of Mr. Gibson's most passionate defenders, the latest best seller published by the same imprint (Crown Forum) that gave us Ann Coulter's "Treason." In "Tales From the Left Coast," James Hirsen writes, "The worldview of certain folks is seriously threatened by the combination of Christ's story and Gibson's talent."
Now who might those "certain folks" be? Since no one was criticizing "The Passion" when Mr. Hirsen wrote that sentence, you must turn elsewhere in the book to decode it. In one strange passage, the author makes a fetish of repeating Bob Dylan's original name, Robert Zimmerman — a gratuitous motif in a tirade that is itself gratuitous in a book whose subtitle says its subject is "Hollywood stars."
This is turning out to be similar to the "Jewish neo-con cabal" controversy of a few months back. Some people can see very clearly - based on long experience with this kind of bigotry - how certain phrases and actions are coded ways of promoting antisemitism, and others say we're imagining things or we're being too sensitive. Like the "neo-con cabal" controversy, this is a great opportunity for education in how antisemitism - and sexism, racism, and most other bigotry - works in sophisticated cultures.
UPDATE: PaleoJudaica points out that Rich's column "Dowdifies" one of Gibson's quotes. His original statement about responsibility for the death of Christ is much more nuanced. However, the whole picture still doesn't look good.
UPDATE: Protocols has the O'Reilly transcript and some more thoughts.
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