Opinion: Benyamin Cohen, editor of the online publication Jewsweek, went to see Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ and came out homicidal: "My first comprehensible thought was this: I really want to kill a Jew", writes Mark Steyn.
Maureen Dowd of the New York Times agreed: "In Braveheart and the Patriot, his other emotionally manipulative historical epics, you came out wanting to swing an axe into the skull of the nearest Englishman. Here, you want to kick in some Jewish and Roman teeth." Really? You want to kick in some Jew teeth? I mean, really want to? If you say so. It may be that elderly schoolgirl columnists at the New York Times are unusually easy to rouse to violence. But I reckon Miss Dowd and Mr Cohen are faking it. They don't mean that, thanks to Mel, marquee columnists and liberal Jewish New Yorkers will be rampaging around looking for Jews to kill, they mean all those hicks in Dogpatch who don't know any better will be doing so.
I'll be reviewing The Passion for the Spectator when it opens in London later this month, so let me put Gibson's direction and James Caviezel's acting to one side, and just say this: chances of any Jew getting his teeth kicked in by one of Mel's customers? Zero per cent. Okay, let me cover myself a little: point-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-whatever per cent.
When this film first loomed on the horizon, the received wisdom of the metropolitan sophisticates was that Mel Gibson had blown well over 30 million bucks of his own money on a vanity project. A couple of weeks ago, when stories began to trickle out of amazing advance sales and Bible Belt multiplex owners booking it on to all 20 screens simultaneously, the received wisdom did a screeching U-turn: how about that Mel Gibson, huh? He claims to be such a devout Christian yet he's pimping his Saviour's suffering to the masses and raking in gazillions of dollars. As Andy Rooney, the ersatz controversialist on CBS's "Sixty Minutes", enquired: "How many million dollars does it look as if you're going to make off the crucifixion of Christ?" Hey, if he's lucky, maybe as many millions as Michael Moore made off of all those dead high-school kids with Bowling For Columbine.
Throughout the U-turn, only one feature of the "controversy" remained constant: that the movie is "anti-Semitic". It's true that in Europe "passion plays" often provided a rationale for Jew hatred. But that was at a time when the church was also a projection of state power. What's happening in America is quite the opposite: one reason why Hollywood assumed Mel had laid a $30 million Easter egg was because the elite coastal enclaves who set the cultural agenda haven't a clue about the rest of the country when it comes to religion. They don't mind Jesus when he's hippy (Godspell) or horny (Terrence McNally's "gay Jesus" play Corpus Christi) but taking the guy seriously is just for fruitcakes.
So, when metropolitan columnists say Mel's movie makes you want to go Jew-bashing, they're really engaging in a bit of displaced Christian-bashing. Ever since 9/11, there's been a lame trope beloved of the smart set: yes, these Muslim fundamentalists may be pretty extreme, but let's not forget all our Christian fundamentalists - the "home-grown Talibans", as the New York Times's Frank Rich called them, in the course of demanding that John Ashcroft, the attorney-general, round them up. Two years on, if this thesis is going to hold up, these Christians really need to get off their fundamentalist butts and start killing more people. Critics berating Gibson for lingering on the physical flaying of Jesus would be more persuasive if they weren't all too desperately flogging their own dead horse of fundamentalist moral equivalence.
The more puzzling question is why so many American Jewish leaders started crying anti-Semitism months before anyone had even seen the picture. It requires a perverse inability to prioritise to anoint Mel Gibson as the prime source of resurgent anti-Semitism. Not to mention that it's self-defeating. As Melanie Phillips recently noted in the Observer: "Let us all agree on one thing at least. The more Jews warn that anti-Semitism has come roaring out of the closet, the more people don't like the Jews." There's something to that. During the New Hampshire primary, I prompted the following complaint from Barbara Baruch of New York: "What motivated Mark Steyn to describe Joe Lieberman as the 'Yiddisher pixie'? As this has absolutely no relevance to Lieberman's political viability, it's obvious that Steyn's linguistic choice is nothing less than insidious anti-Semitism." Oh, phooey. I called him a pixie because, in contrast to John Kerry, he was jolly and beaming, and "Yiddisher" is an allusion to the old song "My Yiddisher Momma", since Joe was always going on about his own momma. "Yiddisher pixie" is a term of affection, and the best way to demonstrate the preposterousness of Ms Baruch's assertion is a simple test: try to imagine Sheikh Akram Abd-al-Razzaq al-Ruqayhi, the A-list imam at the Grand Mosque in Sanaa, who does the Friday prayers live on Yemeni state TV, breaking off from his usual patter on Jews - "O God, count them one by one, kill them all and don't leave anyone" - to refer to one as a "Yiddisher pixie".
Or the members of Calgary's "Palestinian community" who marched through the streets carrying placards emblazoned "Death To The Jews".
Or the gangs who've been torching French synagogues, kosher butchers and schools in an ongoing mini-intifada.
Or Archbishop Desmond Tutu who says people should not be scared of America's Jewish lobby because other scary types like "Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust." Or the wife of European Central Banker Wim Duisenberg who amuses herself by doing oven jokes in public.
Mel Gibson's movie won't kill anyone. On the other hand, right now, at the Hague, the International Court of Justice is holding a show trial of Israel's security fence. At the very least, a European court sitting in judgment on the Jewish state is a staggering lapse of taste. But it should also 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 modern-day secular Europe, where antipathy toward Ariel Sharon long ago crossed over into a broader contempt for the Jewish state and a benign indifference to those who use European Jewry as a substitute target. If Jewish groups think Mel Gibson and evangelical Christians are the problem, more fool them.