Those Who Forget the Past

by Ron Rosenbaum

  As for the rest of Mel Gibson’s threats, context is all: the guy is a movie star. Movie stars expect to get their own way. They are surrounded by sycophants, many of them on the payroll. Should a discouraging word somehow prick the bubble of fabulousness in which they travel, even big-screen he-men can turn into crybabies. Mr. Gibson’s tirade sounded less like a fatwa from the Ayatollah Khomeini than a tantrum from Sinatra in his cups.

  My capital crime was to write a column on this page last month reporting that Mr. Gibson was promoting his coming film about the crucifixion, The Passion, by baiting Jews. As indeed he has. In January, the star had gone on The O’Reilly Factorto counter Jewish criticism of his cinematic account of Jesus’s final hours—a provocative opening volley given that no critic of any faith had yet said anything about his movie (and wouldn’t for another three months). Clearly he was looking for a brawl, and he hasn’t let up since. In the New Yorker profile, Mr. Gibson says that “modern secular Judaism wants to blame the Holocaust on the Catholic Church,” a charge that Abraham H. Foxman, of the Anti-Defamation League, labels “classic anti-Semitism.” Mr. Gibson also says that he trimmed a scene from The Passion involving the Jewish high priest Caiaphas because if he didn’t do so “they’d be coming after me at my house, they’d come to kill me.”

  Who is this bloodthirsty “they” threatening to martyr our fearless hero? Could it be the same mob that killed Jesus? Funny, but as far as I can determine, the only death threat that’s been made in conjunction with The Passion is Mr. Gibson’s against me. The New Yorker did, though, uncover one ominous threat against the star: “He’s heard that someone from one of his hangouts, the Grand Havana Room, a Beverly Hills smoking club, said that he’d spit on him if he ever came in again.” Heard from whom? What is the identity of that mysterious “someone”? What do they smoke at that “smoking club”? Has the Grand Havana Room been infiltrated by Madonna’s Kabbalah study group? I join a worried nation in praying for Mr. Gibson’s safety.

  His over-the-top ramblings are, of course, conceived in part to sell his product. “Inadvertently, all the problems and the conflicts and stuff—this is some of the best marketing and publicity I have ever seen,” Mr. Gibson told The New Yorker. That’s true—with the possible exception of the word “inadvertently” —and I realize that I’ve been skillfully roped into his remarkably successful p.r. juggernaut. But I’m glad to play my cameo role—and unlike Bill O’Reilly, who sold the film rights to one of his books to Mr. Gibson’s production company, I am not being paid by him to do so.

  What makes the unfolding saga of The Passion hard to ignore is not so much Mr. Gibson’s playacting fisticuffs but the extent to which his combative marketing taps into larger angers. The Passion fracas is happening not in a vacuum but in an increasingly divided America fighting a war that many on both sides see as a religious struggle. While Mr. Gibson may have thought he was making a biblical statement, his partisans are turning him into an ideological cause.

  The lines are drawn on seethepassion.com, the most elaborate Web site devoted to championing Mr. Gibson. There we’re told that the debate over The Passion has “become a focal point for the Culture War which will determine the future of our country and the world.” When this site criticizes the Times, it changes the family name of the paper’s publisher from Sulzberger to “Schultzberger.” (It was no doubt inadvertent that Mr. O’Reilly, in a similar slip last week, referred to the author of a New Republic critique of Mr. Gibson, the Boston University historian Paula Fredriksen, as “Fredrickstein.”) This animus is not lost on critics of The Passion. As the A.D.L.’s Rabbi Eugene Korn has said of Mr. Gibson to The Jewish Week, “He’s playing off the conservative Christians against the liberal Christians, and the Jews against the Christian community in general.”

  To what end? For the film’s supporters, the battle is of a piece with the same blue state–red state cultural chasm as the conflicts over the Ten Commandments in an Alabama court-house, the growing legitimization of homosexuality (Mr. Gibson has had his innings with gays in the past), and the leadership of a president who wraps public policy in religiosity and called the war against terrorism a “crusade” until his handlers intervened. So what if “modern secular” Jews—whoever they are— are maligned by Mr. Gibson or his movie? It’s in the service of a larger calling. After all, Tom DeLay and evangelical Christians can look after the Jews’ interests in Israel, at least until Armageddon rolls around and, as millennialist theology would have it, the Jews on hand either convert or die.

  Intentionally or not, the contentious rollout of The Passion has resembled a political, rather than a spiritual, campaign, from its start on The O’Reilly Factor. Since the star belongs to a fringe church that disowns Vatican II and is not recognized by the Los Angeles Roman Catholic archdiocese, his roads do not lead to Rome so much as Washington. It was there that he screened a rough cut of the movie to conservative columnists likely to give it raves—as they did.

  The few Jews invited to Passion screenings by Mr. Gibson tend to be political conservatives. One is Michael Medved, who is fond of describing himself in his published Passion encomiums as a “former synagogue president”—betting that most of his readers will not know that this is a secular rank falling somewhere between co-op board president and aspiring Y.M.H.A. camp counselor. When non–right-wing Jews asked to see the film, we were turned away—thus allowing Mr. Gibson’s defenders, in a perfect orchestration of Catch-22, to say we were attacking or trying to censor a film we “haven’t seen.” This has been a constant theme in the bouquet of anti-Semitic mail I’ve received since my previous column about The Passion.

  I never called the movie anti-Semitic or called for its suppression. I did say that if early reports by Catholic and Jewish theologians alike were accurate in stating that The Passion revived the deicide charge against Jews, it could have a tinderbox effect abroad. The authorities I cited based their criticisms on a draft of the movie’s screenplay. (The most forceful critic of the movie has been Sister Mary Boys, of the Union Theological Seminary in New York.) I have since sought out some of those who have seen the movie itself, in the same cut praised by Mr. Gibson’s claque this summer. They are united in believing, as one of them puts it, that “it’s not a close call—the film clearly presents the Jews as the primary instigators of the crucifixion.”

  Mr. Gibson would argue that he is only being true to tradition, opting for scriptural literalism over loosey-goosey modern revisionism. But by his own account, he has based his movie on at least one revisionist source, a nineteenth-century stigmatic nun, Anne Catherine Emmerich, notable for her grotesque caricatures of Jews. To the extent that there can be any agreement about the facts of a story on which even the four Gospels don’t agree, his movie is destined to be inaccurate. People magazine reports he didn’t even get the depiction of the crucifixion itself or the language right (The Passion is in Latin, Aramaic, and Hebrew, not the Greek believed to have been the lingua franca of its characters). Like any filmmaker, Mr. Gibson has selectively chosen his sources to convey his own point of view.

  If the film does malign Jews, should it be suppressed? No. Mr. Gibson has the right to release whatever movie he wants, and he undoubtedly will, whether he finds a studio to back him or rents theaters himself. The ultimate irony may be that Jews will help him do so; so far the only studio to pass on the movie is Fox, owned by a conservative non-Jew, Rupert Murdoch. But Mr. Gibson, forever crying censorship when there hasn’t been any, does not understand that the First Amendment is a two-way street. “He has his free speech,” Mr. Foxman says. “I guess he can’t tolerate yours and mine.”

  As for Mr. Gibson’s own speech in this debate, it is often as dishonest as it is un-Christian. In the New Yorker article, he says that his father, Hutton Gibson, a prolific author on religious matters, “never denied the Holocaust”; the article’s author, Peter J. Boyer, sanitizes the senior Gibson further by saying he called the Holocaust a “tragedy” in an interview he gave to th
e writer Christopher Noxon for a New York Times Magazine article published last March. Neither the word “tragedy” nor any synonym for it ever appeared in that Times article, and according to a full transcript of the interview that Mr. Noxon made available to me, Hutton Gibson said there was “no systematic extermination” of the Jews by Hitler, only “a deal where he was supposed to make it rough on them so they would all get out and migrate to Israel because they needed people there to fight the Arabs. . . .” (This is consistent with Hutton Gibson’s public stands on the issue; he publishes a newsletter in which the word Holocaust appears in quotes.)

  Then again, Mel Gibson’s publicist, Alan Nierob, also plays bizarre games with the Holocaust. He has tried to deflect any criticism of the Gibsons by identifying himself in both the New York Post and The New Yorker as “a founding member of the national Holocaust Museum.” That’s not a trivial claim. The founders of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington are an elite donors’ group specifically designated as such; they gave a minimum of a million dollars each and are inscribed in granite on the museum’s wall. Mr. Nierob is not among them. Presumably he was instead among the 300,000 who responded to the museum’s first direct-mail campaign for charter members. That could set you back at least 25 bucks.

  Mr. Gibson has told the press that he regards The Passion as having actually been directed by the Holy Ghost. If the movie is only half as fanciful as its promotional campaign, I’d say that He has a lock on the Oscar for best director. A Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for Mr. Gibson himself, though, may be something of a reach.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Peter Boyer’s September 15, 2003, article in The New Yorker contained at least three factual errors: 1) the malignant and false insinuation that the freelance journalist Christopher Noxon, who was assigned by The New York Times Magazine to write an article about Mel Gibson’s sponsorship of a new church in Malibu, California, had a personal agenda in undertaking the story. (Mr. Boyer wrote: “Some local homeowners objected to [the construction of the church] as it made its way through the zoning process. One homeowner suggested that his son, a freelance journalist named Christopher Noxon, write about the church.”); 2) the statement that Mel Gibson’s personal publicist was a “founding member of the National Holocaust Museum” in Washington, D.C., which he was not; and 3) the statement that Hutton Gibson, Mel Gibson’s father, had told Mr. Noxon “that the Holocaust was a tragedy that had been hyped out of proportion,” when Mr. Gibson had said nothing of the kind to Mr. Noxon.

  Though I pointed out errors 2) and 3) in my subsequent New York Times column of September 21, 2003 (collected within these pages), The New Yorker has yet to publish a correction of any of them (as of this writing, January 2004). Now, Mr. Boyer has used this anthology as an occasion to state that one of these errors—Hutton Gibson’s characterization of the Holocaust as a tragedy—was based on his “own reporting,” rather than Mr. Noxon’s, attributing the mix-up in The New Yorker to an “editing error,” whatever that means. (Presumably, this errant sentence not only went through The New Yorker’s fact checkers but was read in galleys by Mr. Boyer.)

  What is Mr. Boyer’s “own reporting” on this question? He doesn’t explain where Hutton Gibson is on record anywhere referring to the Holocaust as a tragedy. Apparently, we are supposed to take this assertion on faith.

  For those who want actual reporting, here is an excerpt from the transcript of Christopher Noxon’s taped interview with Hutton Gibson and his wife, Joye, for Noxon’s New York Times Magazine article. Far from being “dragged” into the story about Mel Gibson, as Mr. Boyer writes, Hutton Gibson invited Mr. Noxon to visit him and interview him at length at his home in Cypress, Texas. Hutton Gibson is a public figure in his own right, the author of three books on Traditionalism, the publisher of a quarterly newsletter on that subject, an activist, and a talk-radio guest. As I wrote in my column, Hutton Gibson refers to the Holocaust in quotes in his newsletter, “The War Is Now!” Here he elaborates on his views about what he calls the “Holocaust.”

  CN: What about the concentration camps?

  HG: They had to rebuild the whole thing. Who knows if it was there in the first place? They say the Germans blew it up. They blew up the plumbing and left the building there. It’s physically impossible. Go and ask an undertaker who operates a crematorium or something like that what’s it take to get rid of a dead body. It takes one liter of petrol and twenty minutes. Now, six million?

  Joye: There weren’t even that many Jews in all of Europe.

  HG: Anyway there were more after the war than there were before. They based it on one figure in the almanac—the figure of 1939, I think, showed six million two hundred thousand Jews in Poland. And after the war it showed two hundred thousand of them—therefore there were six million gone they must be dead. But they were gone everywhere.

  There’s a fellow named David [inaudible] who went around to the Auschwitz Museum and they told him that—they had to rebuild that stuff. The only place where there was any concentration was . . . [inaudible] Yeah there were prison camps, but half the people who died in prison camps died from bombings from the Allies.

  There was no systematic extermination, no. The idea was— what Hitler considered his Final Solution—was. . . . He made a deal where he was supposed to make it rough on them so they would all get out and migrate to Israel, because they needed people there to fight the Arabs and take up space.

  And then the people who coined the word—Shoah— according to the various newspapers he was released from three different prison camps within several months. Figure if they were going to exterminate anyone, they would have exterminated him.

  No I don’t believe that for a minute. Because even so, there were any number of Polish that were there after the war too.

  That’s something that will never be forgotten. If the world lasts ten million years they . . .

  CN: So, Hitler was secretly working with the Jews?

  HG: He was cooperating with the bigwigs to get the small fry to get out of Germany and go to Israel.

  CN: The bigwigs were?

  HG: The financiers . . . I notice your machine is running. In Germany you can go to jail for saying it didn’t happen.

  CN: You can go to Jail?

  HG: Yeah. Because they tell us that they have no connection to the crucifixion of Christ. Because they weren’t there. It’s their ancestors if anybody, not the current people. But look at the whole race. We’re all involved in original sin. In Germany, they weren’t there. They’re forced to pay reparations. They have two sets of rules—one for them and one for us. They’re not responsible for what their ancestors did, but we are responsible for what ours did. It’s not our fault, because we didn’t do it. The rest of the world didn’t know anything about it.

  CN: Will the movie that Mel is making clearly make that connection to who is responsible?

  HG: The facts are clear. Those facts are the most well established in our history.

  Why Peter Boyer wishes to whitewash Hutton Gibson’s views about the Holocaust remains a mystery, as does The New Yorker’s silence about the perpetration of that whitewash in its pages.

  January 9, 2004

  PART EIGHT

  SOME NEW FORMS OF ANTI-SEMITISM

  SIMON SCHAMA

  Virtual Annihilation

  [This is a transcript of Professor Schama’s talk at the YIVO Institute conference“Old Demons, New Debates: Anti-Semitism in the West,” May 11, 2003.]

  HOW WAS MOTHER’S DAY this year? Mine didn’t go so well. I called my mother; I say, “What’s up?” “Three hundred and eighty-six headstones is what’s up,” she says: “Plashett Cemetery in Eastham, your Uncle Victor”—it’s actually her Uncle Victor—my Great-Aunt Prissy—“perpetrators apparently arrested.”

  “A shock,” I say then. “No, I’m not shocked by anything anymore,” she says. And she’s right. We certainly shouldn’t be surprised that ancient paranoia has, after all, survived both the r
easonings of modernity and the testimony of history. We live, after all, in a country and at a time when—so the opinion polls tell us—more people than not reject the scientific validity of the theory of evolution. (In some quarters, Darwinism is regarded, along with secular humanism, as another conspiracy of the Elders of Zion.) But then America is not the only country in which children are made precociously knowing while adults are made credulous. It was a French book that became a best-seller by asserting that the al-Qaeda attack on the Pentagon never happened and that photographs which suggested it had, had been digitally doctored by the CIA. Where once it was naïvely supposed that images never lie, the sovereign assumption of the digital age is that they never tell the truth. Truth morphs: Elvis is alive, the Mogen David is really the Satanic pentangle, there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. And digital-communications technology, once imagined as a universe of transparent and perpetual illumination in which cancerous falsehoods would perish beneath a saturation bombardment of irradiating data, has instead generated a much murkier, verification-free habitat, where a Google-generated search will deliver an electronic page in which links to lies and lunacy appear in identical format as those to truth and sanity. But why should we ever have assumed that technology and reason would be mutually self-reinforcing, since a quick visit to “Stormfront” will persuade you that the demonic is in fact the best customer of the electronic.

  It’s only in America that we imagine history as a series of cultural supercessions, each one comprehensively victorious in the totality of its effacements. Thus, in this processional view of the past, Native American society is supposed to have been obliterated by colonialism, which in turn yields to individualist, capitalist democracy. Except, of course, it doesn’t, not entirely— and much time is spent, and blood oft times is spilled, tidying up the inconvenient anachronisms. In Europe, on the other hand, especially at the end of the last century, so rigidly serial in approach to cultural alteration, it has been suspected to be not much more than textbook convenience.