Womblingdon
10-04-2004, 12:22
From: The Jerusalem Post
(Apologies to Steph for posting the full text, but JP requires registering, and if I only post the link, most readers won't be able to read the article)
Now playing globally: outrage and praise for 'Passion'
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
ATHENS
An Islamic leader says it reveals Jewish "crimes." European Jewish leaders are troubled by anti-Semitic overtones. Israeli theaters don't plan to show it.
The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson's crucifixion epic, is moving into cinemas around the world as Christians celebrate Easter week, and into the international tempests whipped up by terrorism, war, and clashing religions.
"It's not going to help quiet things down," said Giorgos Moustakis, who teaches theology and Christian ethics at the American College of Greece. "There are fundamentalists in every religion – Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Films like this get extremist feelings going."
Gibson and many clergy who praised the film deny it has any anti-Semitic overtones.
Many in the Arab world welcome the film, seeing it as an anti-Jewish message gaining worldwide currency at a time of escalating Palestinian-Israeli clashes.
The Islamic Action Front, a hard-line Jordanian political party, says Muslims should spend their leisure time reading the Koran or praying, not watching movies. But the group's secretary-general, Hamza Mansoor, said he had no objection to the film being screened in Jordan. "The Jews are the most upset with the movie because it reveals their crimes against the prophets, the reformers, and whoever contradicts their opinions," he said.
The film has opened to packed houses in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.
Hanan Nsour, 21, was moved to tears by the film, which she said "unmasked the Jews' lies and I hope that everybody and everywhere they turn against the Jews."
Top aide Nabil Abu Rudeineh used the film to equate the Palestinians' suffering with Jesus's, following a March 20 viewing by Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, local Muslim clerics, and Christians from the United States, Canada, and Britain in Arafat's Mukata compound.
A top Shi'ite cleric in Kuwait, Ayatollah Muhammad Baqer al-Mehri, has urged his government to let the film be shown in theaters there because it "reveals crimes committed by Jews against Christ."
The dean of Kuwait University's Islamic Law College, Muhammad al-Tabtabai, issued a fatwa against watching The Passion because Muslims reject the idea of an actor portraying Jesus, or anyone else Islam reveres as a prophet. Pirated copies of the film are nonetheless being circulated in Kuwait.
The Gibson movie opened Tuesday in Egypt, where the cartoon Prince of Egypt was banned because, among other reasons, it depicted the prophet Moses. Even before the big screen release, some Egyptian churches and Christian bookshops have been selling DVDs of The Passion. Egyptian Muslim clerics who might have been expected to object are taking a hands-off approach.
Censors also have cleared the movie for release in the United Arab Emirates, where a Gulf News editorial recently gushed that "the film is so close to the human condition in its depiction of betrayal, greed, falsehood, forgiveness, and love."
In Israel, the film won't be seen. Shapira Films, which has the Israeli distribution rights, "decided this was not the appropriate time to screen it," said spokeswoman Orly Ben Eliyahu.
Italian theaters will not screen the film until April 7. But Pope John Paul II saw it at a private screening in December, and later blessed Jesus's portrayer, actor Jim Caviezel, a devout Roman Catholic.
Not so the Roman Catholic archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, who described the film as "ridiculous" for its graphic attention to the beatings and abuses suffered by Jesus.
Others, too, recoiled at the violence. "It is downright gruesome," Oslo Bishop Gunnar Staalsett said on Norwegian state television. "It made me out-and-out nauseous."
But that's just what some advocates say is needed to draw attention to Christianity's core beliefs. Bishop Marc, a spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchate, called the film "heavy-duty medicine." The movie opens in Russia on Tuesday.
Some European churches, like American ones, have encouraged the public to see the film, hoping it will reverse declining religious faith. In southern England, five churches joined forces to block-book 3,000 tickets and offer them free on the Internet.
Interesting effect, don't you find? Where anti-Semitism is already on high levels, it seems that The Passion fuels it tenfold. But, thankfully, it seems that the more enlightened public chooses to read it in an entirely different way. So... Was this movie worth making? Does it artistic value outweight the now obvious harmful effect it has on the more vulnerable part of the audience?
(Apologies to Steph for posting the full text, but JP requires registering, and if I only post the link, most readers won't be able to read the article)
Now playing globally: outrage and praise for 'Passion'
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
ATHENS
An Islamic leader says it reveals Jewish "crimes." European Jewish leaders are troubled by anti-Semitic overtones. Israeli theaters don't plan to show it.
The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson's crucifixion epic, is moving into cinemas around the world as Christians celebrate Easter week, and into the international tempests whipped up by terrorism, war, and clashing religions.
"It's not going to help quiet things down," said Giorgos Moustakis, who teaches theology and Christian ethics at the American College of Greece. "There are fundamentalists in every religion – Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Films like this get extremist feelings going."
Gibson and many clergy who praised the film deny it has any anti-Semitic overtones.
Many in the Arab world welcome the film, seeing it as an anti-Jewish message gaining worldwide currency at a time of escalating Palestinian-Israeli clashes.
The Islamic Action Front, a hard-line Jordanian political party, says Muslims should spend their leisure time reading the Koran or praying, not watching movies. But the group's secretary-general, Hamza Mansoor, said he had no objection to the film being screened in Jordan. "The Jews are the most upset with the movie because it reveals their crimes against the prophets, the reformers, and whoever contradicts their opinions," he said.
The film has opened to packed houses in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.
Hanan Nsour, 21, was moved to tears by the film, which she said "unmasked the Jews' lies and I hope that everybody and everywhere they turn against the Jews."
Top aide Nabil Abu Rudeineh used the film to equate the Palestinians' suffering with Jesus's, following a March 20 viewing by Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, local Muslim clerics, and Christians from the United States, Canada, and Britain in Arafat's Mukata compound.
A top Shi'ite cleric in Kuwait, Ayatollah Muhammad Baqer al-Mehri, has urged his government to let the film be shown in theaters there because it "reveals crimes committed by Jews against Christ."
The dean of Kuwait University's Islamic Law College, Muhammad al-Tabtabai, issued a fatwa against watching The Passion because Muslims reject the idea of an actor portraying Jesus, or anyone else Islam reveres as a prophet. Pirated copies of the film are nonetheless being circulated in Kuwait.
The Gibson movie opened Tuesday in Egypt, where the cartoon Prince of Egypt was banned because, among other reasons, it depicted the prophet Moses. Even before the big screen release, some Egyptian churches and Christian bookshops have been selling DVDs of The Passion. Egyptian Muslim clerics who might have been expected to object are taking a hands-off approach.
Censors also have cleared the movie for release in the United Arab Emirates, where a Gulf News editorial recently gushed that "the film is so close to the human condition in its depiction of betrayal, greed, falsehood, forgiveness, and love."
In Israel, the film won't be seen. Shapira Films, which has the Israeli distribution rights, "decided this was not the appropriate time to screen it," said spokeswoman Orly Ben Eliyahu.
Italian theaters will not screen the film until April 7. But Pope John Paul II saw it at a private screening in December, and later blessed Jesus's portrayer, actor Jim Caviezel, a devout Roman Catholic.
Not so the Roman Catholic archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, who described the film as "ridiculous" for its graphic attention to the beatings and abuses suffered by Jesus.
Others, too, recoiled at the violence. "It is downright gruesome," Oslo Bishop Gunnar Staalsett said on Norwegian state television. "It made me out-and-out nauseous."
But that's just what some advocates say is needed to draw attention to Christianity's core beliefs. Bishop Marc, a spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchate, called the film "heavy-duty medicine." The movie opens in Russia on Tuesday.
Some European churches, like American ones, have encouraged the public to see the film, hoping it will reverse declining religious faith. In southern England, five churches joined forces to block-book 3,000 tickets and offer them free on the Internet.
Interesting effect, don't you find? Where anti-Semitism is already on high levels, it seems that The Passion fuels it tenfold. But, thankfully, it seems that the more enlightened public chooses to read it in an entirely different way. So... Was this movie worth making? Does it artistic value outweight the now obvious harmful effect it has on the more vulnerable part of the audience?