NationStates Jolt Archive


The Passion: now playing globally

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?
West - Europa
10-04-2004, 13:17
Psh. The Israeli govt. is the real cause of anti-semitism, not a movie by a pain-fetishist nut like Mel Gibson. (btw the recent South Park episode on the matter summed it up pretty well)
New Mozambique
10-04-2004, 13:21
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."

That's the intended effect.

People in Christian countries have become desensitised to the pain and suffering that Jesus went through. Ever since childhood we've been told "Then Jesus nailed to a piece of wood through his ankles and wrists." and we've accepted that as just another thing in the Bible, instead of the all out three day torturefest that crucifixition entailed.
Womblingdon
10-04-2004, 13:54
Psh. The Israeli govt. is the real cause of anti-semitism, not a movie by a pain-fetishist nut like Mel Gibson. (btw the recent South Park episode on the matter summed it up pretty well)
Right. Don't we all know there was no anti-Semitism before Israel. Of course it was the Israeli government that persuaded all the ignorant morons out there that Jews are Christ killers and sons of apes and pigs :roll:
West - Europa
10-04-2004, 15:01
Psh. The Israeli govt. is the real cause of anti-semitism, not a movie by a pain-fetishist nut like Mel Gibson. (btw the recent South Park episode on the matter summed it up pretty well)
Right. Don't we all know there was no anti-Semitism before Israel. Of course it was the Israeli government that persuaded all the ignorant morons out there that Jews are Christ killers and sons of apes and pigs :roll:

You mean they aren't? :p

Okay, maybe I should have said current day anti-semitism.
Dragons Bay
10-04-2004, 15:04
I haven't seen it yet...

Or,

I'm not allowed by law...

It's rated Category Three, meaning that only those 18 above can watch it.

Oh well, not that I WANT to watch it. :roll:
Womblingdon
10-04-2004, 15:23
Psh. The Israeli govt. is the real cause of anti-semitism, not a movie by a pain-fetishist nut like Mel Gibson. (btw the recent South Park episode on the matter summed it up pretty well)
Right. Don't we all know there was no anti-Semitism before Israel. Of course it was the Israeli government that persuaded all the ignorant morons out there that Jews are Christ killers and sons of apes and pigs :roll:

You mean they aren't? :p

Okay, maybe I should have said current day anti-semitism.
Meaning that it is somehow different, new and totally disconnected from the old anti-Semitism? :roll:
Genaia
10-04-2004, 15:32
I watched the film yesterday and felt that with the exception of a few unecessary additions it was a fairly accurate depiction of the gospels. If you feel the gospels promote an anti-Semitic message then undoubtedly you will feel the same for the film, if you do not, likewise for the film.

I do not believe that the film was especially anti-Semitic, mainly because the criticisms levelled at the pharisees were not intended to be a wider criticism of Jews in general and in fact the film included many examples of 'good' Jews. Furthermore if the film was intended to be anti-Semitic then I would have thought Mel Gibson might have felt inclined to use the line shouted by the crowd Matthew 25:27 "his blood be upon us and upon our children".

For me the film was not as good as it could have been due to the over-gratuitous use of violence. The point that "he suffered" could have been adequately made without diluting the film and the message in a tide of blood which after a while simply became meaningless in my mind, regardless of "accuracy".
Womblingdon
10-04-2004, 15:47
if the film was intended to be anti-Semitic then I would have thought Mel Gibson might have felt inclined to use the line shouted by the crowd Matthew 25:27 "his blood be upon us and upon our children".
As far as I know, this line WAS in the original script, and was only removed when Gibson found himself under pressure over the controversial message of his film.
Clappi
10-04-2004, 15:50
The Gospels are not so much anti-semitic as they are pro-Roman. St Paul and the later editors of the Gospels knew what side their bread was buttered, and they went out of their way to excuse the Romans -- especially the Roman authorities -- for the crucifixion. Hence Pilate "washing his hands". It was still the Roman empire that carried out the execution, though: if the Jews had killed Jesus, they would have stoned him to death. You can get a good sense of the political in-fighting between St Paul and the (still Jewish) early Christians in Jerusalem under James if you read the Epistles: James and his crowd get mad with Paul for allowing Gentiles to become Christians, for not insisting on circumcision and kosher diets (always a bit of a barrier to easy conversion, especially the former), and for generally cosying up to Rome. Paul was, of course, a Roman citizen, and far less concerned with a Jewish Messiah -- i.e. one who would liberate the Jewish people from the Romans -- than he was in instituting a cult which could make useful converts across the Empire. What people think of today as Christianity is really an invention of St Paul's. After the Roman empire fell, of course, Christian anti-semitism really got going.

On the notion of the suffering of Christ, if you want to see a film with shocking acts of violence carried out against innocents you could always watch Amistad. In many ways Jesus got off easy.

As for Gibson's Passion, what I really want to see is the comedy bloopers reel.
West - Europa
10-04-2004, 16:07
Psh. The Israeli govt. is the real cause of anti-semitism, not a movie by a pain-fetishist nut like Mel Gibson. (btw the recent South Park episode on the matter summed it up pretty well)
Right. Don't we all know there was no anti-Semitism before Israel. Of course it was the Israeli government that persuaded all the ignorant morons out there that Jews are Christ killers and sons of apes and pigs :roll:

You mean they aren't? :p

Okay, maybe I should have said current day anti-semitism.
Meaning that it is somehow different, new and totally disconnected from the old anti-Semitism? :roll:

Then you tell me how the jews got along just fine with the muslims in the Middle Ages?
Purly Euclid
10-04-2004, 16:35
Goody. All this hope about not causing anti Semitism, and guess what it does in the Middle East? But I saw the movie. It really is a good film.
Dempublicents
10-04-2004, 17:52
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?

Unfortunately, that's just the way it works. If you are already anti-semitic, anything that seems like it might possibly be anti-(a small sect of Jews) is obviously going to fuel that. I agree with Mel Gibson - I saw Schindler's List, but it didn't make me hate all Germans. The point being, this movie is not going to make any new anti-semites -- and those who are already anti-semitic will find other fuel if this film isn't there.
Palan
10-04-2004, 18:41
The film isn't out here (Isle of Man) till 7th May, by which time I'll be back at uni in the UK so I guess I'll have to catch it there
Womblingdon
10-04-2004, 23:05
Then you tell me how the jews got along just fine with the muslims in the Middle Ages?
They didn't really. Tolerance to other religions in Muslim society was only common for limited periods of time and in very specific places. During the Golden Age in Spain, for example. But in 15 century Yemen Jews were treated by Muslims worse than the European Jewish communities were by the Christians.
10-04-2004, 23:07
I kinda think it's dumb that just because a movie's about jesus, it makes a buttload of money, even when it's not very good.
Incertonia
10-04-2004, 23:09
if the film was intended to be anti-Semitic then I would have thought Mel Gibson might have felt inclined to use the line shouted by the crowd Matthew 25:27 "his blood be upon us and upon our children".
As far as I know, this line WAS in the original script, and was only removed when Gibson found himself under pressure over the controversial message of his film.It's actually still in the film--all that's been cut was the subtitle, and there's no guarantee that the subtitle won't be replaced in non-English speaking venues.
NewXmen
10-04-2004, 23:11
Psh. The Israeli govt. is the real cause of anti-semitism, not a movie by a pain-fetishist nut like Mel Gibson. (btw the recent South Park episode on the matter summed it up pretty well)
Right. Don't we all know there was no anti-Semitism before Israel. Of course it was the Israeli government that persuaded all the ignorant morons out there that Jews are Christ killers and sons of apes and pigs :roll:

You mean they aren't? :p

Okay, maybe I should have said current day anti-semitism.
Meaning that it is somehow different, new and totally disconnected from the old anti-Semitism? :roll:

Then you tell me how the jews got along just fine with the muslims in the Middle Ages?

Do you guys remember a chap called Hitler?
DHomme
10-04-2004, 23:17
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."



I dunno if anybodys mentioned this already but why is a Muslim calling Jesus "Christ"? Surely this is a misquote or even faked...
Incertonia
10-04-2004, 23:22
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."



I dunno if anybodys mentioned this already but why is a Muslim calling Jesus "Christ"? Surely this is a misquote or even faked...I can't know for certain, but it's quite possible that it's a mistranslation. I wouldn't expect a Kuwaiti Ayatollah to be speaking in perfect English, and would expect more likely that he would be speaking in Arabic, so if the translator is unfamiliar with Muslim belief, the mistake would be easy to make.
DHomme
10-04-2004, 23:29
either that or the government has some big conspiracy with the tobacco companies and the mormons on side
Genaia
10-04-2004, 23:51
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."



I dunno if anybodys mentioned this already but why is a Muslim calling Jesus "Christ"? Surely this is a misquote or even faked...


Muslims generally believe that Jesus was merely a prophet and not a Christ and that such claims were made by his followers after he had died rather than himself. Therefore I suppose it's possible that this is merely misquoted and that they feel the film actually condemns Jewish crimes against a prophet. Either way I don't feel it does since such a conclusion would involve generalising the actions of a small elite (the pharisees) to blame every Jew throughout the ages for the death of Christ, which would be absurd and is not what I believe the film attempts to do.