Guest columnist
Anti-Defamation League plays into Gibson's hands

By David Klinghoffer
Special to The Times

	PHILIPPE ANTONELLO Mel Gibson, right, directs Jim Caviezel (Jesus) for "The Passion of the Christ."
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When Mel Gibson's film about the death of Jesus, "The Passion of the Christ," opens this month, critics contend that it may spur anti-Jewish bigotry. Those critics have been led by the Anti-Defamation League, arguably America's most prominent Jewish organization.

If the ADL is right that the film "could fuel latent anti-Semitism," whom should we hold responsible if any Jews get hurt as a consequence of its release? Mel Gibson, you say? How about the Anti-Defamation League?

This film will be seen by lots and lots of people, thanks largely to the controversy around it, and nobody has done more to fan that controversy into a roaring blaze than the ADL.

Fears about Gibson's "Passion," which apparently depicts Jews egging on Christ's crucifixion, were heightened when it was reported that audience excitement is running so strong that the distributor will open it on 2,000 screens nationwide. Church groups are clamoring for blocks of tickets, and one Dallas-area multiplex will show it on all 20 screens starting at 6:30 a.m. of the release date, Feb. 25.

Why is "The Passion" likely to be the year's big event movie? Is it only because the director is Gibson? No. Remember that we are discussing a film with dialogue in Aramaic and Latin — a very significant handicap in seeking American viewers no matter who the director is.

Why does everyone seem to be talking about this film when they were not talking about a movie last year on the same subject, "The Gospel of John," which also portrayed Jews as playing an instrumental role in the crucifixion? That one quietly closed with hardly a remark from pundits.

Or from the pope — who has already screened Gibson's film and, according to reported comments later denied by his secretary, pronounced it to be admirable and authentic. As the movie's assistant director explained of his triumph in arranging the papal screening, "I called the pope's secretary. He said he had read about the movie, read about the controversy. He said, 'I'm curious, and I'm sure the pope is curious, too.' "

A Lexis-Nexis search of articles in newspapers that mentioned "The Passion" over the past six months shows that 22 percent also cited the ADL and its critique — an impressive statistic. The ADL was more often mentioned than the film's star, James Caviezel, who plays Jesus.

The whole atmosphere of debate, worry and accusation has been invaluable to Gibson in generating anticipation of his work, on which he is personally spending $25 million. Lucky for him the Anti-Defamation League was on the case.

If one of the organization's chief purposes is to minimize the impact of negative depictions of Jews in the media, then it has succeeded here in doing the exact opposite.

As the ADL states in its latest fund-raising mailer, referring to bigotry in general, "Of great concern to the Anti-Defamation League is the possibility that individuals are more likely to be targets of attack, simply because they are 'different.' "

For every individual who sees the Gibson film, the odds of some other individual being attacked because he's Jewish are, presumably, increased.

So what did ADL think its relentless criticism of "The Passion" would accomplish? Gibson is the last person in all of Hollywood to bow to hostile pressure to edit his work. A news story this week suggested that the filmmaker may have cut an inflammatory verse from Matthew's Gospel — but this was due to reactions of friendly screening audiences, not thanks to the ADL, which continues to attack the film.

As the Seattle-based interfaith activist Rabbi Daniel Lapin observes, Gibson is the guy who made "Braveheart" and identifies with its hero, William Wallace, a 13th-century Scottish warrior who gladly accepts disembowelment rather than submit to intimidation and tyranny.

The ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman, genuinely cares about the Jewish people, but his group is inevitably affected by the pressures of funding a large, nonprofit organization. The imperative to convince donors that you fight an urgent fight is overwhelming. The ADL has a $40 million yearly budget to raise.

The perilous logic of the anti-defamation business demands that the ADL find "dangers" to denounce, even when those dangers, if left alone, would have been neutralized simply by their own nature — in this case, by the eccentricity of a Latin-Aramaic screenplay. Gibson's purposes positively required that he be denounced.

He played the ADL as William Wallace played the bagpipe. The relationship between anti-defamation watchdogs and alleged defamer is symbiotic and mutually beneficial. What dangers it has unleashed for the rest of us remain to be seen.

David Klinghoffer, who lives on Mercer Island, is a columnist for the Jewish Forward and author of the forthcoming "Why the Jews Rejected Christ: In Search of the Turning Point in Western History" (Doubleday).

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