William Cork is keeping a very good blog on The Passion. I pretty much concur with his thoughts on the movie, which are summarized here.
I still think Mel Gibson is a well-meaning individual, but until he takes a deep breath and acknowledges that his father is a lunatic and that his movie is going to inspire hatred, it really doesn’t matter what his motivations are. Take a look at some Hutton Gibson quotes from the link above (via Orcinus):
“I don’t know what their [the Jews’] agenda is except that it’s all about control. They’re after one world religion and one world government. That’s why they’ve attacked the Catholic Church so strongly, to ultimately take control over it by their doctrine and make one world religion and one world government.”
And:
“To a Jew a Christian commits idolatry every time he looks at a crucifix and says a prayer. You know they’re in control and they’re going to get in control the way things are going. Because they get all of our people…They killed several generations of us Americans [referring to WWI and WWII] … The Jews weren’t in the army much in WWI that because they were fomenting a revolt in Russia. America had no right to fight in foreign wars.”
This is purely and utterly sick. Expect to see more of it. The white supremacists are coming out of the woodwork on this one; the silver lining to all this is that it’ll get some of them out from under their rocks.
2 Comments
One question: The father of the Kennedy’s was a communist sympathizer. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton both had brothers who were loose cannons. Do you think that the three Kennedy brothers, Jimmy and Bill should be judges because of the views/actions of their parents/siblings?
If you want to hammer on Mel, then quote Mel.
Insofar as Mel’s donating large amounts of money to Hutton’s church, yeah, I do think Mel needs to address the issue.
But I’m not unsympathetic to this line of argument. You’ll note that I’m not saying Mel is a bad person. I had the pleasure of participating in a Q&A session with him late last year, and I think he’s a very sincere person.
I also think he needs to address the issue of his father, just as Jimmy Carter needed to establish that he wasn’t endorsing Billy Beer.