Taking Names

Dis-‘Passion’

No boycotts or protests outside movies are planned for the Feb. 25 release ofMel Gibson’s hotly anticipated “The Passion of the Christ.”

However, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee will sponsor lectures, interfaith talks and other programs to prevent an anti-Semitic backlash they fear the movie will incite.

“Do I think there will be pogroms as a result of this movie? No,” Rabbi David Elcott, the AJC’s interfaith director, told the Associated Press.

“It’s part of something larger, which is a hardening of religious conversation. It is such an absolutist movie. It undermines the progress that we’ve made in this country toward mutual respect and religious pluralism.”

The AP notes that evangelical supporters who’ve seen the film don’t believe that it implies Jews are collectively responsible for Christ’s death. Across the country, they plan sermons and lectures in tandem with “The Passion of the Christ,” and have produced special Bibles that contain images from the film.

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Meanwhile, Mr. Gibson may not be doing himself any favors.

In an interview with Peggy Noonan to be published in the March edition of Reader’s Digest, the actor-director was asked, for the record, if he believed the Holocaust occurred.

His discursive response, originally excerpted in the New York Post, included a “Yes, of course”; but there were also hints that Mr. Gibson doesn’t think the Holocaust was all that special.

Just listen: “Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps.”

Hmmm. Did World War II really cause those atrocities? Or did those atrocities and the expansionism of their perpetrators cause World War II?

ADL President Abraham Foxman read the except and said of Mr. Gibson, “He doesn’t get it.”

“There are wars, and people die in wars, and it is tragic,” Mr. Foxman said via phone. But the Holocast was unique: “People died because of who they were,” he said.

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