Inventing an Enemy

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Hello and welcome to Review of the News Online. I’m William Norman Grigg, Senior Editor for The New American magazine – an affiliated publication of the John Birch Society.

This year’s Oscar Night occurred amid the contrived controversy surrounding Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ, which presents a masterful depiction of the trial, scourging, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

Since Hollywood, in recent decades, has shown itself incapable of making movies that depict Christians as anything other than illiterate bigots, Gibson bankrolled the film himself, produced it independently of Hollywood, and built a grass-roots publicity network among priests, pastors, and laymen. The result was an unprecedented box-office success for a film Hollywood didn’t want to produce or promote – and that the peddlers of politically correct prejudice had attempted to suppress.

For months prior to the release of Gibson’s film, the so-called Anti-Defamation League waged a campaign traducing both the director and his movie as anti-Semitic. In the course of that campaign, an ADL operative purloined an early draft of the script. On the basis of a few isolated elements of the stolen script, the ADL condemned the work in progress for displaying "numerous anti-Semitic elements," and demanded that Gibson re-work his film to their satisfaction.

Gibson, to his credit, essentially ignored the ADL, which – in collaboration with the major media and other self-appointed "watchdog" groups – escalated its defamation campaign. Numerous Jewish religious leaders and scholars who previewed the film – including Rabbi Daniel Lapin and film critic Michael Medved – hailed it as an artistic masterpiece that was devoid of anti-Semitic content.

Referring primarily to the ADL, Rabbi Lapin offered the following commentary shortly after Gibson’s film was released: "Those Jewish organizations that have squandered both time and money futilely protesting The Passion, ostensibly in order to prevent pogroms in Pittsburgh, can hardly be proud of their performance. They failed at everything they attempted. They were hoping to ruin Gibson rather than enrich him. They were hoping to suppress The Passion rather than promote it. Finally, they were hoping to help Jews rather than harm them. In this, they have failed miserably. By selectively unleashing their fury only on wholesome entertainment that depicts Christianity in a positive light, these critics have triggered anger, hurt, and resentment."

Rabbi Lapin, like countless other devout Jews, is a man of faith and goodwill. Thus it’s not surprising that he’s insufficiently cynical to understand that the ADL regards the outcome he describes as a success, not a failure. Sowing "anger, hurt, and resentment" through the use of dishonest – and occasionally illegal – tactics is the ADL’s stock in trade, and it has been for decades.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, an individual named James Mitchell Rosenberg, described by political analyst Laird Wilcox as "a career infiltrator for the Anti-Defamation League," was a fixture at Ku Klux Klan rallies in the mid-west. For the benefit of television reporters, Rosenberg also posed as a leader of a para-military group called the "Christian Patriot’s Defense League," which was the subject of a breathless exposé entitled "Armies of the Right." He was eventually arraigned on criminal charges, which were dismissed after the intervention of Irwin Suall, his ADL supervisor.

A little more than a decade later, Roy Bullock, described by Wilcox as "a paid ADL operative and well-known figure in the San Francisco homosexual community," engaged in similar undercover work in the Bay Area, attempting to forge spurious links between ADL-designated "hate groups" and actual terrorist organizations. Bullock worked closely with Tom Gerard, an intelligence officer with the San Francisco Police Department. According to Wilcox, Gerard "regularly took information from police files for transmittal to the ADL and in some cases to Israeli intelligence agencies, with whom the ADL works closely."

Gerard avoided criminal charges by fleeing the country. The ADL bribed its way out of trouble by offering a $75,000 donation to a San Francisco hate crimes investigation fund.

Ten years ago, the ADL released a 193-page screed entitled The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America, purporting to document that Christian conservatives pose a menace to Jews and other minorities. Outraged by this libel, 75 prominent American Jews signed a full-page ad in the New York Times to condemn the ADL. Since Jews have often been victimized by religious bigotry, the ad pointed out, "we have a special obligation to guard against it, and all the more so, when in the case of the ADL attack on our Christian fellow citizens, it emanates from our own community." Additionally, continued the ad, "Judaism teaches ... that we have the duty to acknowledge the good done to us. In issuing The Religious Right study, the ADL has among other things seriously violated that principle."

On March 1^st, just shortly after The Passion’s debut, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively upheld a $10.5 million defamation judgment against the ADL arising out of a Colorado lawsuit. William and Dorothy Quigley had filed the suit in the mid-1990s after ADL regional director Saul Rosenthal, speaking in a press conference, accused the couple of being anti-Semites.

In 1994, the ADL intervened in a pointless neighborhood dispute between the Quigleys and their Jewish neighbors, the Aronsons. Acting on advice from the ADL, the Aronsons arranged for an illegal wiretap of the Quigleys. After the ADL publicly labeled the Quigleys as anti-Semites, they were charged with "hate crimes"; the charges were subsequently dismissed. They were also battered with death threats, hate mail -- including a package containing dog feces -- and denounced from the pulpit by their priest. The family was driven to hire bodyguards, and William Quigley – who worked in the motion-picture industry – found that his career was effectively destroyed.

The Quigley case demonstrates that in contemporary America, it is much more dangerous to be labeled an anti-Semite than it is to be identified as a Jew. The simple fact is that America is unquestionably the most philo-Semitic society in the world. As Orthodox Jewish author David Klinghoffer points out: "You’ve heard the phrase `anti-Semitism without Jews,’ to describe the hostility to Jews felt in countries ... that don’t have any Jews. In the American Jewish community, we’ve got anti-Semitism without anti-Semites."

In a July 15, 1994 interview with the Jerusalem Post, historian Leonard Dinnerstein, author of the book Anti-Semitism in America, observed that "anti-Semitism in the US has clearly declined to an unimagined degree.... [I]t's become so minuscule as to be virtually irrelevant.... Jews are incredibly secure in the United States, and I see no reason whatsoever why that should change.... The fact is, a lot of American Jews just aren't ready to accept just how well-accepted they are in America." Citing the ADL's own annual audits of anti-Semitic acts, Dinnerstein concluded that "anti-Semitism is just a tiny blip on the American consciousness."

Yet to judge matters from the frenzied reaction The Passion provoked from many pundits, one would assume that America abounds in crypto-anti-Semites willing to stage pogroms on the smallest pretext. Much of that commentary also takes for granted the assumption that Christianity itself is anti-Semitic.

One case in point was offered by columnist Charles Krauthammer, who wrote in a March 5 Washington Post op-ed that "the crucifixion is not just a story; it is a story with its own story -- a history of centuries of relentless, and at times savage, persecution of Jews in Christian lands." Krauthammer’s colleague Richard Cohen denounced Gibson’s film – which is drawn almost entirely from the Gospels -- as "fascistic."

Such scapegoating of Christianity is not merely libelous; it is literally demented. As Professor Benjamin Ginsberg of Johns Hopkins University pointed out in his 1993 study The Fatal Embrace, it is statism – not Christianity – that lies at the root of historic anti-Semitism.

In previous eras, Ginsberg explains, Jews were socially marginalized people whose status led them "to seek the protection of the state.... Over the past several centuries ... Jews have played a major role in the strengthening of existing states and in efforts to supplant established regimes with new ones." In many states, he continues, "Jews were crucial in building and staffing institutions of extraction, coercion, administration, and mobilization.... [T]hese relationships between Jews and the state have been the chief catalysts for organized anti-Semitism."

Digested into simple terms, Ginsberg’s compelling thesis is that time and again, Jews have sought to build state power in order to protect themselves from persecution – only to engender the hostility of those whose prosperity and liberties suffer at the hands of the state. And time and again, the state turned its wrath on the same Jewish advisers and agents that had worked so diligently to expand its powers.

Despite this utterly predictable outcome, Ginsberg oberves, "Jews often continued to look to the state for protection even when it was the state itself that was the source of their problems." He cites one particularly tragic example of this "fatal embrace" at work: "[T]o the very end many German Jews could not believe that the German state would fail to protect them from the excesses of Nazi fanatics."

Given this incredibly tragic history, Jews, of all people, should understand the need for limited government under law.

As Rabbi Lapin and many other Jewish leaders have pointed out, America’s Christian heritage is the single most important reason why Jews have enjoyed unparalleled acceptance and security in this country. A closely related reason is our constitutional system of limited government under law, which was designed to limit state power in a way that would prevent the dreadful consequences of the "fatal embrace" described by Ginsberg.

The ADL’s campaign to execrate Mel Gibson and his film is a calculated effort to undermine the goodwill of American Christians and to incite inter-communal hostility. The only obvious beneficiary (besides the ADL itself, which profits handsomely from such rancor) will be the State – which will leave not only Jews, but all of us, in much greater peril.

One final note. In his uncharacteristically obtuse and petulant review of The Passion, Krauthammer compared Mel Gibson to the late Leni Riefenstahl, director of the notorious Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. Riefenstahl, who died last year, was the subject of a tribute from the Motion Picture Academy at this year’s Oscar Awards. Invited to participate as a presenter at the Oscars, Mel Gibson declined, in fear of his likely reception. So it’s official: A worshipper of Adolf Hitler is more welcome in Hollywood than a believer in the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Thank you for listening. Please join us again next time.

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