The misreading of Mel Gibson

by MARK STEYN

Benyamin Cohen, editor of the online publication Jewsweek, went to see Mel Gibson's The Passion Of The Christ and came out homicidal: "My first comprehensible thought was this: I really want to kill a Jew."

Maureen Dowd of The New York Times agreed: "In Braveheart and The Patriot, his other emotionally manipulative historical epics, you came out wanting to swing an ax into the skull of the nearest Englishman. Here, you want to kick in some Jewish and Roman teeth. And since the Romans have melted into history...."

Really? You want to kick in some Jew teeth? I mean, really want to? If you say so. It may be that elderly schoolgirl columnists at The New York Times are unusually easy to rouse to violence.

But I reckon Dowd and Cohen are faking it. They don't mean that, thanks to Mel, Times marquee columnists and liberal Jewish New Yorkers will be rampaging around looking for Jews to kill, they mean all those rubes and hicks in Dogpatch who don't know any better will be doing so.

I'll be reviewing The Passion for The Spectator when it opens in London later this month, so let me put Gibson's direction and James Caviezel's acting to one side, and just say this: Chances of any Jew getting his teeth kicked in by one of Mel's customers? Zero per cent. Okay, let me cover myself a little: Point-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-whatever per cent.

When this film first loomed on the horizon, the received wisdom of the metropolitan sophisticates was that Mel Gibson had blown well over 30 million bucks of his own money on a vanity project of no interest to anyone but him and a few other Jesus freaks. A couple of weeks ago, when stories began to trickle out of amazing advance sales and Bible Belt multiplex owners booking it on to all 20 screens simultaneously, the received wisdom did a screeching U-turn:

How about that Mel Gibson, huh? He claims to be such a devout Christian yet he's pimping his Saviour's suffering to the masses and raking in gazillions of dollars.

As Andy Rooney, the ersatz controversialist on CBS's Sixty Minutes, enquired: "How many million dollars does it look as if you're going to make off the crucifixion of Christ?" Hey, if he's lucky, maybe as many millions as Michael Moore made off all those dead high-school kids with Bowling For Columbine.

Throughout the whiplash U-turn, only one feature of the "controversy" remained constant: that the movie is "anti-Semitic."

It's true that in Europe "passion plays" often provided a rationale for Jew-hatred. But that was at a time when the church was also a projection of state power. What's happening in America is quite the opposite: One reason why Hollywood assumed Mel had laid a $30 million Easter egg was because the elite coastal enclaves who set the cultural agenda haven't a clue about the rest of the country when it comes to religion.

They don't mind Jesus when he's hippy (Godspell) or horny (Terrence McNally's "gay Jesus" play Corpus Christi) but taking the guy seriously is just for fruitcakes.

SO, WHEN metropolitan columnists say Mel's movie makes you want to go Jew-bashing, they're really engaging in a bit of displaced Christian-bashing.

Ever since 9/11, there's been a lame trope beloved of the smart set: Yes, these Muslim fundamentalists may be pretty extreme, but let's not frget all our Christian fundamentalists – the "home-grown Talibans," as The New York Times's Frank Rich called them, in the course of demanding that John Ashcroft, the attorney-general, round them up.

Two years on, if this thesis is going to hold up, these Christians really need to get off their fundamentalist butts and start killing more people.

Critics berating Gibson for lingering on the physical flaying of Jesus would be more persuasive if they weren't all too desperately flogging their own dead horse of fundamentalist moral equivalence.

The more puzzling question is why so many American Jewish leaders started crying anti-Semitism months before anyone had even seen the picture. It requires a perverse inability to prioritize to anoint Mel Gibson as the prime source of resurgent anti-Semitism. Not to mention that it's self-defeating.

As Melanie Phillips, a British Jew, recently noted in The Observer: "Let us all agree on one thing at least. The more Jews warn that anti-Semitism has come roaring out of the closet, the more people don't like the Jews."

There's something to that. During the New Hampshire primary, I prompted the following complaint from Barbara Baruch of New York: "What motivated Mark Steyn to describe Joe Lieberman as the 'Yiddisher pixie'? As this has absolutely no relevance to Lieberman's political viability, it's obvious that Steyn's linguistic choice is nothing less than insidious anti-Semitism."

Oh, phooey. I called him a pixie because, in contrast to John Kerry, he was jolly and beaming, and yiddisher is an allusion to the old song "My Yiddisher Momma," since Joe was always going on about his own momma. "Yiddisher pixie" is a term of affection, and the best way to demonstrate the preposterousness of Baruch's assertion is a simple test:

Try to imagine Sheikh Akram Abd-al-Razzaq al-Ruqayhi, the A-list imam at the Grand Mosque in Sanaa, who does the Friday prayers live on Yemeni state TV, breaking off from his usual patter on Jews – "O God, count them one by one, kill them all and don't leave anyone" – to refer to one as a "Yiddisher pixie."
Or the members of Calgary's "Palestinian community" who marched through the streets carrying placards emblazoned "Death To The Jews."

Or the gangs who've been torching French synagogues, kosher butchers and schools in an ongoing mini-intifada.

Or Archbishop Desmond Tutu who says people should not be scared of America's Jewish lobby because other scary types like "Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust."

Or the wife of European Central Banker Wim Duisenberg, who amuses herself by doing oven jokes in public.

Mel Gibson's movie won't kill anyone.

On the other hand, right now, at The Hague, the International Court of Justice is holding a show trial of Israel's security fence. At the very least, a European court sitting in judgment on the Jewish state is a staggering lapse of taste.

But it should also remind Jews of the current sources of "the world's oldest hatred" – not just the Islamic world, where talk of killing them all is part of the wallpaper, but modern-day secular Europe, where antipathy toward Ariel Sharon long ago crossed over into a broader contempt for the Jewish state and a benign indifference to those who use European Jewry as a substitute target.

If Jewish groups think Mel Gibson and evangelical Christians are the problem, more fool them.

Brilliantly funny stuff from Mike Toole's blog, Blogging Like I've Never Blogged Before:

"I have no interest in seeing Monster. I'm sure she does a fine job, but all I really needed to see was the poster and I was like, "Yeah, she looks like she does a pretty good job." And we all know they were basically just rewarding Charlize for her previous work that was overlooked, like Mighty Joe Young.

A few years back, there was a sketch on Mr. Show where they created an awards show specifically for people playing retarded characters and everyone won an award. Pretty actresses gaining weight or looking ugly is the new retarded.

Now, if someone really pretty can just gain some weight AND play a retard. Well, good God. Give that lady a Nobel."

The Passion of the Liberal
By Ann Coulter

In the dozens and dozens of panic-stricken articles the New York Times has run on Mel Gibson's movie, "The Passion of the Christ," the unavoidable conclusion is that liberals haven't the vaguest idea what Christianity is. The Times may have loopy ideas about a lot of things, but at least when they write about gay bathhouses and abortion clinics, you get the sense they know what they're talking about.

But Christianity just doesn't ring a bell. The religion that has transformed Western civilization for two millennia is a blank slate for liberals. Their closest reference point is "conservative Christians," meaning people you're not supposed to hire. And these are the people who carp about George Bush's alleged lack of "intellectual curiosity."

The most amazing complaint, championed by the Times and repeated by all the know-nothing secularists on television, is that Gibson insisted on "rubbing our faces in the grisly reality of Jesus' death." The Times was irked that Gibson "relentlessly focused on the savagery of Jesus' final hours" – at the expense of showing us the Happy Jesus. Yes, Gibson's movie is crying out for a car chase, a sex scene or maybe a wise-cracking orangutan.

The Times ought to send one of its crack investigative reporters to St. Patrick's Cathedral at 3 p.m. on Good Friday before leaping to the conclusion that "The Passion" is Gibson's idiosyncratic take on Christianity. In a standard ritual, Christians routinely eat the flesh and drink the blood of Jesus Christ, aka "the Lamb of God." The really serious Catholics do that blood- and flesh-eating thing every day, the sickos. The Times has just discovered the tip of a 2,000-year-old iceberg.

But the loony-left is testy with Gibson for spending so much time on Jesus' suffering and death while giving "short shrift to Jesus' ministry and ideas" – as another Times reviewer put it. According to liberals, the message of Jesus, which somehow Gibson missed, is something along the lines of "be nice to people" (which to them means "raise taxes on the productive").

You don't need a religion like Christianity, which is a rather large and complex endeavor, in order to flag that message. All you need is a moron driving around in a Volvo with a bumper sticker that says "be nice to people." Being nice to people is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of Christianity (as opposed to other religions whose tenets are more along the lines of "kill everyone who doesn't smell bad and doesn't answer to the name Mohammed"). But to call it the "message" of Jesus requires ... well, the brain of Maureen Dowd.

In fact, Jesus' distinctive message was: People are sinful and need to be redeemed, and this is your lucky day because I'm here to redeem you even though you don't deserve it, and I have to get the crap kicked out of me to do it. That is the reason He is called "Christ the Redeemer" rather than "Christ the Moron Driving Around in a Volvo With a 'Be Nice to People' Bumper Sticker on It."

The other complaint from the know-nothing crowd is that "The Passion" will inspire anti-Semitic violence. If nothing else comes out of this movie, at least we finally have liberals on record opposing anti-Semitic violence. Perhaps they should broach that topic with their Muslim friends.

One Times review of "The Passion" said: "To be a Christian is to face the responsibility for one's own most treasured sacred texts being used to justify the deaths of innocents." At best, this is like blaming Jodie Foster for the shooting of Ronald Reagan. But the reviewer somberly warned that a Christian should "not take the risk that one's life or work might contribute to the continuation of a horror." So the only thing Christians can do is shut up about their religion. (And no more Jodie Foster movies!)

By contrast, in the weeks after 9-11, the Times was rushing to assure its readers that "prominent Islamic scholars and theologians in the West say unequivocally that nothing in Islam countenances the Sept. 11 actions." (That's if you set aside Muhammad's many specific instructions to kill non-believers whenever possible.) Times columnists repeatedly extolled "the great majority of peaceful Muslims." Only a religion with millions of practitioners trying to kill Americans and Jews is axiomatically described as "peaceful" by liberals.

As I understand it, the dangerous religion is the one whose messiah instructs: "[I]f one strikes thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also" and "Love your enemies ... do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you." The peaceful religion instructs: "Slay the enemy where you find him." (Surah 9:92).

Imitating the ostrich-like posture of certain German Jews who ignored the growing danger during Hitler's rise to power, today's liberals are deliberately blind to the real threats of violence that surround us. Their narcissistic self-image requires absolute solicitude toward angry savages plotting acts of terrorism. The only people who scare them are the ones who worship a Jew.

Guess Which Candidate Our Enemies Want to Lose in 2004?

BY JAMES LILEKS
c.2004 Newhouse News Service

Let's just be blunt: The North Koreans would love to see John Kerry win the election. The mullahs of Iran would love it. The Syrian Ba'athists would sigh with relief. Every enemy of America would take great satisfaction if the electorate rejects the Bush doctrine and scuttles back to hide under the U.N. Security Council's table. It's a hard question, but the right one: Which candidate does our enemy want to lose? George W. Bush.

And some conservatives will be happy to help, it seems.

Woe and gloom have befallen some on the right. Bush has failed to act according to The Reagan Ideal.

The actual Reagan may have issued an amnesty for illegals, but the Ideal Reagan would have done no such thing. So unless Bush packs freight cars full of gardeners and dishwashers and dumps them off at the Mexican border, some voters will just sit this one out.

The Ideal Reagan would have eliminated the National Endowment for the Arts; the actual Reagan proposed a $1 million increase in his final budget. But Bush increased NEA funding -- perhaps an attempt to placate people who wouldn't vote for him if he showed up in performance with Karen Finley and a can of Hershey's syrup. So angry conservatives might just sit this one out.

And if a Democrat takes office, and the Michael Moores and Rob Reiners and Martin Sheens crowd the airwaves on Nov. 3 to shout their howls of vindication? If the inevitable renaissance of Iraq happens on Kerry's watch, and the economy truly picks up steam in the first few years before the business cycle and Kerry's tax hikes kick in? If emboldened Islamist terrorists smell blood and strike again? Fine. Maybe the next Republican president will do everything they want.

Oh, sure, Bush is fine on the foreign affairs stuff, and yes, there's a partial-birth abortion law, and the tax cuts were nice, and come to think of it, Sept. 11 wasn't followed by blow after blow after blow, for some reason. The nation endures, at least at press time. But that's hardly enough. Where's that bill requiring 60-foot Ten Commandments monuments in every capitol rotunda? Let Kerry win. Teach the GOP a lesson, it will.

So both sides have elements that seem unserious about the defining issue of the day: the war. But the right's malcontents snipe from humid redoubts of Internet message boards. The left's biggest spokesmen are parading their delusions.

No less than Al Gore has practically accused the president of treason. In a Feb. 8 speech in Tennessee, Gore went on an alarming rant, performed almost in an arr-matey pirate voice. "He betrayed this country!" Gore bellowed. "He played on our fears. He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure dangerous to our troops, an adventure preordained and planned before 9/11 ever took place."

We've been manipulated into a state of fear, Gore shouted. Really. Which administration spent most of 1998 warning us about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, only to launch some missiles and walk away? Gore saw all the intel on WMDs. Gore was part of an administration that pushed for regime change because it viewed Saddam, correctly, as a danger to the region and to America. Does Gore think we don't remember everything Democrats said about Saddam and WMDs, when they felt responsible for the nation?

As for that state of fear, well, anyone out there feel afraid of Saddam today? Didn't think so.

Gore should give this speech at the convention. Why not? Why not stand up and give vent to all the poisons hatching in the muck? Why not tell America that Bush lied about everything, that he took the country to war for reasons he knew would be discredited, just so Halliburton could make another buck or two? It's what they seem to believe, after all. The delusions of their fringe have become articles of faith for the mainstream. Bush was AWOL! Bush knew! Bush lied! Bush never flosses! Skull and Bones! Plastic turkey!

At least we'll have a clear choice in November. Bush is serious about the war. The Democrats are serious about the war against Bush.

Tuesday, March 2, 2004

Storied Brewery club closes quietly
By DAVID MENCONI, Staff Writer

RALEIGH -- Given how dead things have been at the Brewery lately, it's fitting that the club's closing act was a private, quiet affair. After the long-lived nightspot shut down last week with no fanfare, owner Kenny Hobby oversaw the final load-out Thursday night, stripping the club to the walls.

"There's a lot more stuff in here than I thought there was gonna be," Hobby said Thursday night, surveying the beer signs, sound and light gear, pictures, posters and general detritus piled high. Even the bathroom mirrors were going.

"We've still got the attic to get through," Hobby added. "It's basically a junk room up there, and you can imagine what that's like after 20 years. Twenty years of memories."

While it's still hard to believe the Brewery is gone after so long, the end was not entirely unexpected. The club had been closed more often than it was open over the past few months, often staying dark even on weekends. Its final show was the rock band Strike Anywhere on Feb. 20.

As for what will occupy the space at 3009 Hillsborough St., that has yet to be determined.

"There are still some legal ramifications to work out, so we don't know yet," said Jim Mettrey of property owner Mettrey Commercial Properties.

Though never as prestigious as the larger Cat's Cradle in Carrboro, the Brewery still occupied an important place in the Triangle music community. It held about 300 people, wasn't too long on creature comforts and felt like a sauna during the summer months. But the Brewery was one of the best-sounding rooms in the area -- in part because of the close quarters.

"It looked bigger when it was crowded," production manager Jac Cain said Thursday as he lugged speakers off the stage. "It's only 35 feet from the stage to the soundboard."

The Brewery opened in 1983, the same year the Pier nightclub in Cameron Village closed, and provided the rock community in Raleigh with a center of gravity on Hillsborough Street. Bob Davis, a roadie/tour manager, was part of a crowd who would go there virtually every night when he was in town during the '80s and into the '90s.

"That was back when Hillsborough Street was still the happening place," Davis said. "I'd swing by to see whoever was playing at the Brewery, seven nights a week."

The Brewery was home base for multiple generations of local bands, including the Backsliders (who recorded a live album there in 1996) and the Woods. It was also home away from home for Hootie & the Blowfish, Georgia Satellites and other regional acts on their way up.

Jane's Addiction played the Brewery before vaulting to stardom with Lollapalooza in the early '90s. Blind Melon played a series of regular Sunday-night shows there in 1992, and rewarded the club with a platinum album plaque. The Cranberries played for a few dozen people at the Brewery mere months before becoming MTV stars. And Cain remembers Sheryl Crow playing the Brewery the week her first album came out in 1993.

"A drunk couple on their honeymoon were walking by, heard the music and came in," Cain said. "They were literally the only people in here."

But highlights have been fewer and farther between in recent years. The Brewery's last prime period was the mid-'90s with alternative-country bands Whiskeytown, the Backsliders and 6 String Drag. After that wave of bands ran its course, the Brewery struggled -- as did the rest of the live-music industry.

Nationally, the commercial rise of hip-hop and teen pop moved the mainstream's focus away from the sort of live-performance bands that played the Brewery. And locally, Raleigh's nightlife gravitated away from Hillsborough Street and toward downtown. Kings, Lincoln Theatre and other downtown clubs now serve the role the Brewery once filled.

"It was a good place and had a good run," Cain said. "But its time had come."