Thursday, February 05, 2004

From an article at the ADF's website co-written by Abe Foxman, which was also printed this week in the New York Daily News:
We have urged Gibson to consider adding to the movie a postscript with him coming on screen at the end to implore his viewers not to let the film turn some toward a passion of hate.
Ah yes, those roving bands of murderous Christians might go out on the loose.

A collegue of mine interviewed the Orthodox Rabbi Daniel Lapin on this subject a few weeks ago. I love what Lapin said:
[M]any people have raised the specter of anti-Jewish violence as a result of the movie, and I think this is a complete red herring and I’ll tell you why. It’s a red herring because in the entire history of hundreds of years of American-Jewish life, not a single Jew has ever been murdered or mugged or robbed or raped by a Christian on his way home from church on Sunday morning. That’s not what happens in America. When Jews and other law-abiding people are attacked and assaulted and endure violence, this is always inflicted upon them by conscienceless hooligans raised in an utterly secular atmosphere in which the words “thou shalt not...” were never ever heard....
Lapin also elucidated the threat posed by Christians to those like Foxman and the secular fundamentalists at the ADL:
The threat is that you could, possibly, make Roe v. Wade go away. You could, possibly, stop homosexual marriage. You could, possibly, lower taxation and lower the size of government, because nothing threatens the body politic of what has become the Jewish communities’ public voice as much as the growing power of Christian conservatism.

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