Correspondence
Correspondence POSTMODERN HISTORY IN "The Pomo Primary" (March 15), Andrew Ferguson, alas, missed a watershed "landmark" in politico-journalistic navel-gazing. It came after one of the...
...DOUGLAS W. RAE Yale University New Haven, CT CHANGE AGENTS REUEL MARC GERECHT'S "Going Soft on Iran" is spot-on when he questions the approach promoted by the so-called foreign policy realists (March 8...
...It certainly has not gotten any better since...
...Indeed, for the past quarter century, the fig-leaf policy of successive U.S...
...So it is unlikely that he feels he has altered his message...
...A few good Germans in Schindler's List didn't mean that all the Germans who were in that movie were pleasant...
...It came after one of the presidential debates in 1988...
...What's interesting is that when I talk with Christians who I know would be offended at anti-Semitism and who have seen The Passion of the Christ, they tell me sincerely that it was not anti-Semitic...
...He chose not to...
...It is frustrating that so many reliably adversarial commentators like Labash seem to be turning a blind eye to the anti-Semitic context within which Mel Gibson's movie was made...
...When the debate was over, reporters swarmed into the "spin room" and, for some bizarre reason, began interviewing each other on camera...
...administrations has turned out to be a miserable failure, serving only to prolong the suffering of the Iranian people and undermining America's pro-democracy pronouncements and its war on terror...
...I remember thinking, "This is not good...
...Gibson himself won't take a clear, unequivocal position on the matter...
...Gibson's father denies the Holocaust...
...He could have removed the spoken line entirely, but he didn't...
...DAVID C. IDEMA Staatsburg, NY URBANE SOCIETY HARRY SIEGEL'S well-written and otherwise fair-minded review of my recent book, City: Urbanism and its End (March 15), ends with a reference to "Douglas Rae's grand Utopian vision of the city as a monolithic social (and housing) 'project'"—this in contrast with Mayor Giuliani's "relatively prosaic goal of safe and civil streets...
...Gibson belongs to a schismatic branch of Catholicism that rejects Vatican II, the church council in which the Jews were absolved of guilt in Jesus' crucifixion.Gibson finds inspiration for the movie from Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich, a late-18th-century visionary nun who, in her visions, saw Jews with "hooked noses" and referred to Jews strangling Christian children to use their blood in rituals...
...I entertain no utopian vision for urban America, and insist on the view that cities work best when the nongovernmental forces of business and personal civility are at play, while grand plans formulated by government elites are not...
...This is incorrect...
...Under pressure, Gibson removed the subtitled translation of the line from his movie...
...I wonder...
...True, Iran's nuclear and terrorist programs will only cease when democracy flourishes in Iran, but how does one achieve a "regime change," if that's what Gerecht is proposing...
...The fact is that unless the United States shows the courage to rectify Bill Clinton's error in 1997 of blacklisting, as a goodwill gesture to Mohammad Khatami, the Iranian Mujahedeen Khalq, its Iran policy will remain in neutral...
...Remember that Gibson didn't want subtitles in his movie in the first place...
...But Gerecht's article leaves much to be desired when it comes to offering a concrete road map to democracy in Iran...
...I write about the tragic impact of public housing projects...
...ALI SAFAVI Near East Policy Research Alexandria, VA PASSION PLAY CERTAINLY THERE IS MORE CREDENCE to the anti-Semitism charge against Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ than Matt Labash acknowledges in "Passion and Popcorn" (March 8...
...Then, the coup de grace: The control room switched to a different camera, an overhead wide shot, and viewers were treated to the media filming the media filming the media interviewing the media...
...NOAM DWORMAN New York, NY...
...They have done such a good job at eliminating anti-Semitism in modern American religious discourse that traditional anti-Semitic themes no longer strike a chord among followers...
...Which is, I believe, to the credit of the teachings of modern American churches...
...The issue can't be neutralized just by pointing out that Gibson "infused his film with secondary sympathetic Jewish portraits," as Labash writes...
...Half of City is devoted to the success of informal governance, the other to the failure of social engineering carried forward by governmental elites...
...Whether pundits in Washington like it or not, the Mujahedeen Khalq is the element of change in Iran by virtue of its democratic, anti-fundamentalist Islamic ideology...
...Consider the line: "His blood be upon us and our children," which the Jews proclaim to Pilate in the Gospel of Matthew...
...A refusal to face the issue of Gibson's flirtation with anti-Semitism seems rampant throughout the conservative media...
Vol. 9 • March 2004 • No. 28
