Letter of the Week is by Paul Gottfried, Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College, and author of The Conservative Movement, Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory, After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy. Professor Gottfried’s new book is The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium.–ILANA

Ilana,
This commentary, “One Man’s ‘Malady,’ Another Man’s Fetish,” is entirely on target. Gibson’s stupid remarks while under the influence are grist for the mills of the leftist social engineers and coercive anti-fascists who run our cultural industry. Although Foxman may care about Jewish women who fall victim to Arab terrorists, he cares much less about such embarrassments than he does about the opportunity to play up the anti-Semitic faux pas of an avowedly conservative Catholic, who dared to make a film on the crucifixion.
By the way, the Passion, which I did see, was not only unbelievably gory but totally implausible. It is impossible for any human being, outside of the Catholic iconographic imagination, to endure so much suffering and blood loss and to survive for an entire day. A German Protestant friend who saw the movie thought it was the greatest advertisement for the Puritans that he had witnessed. The Reformation did away with such gory depictions, together with most other depictions, of religious figures. Watching the Passion was like revisiting a Sicilian shrine that I once stumbled upon in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

—Paul

P.S. I’ve always considered Gibson to be a bit of a loud-mouthed exhibitionist, and his movies have been anything but consistently rightwing. Remember the movie he played in with Danny Glover, in which American agents are trying to foil the machinations of powerful Nazi drug-dealers based in apartheid South Africa?