Judas Wannabes

Olavo de Carvalho
O Globo, March 15th, 2003

On January 14th, Mel Gibson went to Bill O’Reilly’s program on Fox News to denounce the persecution he had been suffering since he had announced his intentions of filming the crucifixion of Our Lord Jesus Christ precisely as it is narrated in the Gospels. An openly Christian film was more than the Politbureau of Hollywood could stand: reporters and private detectives did not stop rummaging through his bank accounts and private life in search of raw material for some scandal.

Having found no skeleton in the closet of the star of “Braveheart”, the facts twisters went on to plan B: they whispered in the ears of a conservative rabbi, Marvin Hier, said to be a frequenter of the White House, that the new movie, “The Passion”, was somewhat anti-semitic. Loads of reporters and critics, among them the Jewish journalist Jeff Israely from Time, had read the script without noticing anything of the kind. All the rabbi knew was that an article in New York Times Magazine had described, correctly by the way, that Gibson is an ultraconservative Irish Catholic. But, even with so little ammo, Hier did not want to lose the opportunity to do some work for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, of which he is one of the founders. Quicker than lightning, he gave an interview to the agency Reuters in which, in spite of confessing not having seen the film and not even having read the article, he threw over Mel Gibson the most disturbing suspicions, from making anti-semitic propaganda to wanting to use the film to... revoke the decisions of the Concilium Vatican II!

The American media, despite its chronic leftism and sharp anti-Israelism, even covered the topic decently. But the Brazilian counterpart, which had not published one word of Gibson’s denunciation, promptly gave wide cover to Hier’s idiocies, implicitly presenting him as the unanimous expression of American-Jewish opinion. To make things worse, the incident became reinforced by an alarming prevision of an imminent “witch hunt” against the Hollywood stars that had taken part in the pro-Iraq marches. A real case of political persecution was thus covered under the dense layer of future speculation, while at the same time the victim was made out to be a bandit by the works of a witness that confessed to not know of anything against him.

The reader may be asking: why give so much importance to this despicable cheating of Third World and third league journalists, just one more incident among thousands? Has it not yet been proved that such creatures are just useful idiots, or at least aspire to be so when they grow up?

It is because the usefulness of their idiocy is, in this case, greater than even their bearers imagine.

Hier does not speak for the Jewish community. The most eloquent defender of Gibson in this case has been a Jewish writer, James Hirsen, from the Magazine Newsmax. The movie’s main actress, in the role of the Virgin Mary, is the Jewish Romanian Maia Morgenstern, who would deserve the Oscar for Lack of Attention if after all these months of work in “The Passion” she had not noticed in it the signs of anti-Semitism, if in fact they really existed.

But the rabbi himself is not a unanimity. He has been receiving heavy criticism from the Jews for refusing to use his influence in high circles in favor of Jonathan Pollard. Pollard is an American Jew, a Navy intelligence analyst, who once illegally passed to the Mossad data the American secret service had about chemical and bacteriological weapons made by Arab countries to be used against Israel. Being in trouble with the law, he ended up as a refugee in Tel-Aviv. Tons of petitions to three presidents still could not bring him back home. It is difficult to say if Pollard is a traitor or a hero. What is certain is that he is a hot potato in US-Israel relations and Hier is the last person who would want to hold it: he fears to be seen as annoying by the republican big fish, and his inaction would make him hateful to the thousands of fans of the exiled spy. Well, it so happens that the main political and cultural support for George W. Bush is the alliance between Jewish conservatives and Christians, already as old as many decades and stronger every day. Hier is the weakest link in this alliance because of his attitude towards the Pollard case. He becomes even more vulnerable since besides being a rabbi, he is also a man of show business: producer and script writer. He lives in an environment infested by fans of Saddam Hussein, the typical Martin Sheens and Sean Penns of the field. Imagine then why he was chosen to fry Mel Gibson’s reputation until it could be made a potato as hot as Jonathan Pollard. How wonderful, for the enemies of the US and of Israel, to be able to use a right-winged rabbi as a tool to spread separatism between Jews and Christians, threatening to weaken the conservative alliance at the very moment that the worldwide left is in an urgent need to sweep the topic “chemical and bacteriogical weapons” under the carpet. It is even cuter that it is made under the excuse of fighting anti-Semitism, while at the same time they have released the greatest wave of anti-Semitism ever seen in the world since the ’30s. And it is almost sublime that they show such devotion in protecting the Jewish community from the fearsome Mel Gibson, while at the same time, in the streets, they march against Sharon and Bush side to sidewitho the nazi leader David Duke.

And Mel Gibson? Gibson has merely played the biblical role of scapegoat in all this mess, with the difference that in the Bible the goat’s sacrifice was used to reconcile the community, while Gibson’s was planned to divide it.

Now, about the Brazilian journalists, with their traditional canine subservience to the ruling of the posh leftist fashion from Hollywood and New York, we cannot even say that they played the role of Judas. They are, at best, aspirers to Judas. For Judas, at least, knew to whom he was doing the dirty job.

Translation: Fábio Lins - Proof Reading: Jacqueline Baca