It's been a week now since Mel Gibson's drunken, viciously anti-semitic tirade. With the Nine Days' ban on listening to music over in a few hours, I have listened to, and read, many opinions on the topic from both ends of various spectra, religious, political and social. The most reasonable summation of the whole sordid affair, in my humble opinion, comes from Dennis Prager.
In essence, Prager argues that Gibson clearly harbored anti-Semitic thoughts, the voicing of which require condemnation. At the same time, Prager continued, Gibson has never, as far as we know, acted on his feelings. To those who say that "The Passion Of The Christ" proves to the contrary, Prager responds that while Jews understandably found the movie disturbing since it displays their religion's ancestors as the wrongdoers, you have to look at the movie from the perspective of Gibson and the movie's gentile audience. They saw the movie not as the Jews committing wrong but as Jesus suffering and dying for their sins. The identity of Jesus' killers was secondary. The proof, according to Prager, is in the pudding-there has been no anti-Semitic act of hatred, violent or otherwise, that resulted from the movie.
I myself have not seen the movie, but those whom I know who have seen the movie did not walk away from it with fear of persecution or even disgust that would come with experiencing an anti-Semitic work. At the end of the day, as disgusting as I find Gibson's statements to be, they don't scare me. They were wrong and Gibson has unequivocally apologized for them. Given his track record, which has been devoid of any anti-Semitic actions, I accept his apologies, albeit with an eye on the future to see whether he has put his hateful views behind. Most importantly, Gibson is an entertainer who doesn't seem to have any power to put his views into action.
On the flip side, sadly lost in the Gibson kerfuffle have been Congressman John Dingell's statements and actions regarding the Israel-Hizbollah conflict. On July 18, the United States Congress passed a resolution condeming Hizbollah for initiating the conflict. Only eight members of Congress opposed the measure. Dingell, along with fellow Michigan representatives John Conyers and Carolyn Kilpatrick (Kwame's mother) ,was among the eight dissenters. This past week, a local reporter asked Dingell if he was taking sides between Israel and Hizbollah. Dingell responded that he was not.
While Dingell does not appear to be an anti-Semite, his statements and actions, which you could label as either moral cowardice or mere pandering to his Muslim constituents in Dearborn, are startling. After all, Dingell is a senior member of this nation's legislative branch. Hizbollah is an organization that the government, under administration of both parties, has officially named a terrorist entity. It is an organization that killed 241 members of our military, a terrorist action for which it has never made amends. According to this morning's Detroit Free Press, "Hizbollah has two fundamental goals: the destruction of the Jewish nation of Israel and the creation of an Islamic nation in Lebanon modeled on Iran." Besides supporting the only democracy and true ally his country has in the Middle East, Hizbollah's stated desire to be another Iran should be alarming enough for Dingell.
Call Gibson a hater, but that's where it ends for him. His opinions may be despicable, but he is at the end of the day just a guy who makes movies. Dingell is someone who can make laws and set policy. You tell me which one is worse.
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Here's the quotes from that interview with Devin Scillian:
SCILLIAN: [S]ome would suggest that if -- even though there are obviously a lot of issues with Lebanon and with the Palestinian cause wrapped up in this, that this largely boils down to Israel against Hezbollah, and as Hezbollah is a group that the United States has deemed a terrorist organization, that there's only one side for the Americans to come down on in this fight.
DINGELL: Well, we don't -- first of all, I don't take sides for or against Hezbollah or for or against Israel.
SCILLIAN: You're not against Hezbollah?
DINGELL: I happen to be -- no, I happen to be -- I happen to be against violence. I think the United States has to bring a resolution to this matter. Now, I condemn Hezbollah, as does everybody else, for the violence. But I think that we've got to talk to them, and if we don't -- if we don't get ourselves in a position where we can talk to both sides and bring both sides together, the killing and the blood let [sic] is going to continue.
It seems as though something got lost in the translation. Thank goodness for the internet, which of course was invented by Al Gore.
Nothing was lost in translation. Scillian gave Dingell the opportunity to condemn Hizbollah but the congressman didn't take the easy bait. Saying that you are against violence and that we need to talk is the emobdiment of the wrong headedness of moral equivalence. Where one side in a conflict is right and one is wrong, the morally correct thing to do is to call it as such.
Don't get me wrong. I don't think that Dingell is an anti-Semite. I also think that the state could do much worse than having him as a representative. I merely question which of the two recent incidents is really more cause for concern for Jews.
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