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I DETEST THIS FILM ..WITH A PASSION
Christopher Hitchens

A FEW years ago, Mel Gibson got himself into an argument after uttering a series of crude remarks that were hostile to homosexuals.

Now he has made a film that principally appeals to the gay Christian sado-masochistic community: a niche market that hasn't been sufficiently exploited.

If you like seeing handsome young men stripped and tied up and flayed with whips, The Passion Of The Christ is the movie for you....

...Yesterday, as the movie opened, a Pentecostal church in Denver, Colorado, put up a big sign on its marquee saying: "Jews Killed The Lord Jesus." Nice going....

...Having secured a huge amount of free publicity in this way, and some very lucrative advance block bookings from Christian fundamentalist groups, Gibson now talks self-pityingly about how he has risked his fortune and his career, but doesn't care if he "never works again" because he's done it all for Jesus.

The clear message I get from that is that he'll be boycotted by sinister Hollywood Jews. So it's a win-win for him: big box office or celebrity martyrdom. With any luck, a bit of both. How perfectly nauseating.

In a widely publicised concession, Gibson said that he'd removed the scene where the Jewish mob cries out that it wants the blood of Jesus to descend on the heads of its children's children.

This very questionable episode - it is mentioned in only one of the four gospels - has in fact not been cut. Only the English subtitle has gone. (The film is spoken in Aramaic and Latin, though Roman soldiers actually spoke a dialect of Greek.)

So when the film is later shown, in Russia and Poland, say, or Egypt and Syria, there will be a ready-made propaganda vehicle for those who fancy a bit of torture and murder, with a heavy dose of Jew-baiting thrown in.

Gibson knows very well that this will happen, and he'll be raking it in from exactly those foreign rights to the film. ...