The reaction to the Mel Gibson movie, The Passion, has been passionate, diverse, and on occasion downright strange in the Ummah. It ranges from wild approval for revealing the Jews as murderers of God's Prophets (in spite of the fact that the Quo'ran holds that Jesus wasn't crucified) to an allegory about the sufferings of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians, to this rather encouraging bit of self reflection, from the Saudi family mag:
Hani Naqshabandi, editor in chief of the Saudi family magazine Sayyidaty, criticized the notion of the Jews' extraordinary powers: "The real irritation in the film is that it revealed a lie that we, the Arabs, tell ourselves everyday.
This lie is that we are hated in the world because the Jews control Hollywood, the film industry, and the entertainment industry in America. We say that this control has distorted the Arabs' image everywhere, causing us to be hated by everyone. However, 'The Passion of the Christ' has revealed the exact opposite: It revealed that we are hated in the world because we hate each other and we don't know how to conduct our business… The Jews have nothing to do with it at all. They are innocent of the accusation of harming our image in the world… If the Jews had ultimate control over Hollywood and what happens there, as our fathers, grandfathers, writers, and books say, a film against them would not be produced by the hub of the world's film industry…""I am not saying that they [the Jews] have no impact or influence. They do indeed, but not as we think or claim, and not as we imagined when we accused the Jews, Hollywood, and the Zionist lobby here and there for our failure to communicate with others. This is not a defense of the Jews or a promotion for the film, but an attempt to reveal that we must stop accusing others for our mistakes… We shouldn't make Hollywood and the Jews the excuse for our backwardness. It goes deeper than that…" (from MEMRI)
This is good, isn't it? Well, sort of?
Posted by Demosophist at April 24, 2004 02:38 PM | TrackBack