Undoubtedly the racial discourse of Gibson's film, insofar as it announces neo-Barbarism, apologises for power and defends the Divine Corporation, really employs 'the Jews' in this Orientalist discourse, generating meaning mostly now as crypto-Arabs fashioned after Thomas Friedman's creation 'The Arabs,' our new archetypal menace, the fungible enemy horde, because his project involved a fetish of authenticity which would not allow him to rewrite the underlying material to portray them as actual Arabs outright. If the neocons themselves hadn't been relentlessly ringing the alarm bells of anti-Semitism for years now, 'the Jews' in The Passion might even have been commonly read this way, as stand-ins for fellow Semites of Orientalist construction whom the neocons have helped to create as a satanic enemy even while all this time keeping 'The Jews' as a Semitic Other on life-support in the aftermath of its fall from fashion with the discovery of the extent of Nazi crimes.
Now in Oscar season, having calmed down and recovered from their unpleasant surprise, neocons may begin to notice how much Gibson's film relies on the enormous output of Israel-apology - not Friedman's alone, though he has contributed enormously to the formation of the holy land archetypes at work - for its images and political paradigm, and that this 'rabble' which is narratively 'Jewish' actually manifests the neo-barbarian neo-cons and liberals own fictitious 'The Palestinians' with some exactitude.
A dirty, incomprehensible, howling crowd in the holy land which acts like a single organism; this organism is psychically sick; its sickness expresses itself as an obsessive cult of death; it is relentlessly rebelling against a foreign occupation for no reason at all, out of sheer savage perversity, for the occupier is morally superior and fit to dominate; its rebellion makes the occupier act cruelly, out of necessity, and against his own will and nature; it is because of its rebellion that the occupier kills innocents; it engages in the sacrifice of its own innocents, Jesus the Jew, its own violence manipulating the occupier to violence necessary to contain and pacify its beastly intifada; it's spokespeople never tell the truth
('Palestinians are liars' Colonel Miri Eissen told Paula Zahn on television, 'Israel doesn't lie'); its leader is a ruthless, power-hungry, corrupt deceiver; it has nothing really to complain of but is overflowing with hate for its betters, and 'dancing in the streets' when they suffer; it's uncontrollable and insatiable; the basically decent European trying to deal reasonably with it and satisfy its demands is at his wit's end; the children among it are especially demonic and dangerous; its ruling principle, Satan, lurking about within it, is portrayed as a woman in a hijab wearing no eyebrows; one or two individuals among it maybe are not evil but they are so exceptional we recognize them as saints in the act of proving sainthood by deserting the tribal faith for Christianity and implicitly, loyalty to Rome.
The resemblance of Gibson's rabble to the Israeli-apologists invention 'The Palestinians' is really striking, even more than to anything from the classic European anti-Semitic tradition. 'The Jews' were never portrayed by Nazis as a 'mob' out in the public square, but as a shadowy enemy presence, infiltrating slowly and steadily, cautious and cunning, rats scurrying by night in niches and nooks but by day sinister others successfully masquerading as peace-loving, integrationist, and harmless. Classic anti-Semitism - which Gibson's film also employs for the roles apart from the mob, and which he has exhibited personally in his whining about persecution - portrays Jews integrating, non-violently, while working through their conspiracies and secret worldwide financial channels to bring down the 'host' society. Invisible parasites, seducing society (not badgering it or overthrowing its rulers through open rebellion) to evil and degradation through decadence, art and literature, money, media, requiring flushing out and extermination if the host society is not to sicken and be overtaken by them. Never a wild howling angry mob whom a sufficient number of Cossacks or tear gas could disperse, as the Jerusalemite crowd appears in The Passion.
'The Jews' of anti-Semitic tradition are stateless, a minority, a parasite in Europe. The portrayal of Jews in Schindler, as Art Spiegelman noted, is quite close to the anti-Semitic tradition - the Jewish seductress, the financiers doing business in the church - far closer than the totality found in Passion. The hideous crowd in The Passion is an indigenous population in Palestine under foreign occupation.
That is unmistakably a crowd of Palestinians in the imagination of Israel apology, but the current 'inter-semitic clash' which identifies The Palestinian as the diametric opposite of The Jew disguises this Orientalist product from popular perception. In the anti-Semitism from which Caiaphas comes directly, such a crowd of Jews is unthinkable, even disruptive to the coherence of the collective slander. Even medieval European and 19th c. Russian anti- Semitism portrayed Jews as virtually unseen, committing crimes clandestinely, at night, whisperers and plotters, not the dirty thuggish nihilistic insurrectionary rabble which here is Gibson's manufactured enemy humanity. There is no precedent for these images of Gibson's Jewish mob from the anti-Semitic tradition, but in the years leading up to the filming of Passion, and especially during the filming, there have been thousands of precedents for these images in Israel-apology and US-apology in the mainstream media.
What Gibson's film's images and sounds owe directly to the media-product which showed, over and over and over and over and over, the exulting bloody-handed young man and the cheering crowd as the Israeli soldier's dead body fell from the window of a Palestinian police station oughtn't be so obstinately ignored in the interpretation of this film. Mel Gibson hasn't been living in a cave. Like Schindler, passion was shot during a US-client's military aggression and US direct military aggression (Afghanistan, less televised) and there are traces of these aggressions and their apologies all over his film just as there are traces of the dismantling of the FRY and its apology all over Schindler. There is nothing in the Gospels whatsoever to have inspired Gibson's portrait of humanity which so resembles that of CNN. Gibson has exploited the massive accumulated power and signification of Israel-apology for the creation of a convincingly anti-human humanity, a humanity that isn't capable of self-control or self-government, requiring the strictest possible control from above, a humanity incapable of decency or democracy, a humanity whose mindless bloodlust is best satisfied and exploited for profit.
'The Palestinians' of Israel- apology generalises to and coheres with 'The Arabs' of broader US- apology; both are very present in Gibson the Holy Ghost's manifesto of neo-Barbarism. The Semitic Other neocons desire and fashion for their new crusade in Iraq and the continuing cleansing of Eretz Israel are borrowed all but whole by Gibson, who has never been an original or imaginative filmmaker and who could scarcely be expected to make anything more than a patchwork of what he's already seen on teevee. Sooner or later, the frenzied neocon apologists for this film will discover this borrowing, and the occult US-apology and Israel-apology that this film also is, in addition to everything else, as striking as its undeniable anti-Semitism, and announce that there is no moral equivalence between defaming fully European pseudo-Semites and protecting humanity from real ones. The real anti-Semitism and Israel-apology and US-apology of neo-barbarism are hand in hand, of course, everywhere they go, from the column of Thomas Friedman in The New York Times to Opus Dei.
