J-Pod, who is going to be known as Jew-Pod soon if he doesn’t arrest his descent into an Andrew Sullivan-like spiral wherein everything from alpha to omega is viewed through an obssesively monomaniacal lens, informs us when hatred is acceptable on NRO:
Mel Gibson is an anti-Semite, which means he hates Jews, which means Jews should hate him, which means I hate him and means I hope nobody goes to see Apocalypto and everybody who paid $10 for Passion of the Christ will demand his money back and if they do a special DVD edition of Chicken Run, they will replace Mel’s stinking, drunken, cop-insulting voice with the voice of Joey Buttafuoco.
Now, keep in mind that this is the same guy who only three weeks ago announced his hatred of the French for their treacherous failure to declare war on Hezbollah over their kidnapping of a French “citizen” who was serving in a foreign army. (The IDF, to be specific). So, if it’s right for Podhoretz to hate Mel Gibson for his hatred of Jews, are not Christians compelled by his logic to hate Jews like Abe Foxman, who declares the Catholic Church to be the “arch-enemy of the Jews”? Should they not also hate the organization which embraces a leader holding such views, the ironically named Anti-Defamation League? Are not the French and every French-American now correct to publicly declare their hatred of Podhoretz the Younger himself?
Of course, one can’t expect too much of P the Y, as his dearth of analytical ability is revealed here, twice over:
I made a joke earlier about how a Jew is as likely to be a Shiite sheikh as a Malibu cop. Oops. Turns out Mel Gibson’s arresting officer is Jewish. Which actually makes Mel’s remarks even worse.
No, it actually makes what had previously been completely inexplicable to everyone rather more comprehensible. People would have been similarly bewildered if Mel Gibson had gone off on “fucking niggers” while drunkenly ranting at a white cop, or, alternatively, if it had been a male officer addressed as “sugar tits”. (Insert joke about donut-eating cops here….) The fact that the arresting officer was, in fact, a Jew, makes Gibson’s anti-Jewish rant far less insane and indicates that he was primarily pissed off at a Jew in particular rather than totally unhinged about Jews in general.
It will be interesting to learn if publicly releasing the drunken rantings of individuals being arrested is standard operating procedure or if the Jewish police officer decided to act provocatively in letting the whole world know that someone had called him names.
In any event, here’s the more significant point that all of the media commentators currently indulging in the vapors seem to be avoiding. If Jews don’t run Mel’s world, then why are so many people suddenly declaring that his long career as a movie star and film director are now finished. To me, such responses would seem to indicate that Gibson’s anti-semitism has a basis in fact rather than in psychological problems.
Being an openly pro-Israel evangelical Christian, I don’t share Mel’s antipathy for Jews. However, I also don’t share the idea, held by many of my media counterparts, that Israel and every individual Jew are permanently immune from criticism by virtue of their Jewishness. It is a pity that so many commentators feel this way, because as Podhoretz’s ever-more-embarrassing rantings demonstrate, an absence of criticism is the surest way to intellectual irrelevance.
NRO has been so reliably and remarkably wrong over the last year that I’m beginning to think I may have to move them from Day Trips to Target-Rich Environments.