Who hates Jews more: The drunk guy who slurrily cursed them and then apologized, or the guy who shot five Jews, one fatally? You don’t have to decide — the media has done it for you, according to a column by Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe.
Jacoby said the Mel Gibson anti-Semitic tirade turned up 888 hits on a Nexis search, while the story of Naveeq Haq’s attack with an automatic weapon on the Jewish League of Seattle received coverage in only 236 stories. Jacoby asks, Why the disparity?
No doubt part of the answer is that Gibson is a celebrity, and that “The Passion,” his 2004 movie about the crucifixion, was criticized by many as a revival of the infamous anti-Semitic motif of Jews as Christ-killers. Gibson, who belongs to a traditionalist Catholic sect, was already suspected of harboring ill will toward Jews. His crude remarks on July 28 confirmed it, and pushed the subject back into the spotlight. But if previous behavior and religious belief explain the burst of interest in the Gibson story, they only deepen the question of why the Seattle bloodshed was played down. After all, Haq is not the first example of what scholar Daniel Pipes has called “Sudden Jihad Syndrome,” in which a seemingly nonviolent Muslim erupts in a murderous rampage.
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If the Catholic Gibson’s nonviolent bigotry is a legitimate subject of media scrutiny, all the more so is the animus that spurs Muslims like Haq and the others to jihadist murder. As The New York Sun asked the other day, how many more Haqs must erupt in a homicidal rage before we open our eyes “to the possibility that they are part of a war in which understanding the enemy is a prerequisite for victory?”
I understand where you are coming from. Ive been a fan of Mel Gibson for years but with his ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva telling the world today she feared that he might kill her during a fight they had in the news today its hard to know what to think. Anyways good post.