No, I don’t mean Mel Gibson’s ’The Passion of Christ’.

While talk radio natters on about the possible anti-semitism of Gibson’s movie, Joel Rosenberg reports on this particlarly vile movie entitled ’Al-Shatat,’ ’The Diaspora’. This 30 part mini-series was produced by Syrian TV and aired in the middle-east last year during Ramadam. The title of Rosenberg’s article is ’A Vicious, Anti-Semitic Film’.

One excerpt from the article: In Episode Six of the Syrian film, a group of rabbis and other Jews in a Romanian ghetto gather to torture and kill a man found guilty of marrying a non-Jewish woman. As the man screams in agony, the head rabbi instructs his fellow Jews: "You hold his nose shut. You, open his mouth with tongs. You pour lead into his mouth. You cut off his ears. You stab his body with a knife before the lead kills him. This is a sacred Talmudic court; if any of you fails in his mission I will try you just like this criminal." The men follow the Rabbi’s orders.

Rosenberg concludes his article with this observation: Those Jewish leaders attacking The Passion are thus making a serious strategic error. They’re crying wolf, and hurting their own cause by pointing to anti-Semitism where it doesn’t exist and thus distracting attention from real and rising evils where they do. Moreover, by attacking a film in which a Jewish person is portrayed as the Savior of all mankind, they’re needlessly insulting and alienating millions of Bible-believing Christians, the very people most supportive of the right of all Jews — and the Jewish state of Israel — to exist in peace and security.

Like the earlier post on George Will’s article, Rosenberg notes especially the rise of anti-jewish sentiment and activities in Europe. One observer believes that anti-semitism is as rampant in Europe today as it was in Germany in the 1930s.