Opinion
 

'Passion' paints accurate picture

By Nathan Hoang

You can tell a rhinoceros that he's horny, but he won't care. The rhinoceros knows you're talking about its keratin horn, and nothing else.

But when a Catholic celebrity produces a movie about Christ, Jewish communities declare that the movie promotes anti-Semitism and negative feelings toward the Jews when, in fact, it is a movie that is meant to educate and move.

There have been countless movies about the Holocaust and the suffering brought upon the Jews by the Nazis. But Germans don't declare the movies anti-German. 

There have been countless movies about African slaves who are driven to death in cotton fields by their ruthless plantation owners. But whites don't declare the movies as anti-Caucasian. 

There have been countless movies about Pearl Harbor. But the Japanese don't declare the movie as anti-Japanese. That's because we know most of today's Germans weren't involved in the Holocaust, just as the white people of today did not own slaves, just as the most Japanese weren't involved in Pearl Harbor. 

The Passion of the Christ, like so many other movies, is a movie based on history. As history says, during the last days of Jesus, the Romans and the Jews executed him. Just as the Catholics had the Spanish Inquisition, just as the Protestants burned "witches." As in any other situation, history is history.

There have been countless movies about the life of Jesus Christ, but never has there been so much conflict as there has been about Mel Gibson's new movie. So what makes this situation different? Charleston Heston made numerous movies based on or related to the Bible, yet they never caught as much heat as this new movie.

Is it because in a time of social progress, the Christians are holding back? Jehovah's Witnesses tend to be the butts of jokes because of their perseverance, Mormons are picked on for their practices and Catholics are deemed as old-fashioned and too conservative for the new millennium.

The liberal media and society doesn't want to see Christianity spread. I have even been called a "screwed-up Christian." If I'm a "screwed-up Christian," then so be it. But that's what I believe, and it's who I am.

A movie produced and written by a Christian actor will not spark a holy crusade out of nowhere or inspire attempts of ethnic cleansing. The Passion of the Christ, very much like the Janet Jackson halftime show incident, has gotten too much reaction.

Hoang, an editorial writer for The Daily Cougar, 
can be reached via dccampus@mail.uh.edu.