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Mel Gibson, a devout Catholic, produced the film "The Passion of Christ ", which followed very closely the Gospels' account of the last days of Christ. But Jewish groups didn't like the idea and protested. A number of Jewish leaders, including Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League denounced the movie. The fear is that the movie will fuel anti-Semitism as the Gospels implied that Jewish authorities were responsible for the death of Jesus. Read Here Rabbi Tovia Singer's "shoot the messenger if you don't like the message " comments, and HERE for Robert Novak's " No Anti-semitism" comments.
"I think it's meant to just tell the truth. I want to be as truthful as possible," Gibson said. Gibson reportedly spent $25 million of his own money on the film, which is in Aramaic and Latin.
Pastors are encouraging churchgoers to attend the movie (it reportedly will get an R rating), and evangelical leaders are creating marketing campaigns to tie into "The Passion of the Christ." To them, the film is an opportunity to explain their faith. "It's the greatest evangelism tool to come along in years - maybe 2,000 years," says Mark Brown, spokesman for the American Tract Society. Read here for more... and Here and Here. For more on Churches' support for Mel Gibson's film, read HERE, and HERE, and HERE, and HERE and HERE on Catholic.net website.
Contrast this controversy with THIS issue (...and read Here and HERE for more).
David Kay, who resigned as head of Bush's team to hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, said that he did not believe that any stockpiles of such weapons ever existed. He did not believe Iraq possessed large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons. "I don't think they existed," Mr Kay said. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last Gulf War and I don't think there was a large-scale production programme in the 90s." "I think we have found probably 85% of what we're going to find." Read Here for more... Also read HERE "A History Of Lies: WMD, Who Said What and When ?"
MUST READ ARTICLE !! Iraq: In an exclusive interview, repentant Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara breaks his silence on Iraq: He says the United States is making the same mistakes all over again . He was deeply frustrated to see history repeating itself. "The United States is today the strongest power in the world, politically, economically and militarily, but I do not believe, with one qualification, that it should ever, ever use that power unilaterally -- the one qualification being the unlikely event we had to use it to defend the continental U.S., Alaska or Hawaii." Mr. McNamara said it is particularly upsetting to see that the White House administration has ignored or failed to heed key recommendations coming from military officers on the ground in Iraq -- a crucial and oft-repeated mistake in Vietnam. Read here for more....
A car bomb exploded on Saturday in Khaldiyah, a town west of Baghdad, killing three American soldiers and injuring six soldiers and several Iraqi civilians. Two other American soldiers were killed earlier Saturday in a roadside bombing near Fallujah. The latest deaths raised to 512 the number of American service members who have died since the United States and its allies launched the Iraq war. Read Here for more......
Ahmad Chalabi, one of Washington's staunchest allies on Iraq's interim Governing Council, on Friday added to Washington's difficulties with its exit strategy from Baghdad by joining calls for direct elections before the country returns to self-rule. Read here for more...
As the world's foremost advocate of democracy, the United States is trying its best to avoid a one-person-one-vote in Iraq -- at least for this year. The irony is not lost on Shiite followers of Iraq's most influential cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who question why the United States agitates for the ballot box around the world but not in Iraq. Read here for more... and Here
Two Halliburton Co. officials accepted up to $6 million in kickbacks from a Kuwaiti company that was awarded contracts to supply U.S. troops in Iraq, according to a newspaper report.The two employees, who have been fired, worked for Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root in Kuwait, the same division of the company involved in a highly scrutinized gasoline contract. Read Here for more....
Colin Powell now says that it is actually an "open question" whether or not the Iraqis had stocks of weapons of mass destruction before the war. Read here for more...
Amidst a bribery scandal, pressure is mounting for Ariel Sharon to resign. Read here for more....
Jews opposing the Israeli government's policies face intimidation and harassment via email and on the internet from fellow-Jews. One came from a rabbi in New York, informing Deborah Fink, a singer and music teacher living in London, and who is Jewish: "Your soul, my dear, is petrified and lost." Another said, menacingly: "Hitler killed the wrong Jews." Yet another - ostensibly from a Jewish doctor of medicine in the US - elaborated on the Holocaust theme. "Too bad Hitler didn't get your family," it said. "With six million Jews dieing [sic] 60 year [sic] ago it's a shame scum like you somehow managed to survive." Read here for more...
Why has Tom Hurndall's killer been charged when nothing has happened to Rachel Corrie's killer? Rachel Corrie , an American, was crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer in the Rafah refugee camp about a month before Hurndall was shot there. Tom Hurndall, a British, was shot in the head by Israeli sniper fire nine months ago while shepherding Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip out of the line of fire.
Tom Hurndall
According to the Hurndall family, the only reason the soldier who shot him has been charged is because of pressure applied by the family. Hurndall's father is an attorney.He went to Rafah shortly after the shooting and compiled an extensive dossier of eyewitness affidavits, forensics reports, photographs and other relevant information. This dossier was put before the British foreign secretary in a way that made it very difficult to ignore. Ultimately, the British government went to bat for Hurndall, an unarmed British civilian killed by an Israeli soldier under the impression that he could shoot with impunity.
Rachel Corrie
Rachel Corrie's parents are not lawyers. In addition, they were told by members of the Washington state congressional delegation and State Department officials that if they quietly played along, justice for their daughter would ultimately be achieved. So far, all that has emerged is a non-credible Israeli military report claiming that 1) Corrie was not run over by a bulldozer and 2) even if she had been, the driver could not have seen her. These statements are contradicted respectively by the autopsy report and multiple eyewitness reports. Read HERE for more..
The practice of "Google bombing" is gaining momentum as political webloggers realise they can manipulate the results of Google, the top-ranked search site, to make a satirical point. The first victim was President George Bush, who found last year that his official White House website biography came top of Google's results whenever someone typed in the phrase "miserable failure". The online tussle has raised fears that the usefulness of the search engine may be harmed by internet users attempting to distort its results. Read here for more...
Russia: In what appeared to be yet another blow in the legal assault on oil major Yukos, the chairman of the board of the company's Kuibyshev refinery was arrested on charges of tax evasion, the company said Thursday. Rafail Zainullin was detained on charges of being instrumental in the refinery's failure to pay 67 million rubles ($2.3 million)in taxes in 1999. He was the director of the refinery from 1997 to 2001, after which he became chairman of the company's board. Read here for more....
ASIA: Bird flu could be "worse than Sars", if it mutates so it can spread between humans, experts have warned. Three deaths in Vietnam have been linked to the disease, which is affecting poultry across Asia. Vietnam and Thailand are the only countries this year where avian influenza has been passed onto humans. Asia is on a region-wide health alert, with governments slaughtering millions of chickens to contain outbreaks in six countries: Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. Read here and here for more....
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