My first item back couldn’t be anything other than Mel Gibson, could it?

David Klighoffer, a [political] conservative Jew, wrote a column in the Los Angeles Times (reserved here) attacking the notion, flung against Mel Gibson, that showing any Jewish involvement in the death of Jesus is anti-Semitism. What makes his column new and worth noting is that he details several Jewish sources, including the Talmud and Maimonides, that support the Gospels (though not modern biblical scholarship, which worships the god anti-anti-semitism or at least the god Getmel) in contending that the Jewish leaders of 1st century Jerusalem and some of their followers played a role in the death of Jesus of Nazareth.

I well understand, to a point, moral discomfort about this fact of history among both Christians and Jews, given what some Christians have done under the cry of “Christ-killer.” Certainly, in principle, Gibson *could* have used the Crucifixion narrative to make an anti-Semitic movie. The Times printed some letters to the editor in response, but I must say that I don’t think any really laid a glove on Klinghoffer. And how could they? I’ve said this here before, but I fail to see why the Jewish authorities of the time, or any Jew to this day thinking about truth rather than Christian anti-Semitism, shouldn’t or wouldn’t have sought the execution of such a rank blasphemer as someone who would claim to be the Son of God, but wasn’t; who would ride into Jerusalem on a donkey with his followers waving palms, but who wasn’t the King of the Jews.