International Political Will

Part of the reason I like political comedians, like Jon Stewart or Bill Maher, is because they often use humor to expose truths.

Bill Maher’s documentary Religulous looks at extremism and its literal interpretations of scripture. He clearly is attempting to get viewers to reevaluate their beliefs and abandon religious extremism. Maher bemoans religion as unfounded fairy tales, but he does so with the same intolerance and biases from the past that he accuses his opponents of.

He picks on the obvious targets – homophobia, creationism, apocalyptic prophesy, John Smith, religious violence, and even contraptions that circumnavigate Judaism’s Sabbath rules. And yes, it’s entertaining.

But, like every other media production, Maher’s critique stems from conventional assumptions, attacking Christianity and Islam while giving Judaism’s more controversial aspects a free pass.

Despite filming parts of the movie in Israel, Maher completely ignored the right-wing Jewish settler movement. These settlers often incite or perpetrate violence against Arabs because they believe that their scripture promised Jews the state of Israel.

The only controversial Jew that Maher did interview was one of the ultra-orthodox rabbis that attended Iran’s conference for Holocaust deniers.

The choice of the rabbi to use in his film – one who denies the Holocaust – hints at the reason why Judaism is often off limits. Collective Western guilt over allowing six million Jews to be murdered means that any contemporary criticism of Judaism is off-limits. We seem to have an unwritten rule that the media must portray modern Jews in the same historical role they played during World War II – as victims.

Maher’s decision to ignore fundamental Judaism is part of our aversion to objectivity whenever the topic includes Jews or Israel. To be publicly critical of Israel or Judaism – no matter the context – is akin to aligning oneself with the Nazis. It obstructs any real debate, and – in Maher’s case – means Judaism’s violent fundamentalists are off-limits (while Christianity and Islam are appropriate targets).

The failure of Religulous to be objective illustrates why Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, Inglourious Basterds, was so ground-breaking. Tarantino’s movie reinterprets the past by ignoring conventional assumptions and liberating Jews from victimhood. [SPOILER ALERT]

Inglourious Basterds follows a group of Allied soldiers during World War II in Europe – comprised of several Jews – that kills Nazis (in true Tarantino fashion: violently). They inadvertently combine forces with a young Jewish woman who lures the Nazi high command – including Hitler himself – into her movie theater. She sets fire to the theater, with everyone locked inside, to exact revenge for the death of her family. Meanwhile, the Jewish soldiers use their machine guns to mow down the frantic crowd of Nazis trying to escape the flames. In an odd cinematic twist, one soldier even riddles Hitler’s body with dozens of bullets.

But it’s the poetic laughter of the young Jewish theater owner as the Nazis burn to death, and the expressions of sweet revenge on the Jewish soldiers’ faces as they shoot Nazi men and women, that really stands out. When was the last time you saw a movie with vengeful Jews with gratifying smirks pumping lead into Hitler’s head?

Tarantino ventures into new territory and creates an entirely new paradigm. He portrays Jews in an authentically human light, allowing viewers to experience emotions and feelings that normally are considered taboo when it comes to World War II-era Jews.

In the movie, the Jews are empowered, vengeful, and violent – human traits that are shared among all people. Conventional culture seems to forget that the Jewish victims of the Holocaust are just that – people – and have the same human emotions, desires, and faults as the rest of us. They are subject to feelings of revenge and capable of perpetrating violence just like anyone else.

Obviously sharing a penchant for violence isn’t the point – but seeing people as human instead of infallible victims can help open up objective analysis of contemporary events, creating new starting points from which to interpret history. Rabbi Marc Gopin, author of Holy War, Holy Peace, thinks reinterpretation of our past can resolve conflicts by using religion instead of trying to refute it.

Consider Judeo-Christian scripture: it prophesizes that the apocalypse and the coming of the Messiah can only happen if Jews and/or Christians rebuild the temple in Jerusalem that was destroyed in 70 AD. Muslims – who built the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the same site in 685 AD to mark where the prophet Muhammad met with God, Moses, and Jesus – obviously think otherwise.

In Gopin’s book, he proposes an alternative reading of apocalyptic scripture. Gopin says (paraphrased in my words):

Imagine this: the Messiah returns to Earth and walks up to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Jews, Christians, and Muslims gather round, all expecting the Messiah to pick a side so that they can kill each other in the final war of Armageddon. They figure that once the Messiah chooses a side, the first order of business will be to tear down the mosque and build the new temple.

But instead, the Messiah looks up at the golden dome of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and says: “Beautiful temple. Great work, everyone!”

A similar drastic reinterpretation is what is needed if people like Maher, or atheists like Sam Harris (who also conveniently failed to criticize Judaism in his book The End of Faith), really want to combat extremism.

They need to stop beginning their critique from the same conventional biases that have been embedded in our collective consciousness. They must not see our world in terms of extremes – assuming that everyone is either a whacky religious nut-job, or a sober and logical atheist. They need to create a new paradigm that analyzes all religion and violence using the same standards, realizing that just as no one religion is right, no one religion is exempt, either.

Most importantly, they need to realize that the best solutions to world problems use religion instead of fighting it.

These shifts in perception may seem strange, abhorrent or impossible. But people said the same when someone claimed the Earth was round, or when a doctor theorized that bleeding a person with leeches wasn’t a cure for anything.

Truly new solutions don’t originate from archaic and stale assumptions about our historical experience. They germinate when we move beyond what we think we know, and reconsider what we may have dismissed.

Tags: Bill Maher, Christianity, Palestine, Quentin Tarantino, Religulous

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