Tasteless "Black Christmas"

The folks at Fox News brought me in the other night to discuss and denounce Joy Behar, the co-host of ABC's daytime gab show "The View." She'd "joked" that Time's Person of the Year should be a Hitler type — like departing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

I attempted to suggest through the crossfire that it was no big deal to have a conservative condemn Behar for that ad hominem. Rather it is the decent men and women of the left who ought to be the most offended and therefore the most prominent in their denunciation. They are the most tarnished by their association, no matter how minimal.

The same reaction wells up at the news that viciously anti-Catholic Hollywood producers Harvey and Bob Weinstein are at it again, this time with their Christmas Day release of the horror movie "Black Christmas." Their bloody promos, splashed on TV sets everywhere, underscore the intent to have this movie ridicule the solemnity of the birth of Jesus. Strains of "Silent Night, Holy Night" play in between gruesome murders in the commercials.

This is nothing new for the Weinstein boys. Three years ago, they trashed the Christmas season with the movie "Bad Santa." One critic explained you would like the film if your idea of a good time was hearing Billy Bob Thornton as a department-store Santa "talk endlessly about his bodily functions and penchant for anal sex with obese women."

But as the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights reminds us, the Weinsteins have a longstanding Christian-taunting and Catholic-bashing agenda in their film library.

In 1995, they issued the movie "Priest," where the sympathetic hero of the piece was a gay priest who was unhappy with the other priests' longstanding heterosexual adultery. They wanted to release it on Good Friday (same itchy trigger finger for maximum offense), but Catholic League chief William Donohue talked them out of it.

In 1998, they were behind "The Butcher Boy," a film with the lowlight of Sinead O'Connor (the washed-up folksinger who ripped up Pope John Paul's picture on "Saturday Night Live") playing an F-bomb-dropping Virgin Mary.

In 1999, it was Kevin Smith's "Dogma," a religion-mocking film whose central character was a descendant of Joseph and Mary who worked in an abortion clinic.

God was fallible (and female), and had to be saved from Biblical loopholes by the earthlings.

In the Lenten season of 2002, the Weinsteins were behind "40 Days and 40 Nights," a deeply stupid movie with the weak plotline of a Catholic college boy deciding to give up sex for Lent, while beautiful women threw themselves at him.

Later that year, it was the hateful art film "The Magdalene Sisters," which painted a broad-brushed propagandistic portrait of sadistic Irish nuns and a church pulsing with pure evil.

When Mel Gibson uncorked his drunken rant against Jews last summer, some Hollywood titans wanted him drummed out of the industry forever. Now, can you imagine their reaction had Mel Gibson tried to produce a film defaming Jews and ridiculing Judaic traditions? Never mind one. How about launching an anti-Semitic cottage industry, as in seven bigoted movies, as the Weinsteins have hurled against Catholics and Christians?

A vicious debunking movie titled "Rabbi"? Mocking comedies with titles like "Bad Mitzvah" Or a horror film titled "Black Hanukkah," or "Dreidels of Death," released on the first day of the holiday season, complete with Hanukkah songs as the soundtrack to murder in the commercials?

It needn't even be stated that the Weinsteins' continual anti-Christian bigotry is no reflection on the Jewish community, but that is no reason for this community to be silent. To the contrary, it is every reason for Jewish leaders to be outraged.

Several years ago, that broadly defined conservative — but ever-insulting — talk radio host Michael Savage was given his own TV show on the MSNBC network. Many of us knew it was only a matter of time before he self-exploded with a patented hate-filled rant, and it took just a few weeks before the ugliest of on-air gay-bashing tirades cost him his job.

I made it a point publicly to commend the network for showing this bigot the door, which earned me his everlasting enmity, about which I could care less. I did so because I was outraged and wanted it emphasized that his behavior was not just offensive to homosexuals, it was insulting to every person who calls himself a conservative.

It is time for the Jewish community to denounce the equally bigoted Harvey and Bob Weinstein machine.

L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. To find out more about Brent Bozell III, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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