Last Item Re: Gibson (I Swear)

An e-mailer thinks I'm hyper-ventilating about the chances that Gibson Christ Superstar will incite anti-Jewish violence:

I can understand the frustration in certain circles that the American rednecks they so look down on have thus far failed to produce even a single pogrom in response to Mel Gibson's recent movie, thus showing that they obviously don't understand the movie. These critics are thus reduced to predicting future pogroms once the movie opens in more sophisticated foreign markets.

Well nobody is claiming that the Ukranian peasants of the Pale of Settlement era or the Saudi peasants of today are any more sophisticated than Protestant rednecks; merely that the former group have been inculcated to respond to anti-Semitic imagery in specific and predictable ways, whereas the latter group have no knowledge of the Catholic liturgical calendar, much less the traditional iconography of European anti-Semitism.

In so far as inductive reasoning is valid, those of us who worry about the capacity of this film to promote anti-Semitism abroad should not feel nervous about the position we have staked out. Indeed, the assumption of the motifs of traditional Christian anti-Semitism by contemporary Jihadist Islam is a major factor in the narrative of our current civilizational struggle---witness the popularity of an Egyptian film version of that crass Czarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

He then takes me to task for picking on the Serbs:

It's a bit unfair...to make dire predictions about the Serbian response and imply that it is likely to be more pogrom-happy than that of other European markets. The Serbs have historically been so worn out after a long day's work oppressing Albanians, Bosnians, Croats, etc etc. that they have little energy left by the time they come to the letter J.

He cites a calming of Serbian ethnic violence following the end of the wars of the mid-90s, as well as the (authentic and commendable) Serbian history of resistance against the Nazis

I'd like to apologize for having potentially offended the Serbs and all the other populations of the contending states in the Balkan Wars who are, in fact, too tired for now to resume campaigns of murder and terrorism against the region's few remaining Jews.