Eye on Zion

[vovat]

I don't have much to say about tonight's Simpsons and American Dad episodes, but they were decent enough. The friendship that developed between Homer and Chief Wiggum was interesting, but nothing really came of the subplot. The Battleballs themselves were an amusing concept, but the mistakes that led the school and Marge to think Bart was dealing drugs were rather predictable and not all that funny. I thought at first they were going to do something related to schools banning Pokémon cards, although I guess that's really old news at this point.

Also tonight, we watched a documentary called Protocols of Zion, which I believe I added to our Netflix queue a few years ago when revme mentioned it. I don't think he'd seen it at the time, and I'm not sure if he has since. As might be expected from the title, it dealt with the continuing popularity of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous late nineteenth century forgery (and plagiarism, for that matter) detailing how Jews secretly rule the world. Apparently there was a bit of a spike in interest in the Protocols after September 11th, tied in with bizarre conspiracy theories about how no Jews died in the attacks, and how the Zionists were secretly responsible. Yeah, that makes sense, considering the rampant antisemitism in Al Qaeda strongholds. But since when do the beliefs of hate groups and conspiracy theorists have to be consistent? The film mentioned how the Protocols really just confirmed existing prejudice, and that a significant amount of antisemitic thought dates back to the beginning of Christianity. There was a clip of Mel Gibson insisting that people who have problems with The Passion of the Christ actually have problems with the Gospels. Hey, I have a problem with both, although at least the Gospels contain some good stuff to augment the cringe-worthy parts. But there's definitely a tradition of blaming "the Jews" for the death of Jesus, which only became worse as Christianity grew apart from its parent religion. While it seems that modern churches are trying to distance themselves from this idea, there's still a significant lunatic fringe that still holds on to it.

Comments

[revme.livejournal.com]

I kinda liked the Simpsons ep; it wasn't great, but I thought Homer/Wiggum was kinda cute. You sorta felt bad for Wiggum when he was feeling hurt -- that kinda emotional type thing isn't something the Simpsons have done for a while.

Also: You're right -- I still haven't seen it! And it was funny because I had completely forgotten about the documentary until right now when you mentioned it. Overall, what'd you think of the doc? It doesn't sound like you particularly cared for it -- but at least it doesn't sound as bad as "The God Who Wasn't There". But yeah -- looking for consistency in conspiracy theories/other nutjobbery is kind of a fool's errand. They're crazy, that's why they believe that crap...8)

[vovat.livejournal.com]

I actually liked the film pretty well; I ended up giving it five stars on Netflix. There wasn't a whole lot of new information, but it was interesting, and gave a lot of different perspectives.