On the pomo primary, etc.

Then, the coup de grâce: The control room switched to a different camera, an overhead wide shot, and viewers were treated to the media filming the media filming the media interviewing the media. I remember thinking, “This is not good.” It certainly has not gotten any better since.

David C. Idema

Staatsburg, NY

Urbane Society

HARRY SIEGEL’S well-written and otherwise fair-minded review of my recent book, City: Urbanism and its End (March 15), ends with a reference to “Douglas Rae’s grand utopian vision of the city as a monolithic social (and housing) ‘project'”–this in contrast with Mayor Giuliani’s “relatively prosaic goal of safe and civil streets.”

This is incorrect. I write about the tragic impact of public housing projects. I entertain no utopian vision for urban America, and insist on the view that cities work best when the nongovernmental forces of business and personal civility are at play, while grand plans formulated by government elites are not. Half of City is devoted to the success of informal governance, the other to the failure of social engineering carried forward by governmental elites.

Douglas W. Rae

Yale University

New Haven, CT

Change Agents

REUEL MARC GERECHT’S “Going Soft on Iran” is spot-on when he questions the approach promoted by the so-called foreign policy realists (March 8). Indeed, for the past quarter century, the fig-leaf policy of successive U.S. administrations has turned out to be a miserable failure, serving only to prolong the suffering of the Iranian people and undermining America’s pro-democracy pronouncements and its war on terror.

But Gerecht’s article leaves much to be desired when it comes to offering a concrete road map to democracy in Iran. True, Iran’s nuclear and terrorist programs will only cease when democracy flourishes in Iran, but how does one achieve a “regime change,” if that’s what Gerecht is proposing?

The fact is that unless the United States shows the courage to rectify Bill Clinton’s error in 1997 of blacklisting, as a goodwill gesture to Mohammad Khatami, the Iranian Mujahedeen Khalq, its Iran policy will remain in neutral.

Whether pundits in Washington like it or not, the Mujahedeen Khalq is the element of change in Iran by virtue of its democratic, anti-fundamentalist Islamic ideology.

Ali Safavi

Near East Policy Research

Alexandria, VA

Passion Play

CERTAINLY THERE IS MORE CREDENCE to the anti-Semitism charge against Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ than Matt Labash acknowledges in “Passion and Popcorn” (March 8). The issue can’t be neutralized just by pointing out that Gibson “infused his film with secondary sympathetic Jewish portraits,” as Labash writes. A few good Germans in Schindler’s List didn’t mean that all the Germans who were in that movie were pleasant. It is frustrating that so many reliably adversarial commentators like Labash seem to be turning a blind eye to the anti-Semitic context within which Mel Gibson’s movie was made.

Gibson’s father denies the Holocaust. Gibson himself won’t take a clear, unequivocal position on the matter. Gibson belongs to a schismatic branch of Catholicism that rejects Vatican II, the church council in which the Jews were absolved of guilt in Jesus’ crucifixion.

Gibson finds inspiration for the movie from Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich, a late-18th-century visionary nun who, in her visions, saw Jews with “hooked noses” and referred to Jews strangling Christian children to use their blood in rituals.

A refusal to face the issue of Gibson’s flirtation with anti-Semitism seems rampant throughout the conservative media. Consider the line: “His blood be upon us and our children,” which the Jews proclaim to Pilate in the Gospel of Matthew.

Under pressure, Gibson removed the subtitled translation of the line from his movie. He could have removed the spoken line entirely, but he didn’t. He chose not to. Why? I wonder. Remember that Gibson didn’t want subtitles in his movie in the first place. So it is unlikely that he feels he has altered his message.

What’s interesting is that when I talk with Christians who I know would be offended at anti-Semitism and who have seen The Passion of the Christ, they tell me sincerely that it was not anti-Semitic. Which is, I believe, to the credit of the teachings of modern American churches.

They have done such a good job at eliminating anti-Semitism in modern American religious discourse that traditional anti-Semitic themes no longer strike a chord among followers.

Noam Dworman

New York, NY