Some of the leading critics of Mel Gibson?s movie “The Passion” have been dishonest in their attacks, and the media have let them get away with it.

Some of the leading critics of Mel Gibson-s movie “The Passion” have been dishonest in their attacks, and the media have let them get away with it. In an exhaustive examination of the controversy, noted writer Peter J. Boyer explains in the New Yorker’s Sept. 15 edition the murky background of the assaults on Gibson and his film.

For example, the major complaint sparked by a group of “liberal” scholars was not that the film is anti-Semitic, which most admit it is not, but that it is based on the Four Gospels, which the group scorns as inaccurate. Furthermore, this group was not an official body of the Catholic bishops’ organization – which they held themselves out to the media as representitivies of – but rather a committee formed, long before the movie’s completion, by an employee of the bishops and the head of Anti-Defamation League.