The film, set for release this spring, was partially backed by a well known anti-Semitic and far-right conservative, Robert Sungenis, who runs a blog called 'Galileo Was Wrong.'I wrote a post on Sungenis a bit back, when the geocentrism issue appeared on the radar and the post generated some chatter. According to the story in the Daily Mail, Sungenis has also been tied to anti-holocaust rhetoric and they provide a link to this article, which relates this bit of unpleasantness:
Scientists such as Michio Kaku, Lawrence Krauss, and Max Tegmart all appear in the trailer, discussing the Earth's unique characteristics that allow it to sustain life.
Sungenis himself appears in the trailer to offer some of his conspiracy theory.
'You can go on some websites of NASA to see that they've started to take down stuff that might hint to a geocentric universe,' he tells the audience.
Sungenis, who was born into a Catholic family but became a Protestant before returning to the Catholic Church in 1992, was taken seriously in mainstream Catholic circles for many years, even producing two religious series for EWTN, a Catholic television station. That ended in 2002, when Sungenis published a 33,000-word, anti-Semitic attack on a joint statement by the National Council of Synagogues and the Bishops' Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs that criticized the Catholic Church's history of attempting to convert Jews. The article repeated a series of ancient anti-Semitic canards, relied on anti-Semites like Father Denis Fahey as authorities, and even praised Fahey and Father Charles Coughlin (the viciously anti-Semitic "radio priest" of the 1930s) as "dedicated Catholic priests who lived impeccable lives and defended Holy Mother Church from every sort of Satanic deception." As a result, EWTN pulled Sungenis' TV series and removed all mention of him from its Web site; in a similar way, Envoy magazine also removed Sungenis from its website. Since then, Sungenis has gone even further into anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongering, frequently reminding people that the 1911 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia "predicts the anti-Christ will come from Jewry."As career moves go, this is not a good one for Ms. Mulgrew, who should know better than to get mixed up with these people.
P.S. Ordinarily I would not touch things that come from the Southern Poverty Law Center, since they are rabidly partisan, sensationalistic, and lean far to the left of MSNBC. Insomuch as I can tell, they have gotten their fact right here but I have not dug deep.
Jim - I don't fully understand it, but there was a streak of anti-Semitism that still ran pretty deep in some Catholics in the last century (probably is still present here and there, as these things tend to do.) Even Chesterton had some of it.
ReplyDeleteA later example was Joseph Sobran who used to write for National Review. He revealed some serious anti-Semitism in some essays, and when he wouldn't back off it, Buckley fired him. It was sad. I had heard Sobran say something I will never forget in a lecture in Dallas. "The ad hominem argument is the profoundest argument of all. It is God's argument." It's true, we just have to remember that we don't get to use it.