apr 26th, 2008

more about the premier semitic death cult and its history of blood and gore.

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From: The

`Constantine' Follows Murderous Christian Soldiers

Thursday, 24 April 2008

source: Bloomberg, April 24, 2008

April 24 (Bloomberg) -- Oren Jacoby's film ``Constantine's Sword'' begins and ends in Colorado Springs, Colorado, home of the U.S. Air Force Academy and several of the country's biggest evangelical Christian ministries.

These include the New Life Church, the 14,000-member Pentecostal congregation founded and run by Ted Haggard until November 2006, when he was removed following allegations that he had a relationship with a male prostitute and a fondness for methamphetamines.  

Based on James P. Carroll's 2001 book of the same name, the film packs 2,000 years of violence perpetrated in Jesus' name into 95 minutes of visually mesmerizing history -- from the Emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity, through the Crusades and the Inquisition and, inevitably, to the Holocaust and the modern era.

A native New Yorker whose previous documentary, ``Sister Rose's Passion,'' was nominated for an Oscar in 2004, Jacoby himself looks like he might have just walked out of the Air Force Academy. Slim and silver-haired, the director met with me earlier this week at Bloomberg's New York headquarters.

Jacoby, 52, said he began with the Air Force Academy after hearing that the fundamentalist churches were infiltrating the military school. When ``The Passion of the Christ'' was released, for example, cadets found fliers on their dining-room plates promoting local screenings of the film.

Second-Class Citizens

``They had so become a presence on the campus that students who were not members of these churches, or were not fundamentalist Christian evangelicals, were treated as second- class citizens,'' Jacoby said. ``They were being proselytized all the time, and they were being pressured -- often by people who were officers or faculty members.''

Carroll, a former priest and the son of a prominent Air Force general, argues that the cross-shaped sword symbolized Christianity's transformation into a brutal crusading force. It's an image chillingly invoked whenever President Bush refers to the war on terrorism as a ``crusade.'' In Colorado Springs, the line between the military and the church is unsettlingly blurred.

``This story fit in with the historical part of `Constantine's Sword,' which concerns proselytizing in order to convert,'' Jacoby said, ``and contempt for those `others' --Jews, Muslims and, at the Air Force Academy, it included Catholics, atheists -- who didn't fit the current mold.''

Youth in Germany

Carroll spent much of his youth in postwar Germany, where he and Jacoby returned with the film crew. The story took another unexpected turn when they toured the ancient Jewish cemetery in the Rhineland city of Mainz, not far from where Carroll had lived as a teenager. Many of the people buried there were butchered by rampaging Crusaders after the traditional Good Friday sermon, which blamed the Jews for the killing of Jesus.

``At the cemetery there were several graves dating to the 12th century,'' Jacoby said. ``We were filming with a local historian and I noticed another guy following along behind us, by the grave of a Cohen, a Jewish priest.

``Jim asked him why he was there, and he said, `I'm here to show people around. I do it because I care about the people who died and their stories.' And he just burst into tears. It was the most upsetting thing I'd ever witnessed. We later found out that he was a survivor of Auschwitz and that his whole family had died there.''

Detective Story

While in Germany, Jacoby also retraced the wrenching story of Edith Stein. Born in 1891 to a Jewish family in Breslau, she converted to Catholicism, eventually becoming a Carmelite nun. In 1933, Stein wrote to Pope Pius XI, urging him to speak out against Hitler's growing persecution of Jews and Catholics. She got no response.

``It became kind of a detective story,'' Jacoby said. ``The trail took us to Auschwitz.''

Jacoby found Stein's copy of the impassioned letter at the convent in Cologne, Germany, where she had lived. In July 1942, she was deported along with other Jewish converts to Poland, where, a month later, she died in the Auschwitz gas chambers. Stein was canonized in 1998 by Pope John Paul II.

``Anybody who goes to Auschwitz, that's a deeply traumatic experience,'' Jacoby said. ``But I was also shocked when I got there because you expect this place to look horrific.

``Yet what struck me is that it was one of the most beautiful natural environments I'd ever seen. Within 50 or 60 years, this life had grown up in this place of death. It was kind of shocking.''

(``Constantine's Sword'' is running in Manhattan at the Quad Cinema, 34 W. 13th St., and Lincoln Plaza Cinema, Broadway at 62nd Street. Starting tomorrow, it will be showing in Los Angeles at Laemmle Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd.)

http://www.crusadewatch.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=937&Itemid=

To contact the writer on this story: Jeremy Gerard in New York at jgerard2@bloomberg.net