But again I ask: Does anyone at the Times have the vaguest notion what Christianity is? (Besides people who go around putting up nativity scenes that have to be taken down by court order?) The religion that toppled the Roman Empire ? anyone?
Jesus' suffering and death is not a Hatfields-and-McCoys story demanding retaliation. The gist of the religion that transformed the world is: God's only son came to Earth to take the punishment we deserved.
If the Jews had somehow managed to block Jesus' crucifixion and He had died in old age of natural causes, there would be no salvation through Christ and no Christianity. Whatever possible responses there may be to that story, this is not one of them: Damn those Jews for being a part of God's plan to save my eternal soul!
Gibson didn't insert Jews into the story for some Machiavellian, racist reason. Christ was a Jew crucified by Romans at the request of other Jews in Jerusalem. I suppose if Gibson had moved the story to suburban Cleveland and portrayed Republican logging executives crucifying Christ, the left would calm down. But it simply didn't happen that way.
Of course, the original text is no excuse in Hollywood. The villains of Tom Clancy's book "The Sum of All Fears" were recently transformed from Muslim terrorists to neo-Nazis for the movie version. You wouldn't want to upset the little darlings. They might do something rash like slaughter 3,000 innocent American civilians in a single day. The only religion that can be constantly defamed and insulted is the one liberals pretend to be terrified of.