Catholic League’s William Donohue’s Rage Against the Jews
BuzzFeed also reported that “Donahue also raised a recent child abuse scandal in Orthodox Jewish communities. `You need to do something about this epidemic right now,’ he told Waskow, who is not Orthodox, suggesting that Jews follow the Catholic Church’s reforms in dealing with clerical abuse.”
In a subsequent interview with BuzzFeed, Donohue claimed that Waskow was “a man full of hate,” and that his op-ed was “the kind of thing I’d expect from Bill Maher, not from a rabbi.”
“Who the hell is he?” Donohue added. “I don’t tell Jews what to do when they have people who are miscreants in their community.”
Donohue has been down this rage-against-the-Jews road many time: In 2004, Donohue, a major admirer of Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of the Christ,” expressed his displeasure with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for snubbing Gibson’s film. In typical Donohue style, he said: “Mel Gibson releases the most significant blockbuster movie of the year, but it’s not good enough to make the cut for a Golden Globe. That’s because his film promotes Christianity, and the Hollywood crowd will have none of it. The only movies they like to make about Christianity these days are ones that demean it.”
In December 2004, Donohue told fellow defender-of-the-faith, Pat Buchanan, who was subbing for host Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country,” that the reason “The Passion” wouldn’t get its just due is because “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, OK? And I’m not afraid to say it. That’s why they hate this movie. It’s about Jesus Christ, and it’s about truth. It’s about the Messiah.”
As Media Matters For America pointed out, after Gibson was arrested in Malibu, Ca. on July 28, 2006 for driving under the influence and making a “series of anti-Semitic remarks,” several conservative media figures, including Donohue, leaped to his defense. “There’s a lot of people who have made comments which are bigoted who are not necessarily bigots,” Donohue told Joe Scarborough. He added that he was “concerned now about piling on.”
In the interview, Donohue drifted back to his Jews run Hollywood meme: “Hollywood has a real problem of anti-Catholicism. It’s in the movie industry, all right? Do we need to go through this one more time? I’m so interested that the sensitivity mavens now are so concerned about anti-Semitism, as they should be. And they should have hammered Mel Gibson. But are we just going to leave this on the table, now that there’s another problem in Hollywood? How about if they clean up their act toward Catholics?”