The Justice Department is being urged to rule whether Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” constitutes a hate crime. An Internet petition by the Messiah Truth Project urges Attorney General John Ashcroft to determine whether the controversial movie about Jesus’ death violates hate-crime statutes because its portrayal of Jews amounts to an “anti-Semitic diatribe.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.