Arabs get passionate

last updated 8 January 2015

Amman

The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson’s film depicting the suffering and death of Jesus, has become a hit with Muslims in the Arab world. “It’s more popular than Titanic and the James Bond films,” said Johnny Masri, the movie’s Middle East distributor. Islam forbids the depiction of a prophet and denies that Jesus was crucified, so the film has been banned in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain. But it has set box-office records in Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Qatar, and Jordan, where Arab viewers applauded the message that the Jews killed Jesus. “It unmasked the Jews’ lies,” said Jordanian viewer Hanan Nsour. “I hope that everybody, everywhere, turns against the Jews.”