Bill Donohue, who abandoned his post as a professor at La Roche College to take up the role of Don Quixote of the Catholic laity, recently missed a windmill and ran his lance straight through the feelings of Jews, Protestants and a number of ex-Catholics and, well, Merry Christmas everybody and grab a helmet while you're at it.

Donohue is president of The Catholic League, which hunts out signs of anti-Catholicism. Its evidence has ranged from the blatant, like the "Left Behind" books, to the imagined, like the occasional theatrical satire. Mostly, he's been handy as a talking head on the cable networks and that's how he ended up on MSNBC's "Scarborough Country," which was being hosted for the night by ecumenical powerhouse Pat Buchanan.

Donohue was asked to explain why Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" wasn't getting big buzz for an Academy Award.

He said this: "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.

"Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions. I believe in traditional values and restraint. They believe in libertinism. We have nothing in common.

"But you know what? The culture war has been ongoing for a long time. Their side has lost. You have got secular Jews. You have got embittered ex-Catholics, including a lot of ex-Catholic priests who hate the Catholic Church, wacko Protestants in the same group, and these people are in the margins. Frankly, Michael Moore represents a cult movie. Mel Gibson represents the mainstream of America."

Let us put aside the irony that, on the day he received an Academy Award for "Bowling for Columbine," Michael Moore, a lifelong Catholic, attended Mass. Let's disregard the fact that Mel Gibson not only does not represent mainstream America, he doesn't represent mainstream Catholicism. He belongs to a schismatic group that does not honor the authority of the current pope.

Let us, instead, ask Bill Donohue why he seems to have a bad case of Jews on the Brain.

"Is there anyone in the world ... that hasn't admitted that Hollywood is essentially a Jewish town?" he asked me. "It's like asking the question who runs the Chinese restaurants in Chinatown. Who runs the Mafia? It's the Italians."

Donohue's fixation seems to be less an animus toward the Jews than a willingness to use them, not to mention "wacko Protestants," for polemical leverage. His press releases of the past six years have often included a "what if they said this about the Jews?" angle when complaining about everything from plays that make fun of Catholic ritual to greeting cards that make tired Catholic jokes.

"I typically say 'blacks, Jews and gays,'" he told me. True enough. He was once asked how the Democrats could win back Catholic voters and suggested they could begin by thinking of Catholics as if they were all homosexuals.

"I realize that's a dicey thing to say," Donohue said. "But the media elite, the secular elite tend to have certain people that are their favorites."

This sort of envy by a group that is now, in large measure, so fully assimilated that we sometimes resemble WASPs with a meatless Lent, cannot be healthy, and the language in which it is being expressed takes on an edge of hatefulness. I don't think Donohue is an anti-Semite. Nor does Shmuley Boteach, the Orthodox rabbi and fellow MSNBC panelist who challenged Donohue's slur moments after it sprang from his lips.

"I like him. I respect him," Boteach told me. "I do not believe he's anti-Semitic and I think what he said on the air was repulsive and it troubles me that he does not understand what was wrong about what he said."

Donohue betrays no such understanding. "I think it's time people had an open conversation about this," he said.

I suspect it's under way now, and it has started out ugly.