I trust that by now everyone has heard about Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic tirade upon being arrested for DUI. He was doing 87 m.p.h. with a 0.12 blood alcohol content and an open bottle of tequila next to him. Donutbabe writes of her reaction: “I don’t know anything about Mel Gibson that I didn’t know five minutes ago.” My reaction to reading the news, which I first read on a blog, was that the blog post was an over-the-top joke. I had to read it twice before I realized it was no joke.
I of course remember the whole dust-up surrounding The Passion of the Christ, but I have to admit that I never paid much attention to the controversy — not because I didn’t think it was an important or interesting story, but because I’m a godless heathen who hasn’t read the bible and I figured that I didn’t know enough about the crucifixion story or about Christianity and Judaism to fully understand the nuance of the debate. Well, there was no nuance — Mel Gibson is an anti-Semite, plain and simple.
I knew that his father, Hutton Gibson, was reportedly a Holocaust denier, but I hadn’t read the younger Gibson’s own remarks that he thinks the Holocaust isn’t such a big deal, cause, you know, bad things happen during war.
“I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. He worked in a concentration camp in France. Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century, 20 million people died in the Soviet Union.”
I wonder if ol’ Mel was listening to Prussian Blue when the cops pulled him over. In case you’re not up on the White nationalist pop music scene, Prussian Blue is a folk duo whose 14-year-old Aryan-looking members, Lynx and Lamb, think Hitler had some good ideas. Of course, they did donate supplies to victims of Hurricane Katrina — oh wait, only the white ones. (By the way, “Prussian blue” is a chemical residue that Holocaust deniers claim would have been detected in greater amounts in Nazi gas chambers if the “myth” of mass execution of Jews were true.)
But back to Mel. Donutbabe points out the obvious (don’t you hate when you have to point out the obvious?), which is that the drunkeness excuse only gets you so far — hateful statements don’t just come out of nowhere. As I said in the comments of her post, people who aren’t racists don’t start spouting off racist remarks just because they’re drunk. And no matter how much they’ve had to drink, people who are not anti-Semites don’t start yelling about how Jews cause all the wars in the world — and what that has to do with getting pulled over for a DUI, only Mel knows.
In case anti-Semitism doesn’t do it for ya, rest assured that Mel Gibson is just a huge asshole all around, as he demonstrated in a 1995 interview with Playboy magazine. Why should women be prohibited from becoming priests? The conservative Catholic Mel Gibson says: “I’ll get kicked around for saying it, but men and women are just different. They’re not equal.”
He also needs a remedial science lesson.
PLAYBOY: Do you believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution or that God created man in his image?
GIBSON: The latter.
PLAYBOY: So you can’t accept that we descended from monkeys and apes?
GIBSON: No, I think it’s bullshit. If it isn’t, why are they still around? How come apes aren’t people yet? It’s a nice theory, but I can’t swallow it. There’s a big credibility gap. The carbon dating thing that tells you how long something’s been around, how accurate is that, really? I’ve got one of Darwin’s books at home and some of that stuff is pretty damn funny. Some of his stuff is true, like that the giraffe has a long neck so it can reach the leaves. But I just don’t think you can swallow the whole piece.
Of course, the interviewer gets a demerit for asking a flawed question, but sheesh Mel Gibson is an idiot. If God created man in his image, I don’t think he’d want to take credit for the vile facsimile that is Mel Gibson.
Finally, I’ll leave you with one more Mel Gibson quote:
Nor do I hate anybody — certainly not the Jews…They are my friends and associates, both in my work and social life. Thankfully, treasured friendships forged over decades are not easily shaken by nasty innuendo.
Correction, Mel — they were your friends and associates, because it’s no longer innuendo.
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