Flashback

Mel Gibson was asked whether he believed the Holocaust really happened in a 2004 interview. Here's his response:

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. And my dad also knows that there were internment camps where many people died. Now, his whole thing was about the numbers. I mean atrocities happened. The thing with him [my father] was that he was talking about numbers. I mean when the war was over they said it was 12 million. Then it was six. Now it's four. I mean it's that kind of numbers game. I mean 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 people starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century 20 million people died in the Soviet Union. Okay? It's horrible.

I don't know if you can call it Holocaust denial, but Gibson certainly sounds like a man trying to downplay the extent of what really happened. (Who, exactly, is saying only four million died?) If he really wants the Jewish community to forgive him, he'll have to account for statements like that.

No one should expect Gibson to cut all ties with his father - it is his father, after all - but renouncing and criticizing Hutton Gibson's rabidly antisemitic, Holocaust-denying (and 9/11-denying) beliefs is not too much to ask.

Damian P.

Posted by damian at August 3, 2006 07:02 PM