Category Archives: Anti-Semitism

Gibson's Gibberish

As I’ve said, “the South Park depiction of Mel Gibson bouncing off walls he had freshly ‘coated’ in bodily waste is not far off.” Gibson was at it again, this time in a painful-to-watch interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer. He twitched, grimaced, scratched himself non-stop, and generally came across as creepy and insincere.

Gibson, it transpires, holds that “alcohol loosens your tongue and makes you talk in a way that is not you.” It wasn’t Mel that said those things about all Jews; it was some separate alter ego.

I’ve known a few drug addicts in my life. While they were particularly disgusting when on drugs, their sober persona didn’t deviate that much from their soused state-of-being. A is A, if you know what I’m saying.

In response to Sawyer’s truncated question paraphrasing the assertion that got Mel in trouble in the first place), “So are the Jews responsible [for all the wars in the world]?”, Gibson observed that [Jews] were not blameless in the Middle-East conflict. Blimy! He conflated Jews with Israelis. Sawyer was way too dumb to question him about that.

All the Israelis he considers semi-culpable for the conflict are Jews, but not all Jews are Israelis. And not all Jews support Israel. In fact, the anti-Israel claque is led by Jews. To wit, the New Historians, Noam Chomsky, “The Godfather,” Steven and Hillary Rose, Norman Finkelstein, Joel Kovel, Tanya Reinhart in Tel Aviv, and Michael Cohen in Swansea—these are but a few of the new anti-Semitism’s leading Jewish lights.

The fact that Mel conflates Israelis with all Jews confirms he has a prejudice.

Gibson then hazarded that he had lashed out because of the attacks by some Jews on “The Passion,” for its alleged anti-Semitism. Once again, true to type, Mel conflates the “Christophobic charlatan Abe Foxman,” and a few other idiots, with all Jews, and fails to mention the many prominent Jews who valiantly and eloquently defended his morose movie (which, as I’ve said, is not my idea of entertainment, or even art). Rabbi Daniel Lapin, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, and Jackie Mason come immediately to mind.

Malibu Mel

Anti-Semitism, Hollywood, The Zeitgeist

Mainstream media only recognizes a narrowly defined spectrum of opinion: Republican and Democratic. The one they consider Right; the other, Left.

Both generally support gratuitous, unconstitutional wars, for ostensibly charitable reasons. Each is more likely to support such adventures if their guy is strafing the lucky recipients of the gift of democracy. To wit, Democrats cheered a “preemptive attack” on Slobodan Milosevic; Republicans rubber-stamped sundering Saddam.

Thus when the topic of Gibson’s anti-war-in-Iraq comments came up, commentators on Fox and elsewhere on the blogosphere (which seems as one-dimensional, in many ways) wondered if the immensely wealthy Gibson was not pandering to “Hollywood elites.” (As if he needs to.)

Gibson is probably a paleo-conservative. As far as I know, he’s always been against this war (it fits with his view about “dem Jews”). More material, why would anything he says matter?

Thomas Fleming’s comments on Malibu Mel are the best I’ve seen so far:

I find the whole Mel Gibson saga depressing, because it reminds me of the grotesque stupidity of American Catholic conservatives, who insist on putting their faith in actors like Ronald Reagan and Mel Gibson. Have they ever read an interview with Gibson? He cannot frame a three-word sentence that does not sound like it comes from the mouth of Malibu Barbie…men who spend their adult lives making movies are, to put it as nicely as I can, unreliable as guides to living…

Why does anyone care what an actor thinks about, whether it is the life of Christ or Jewish influence on history? And why, by the love of all that is holy, would anyone with even the brain of Rush Limbaugh, give two seconds to a Christophobic charlatan like Abe Foxman?…
If you really wish to study the Life of Christ, read the Gospels. If you like C.S. Lewis or Tolkien, read their books and do not waste time on the slick and manipulative films made out of them. Christian lovers of Peter Jackson’s version of Lord of the Rings will be pleased to know that he is contributing a large chunk of their ticket money to promote leftist, anti-Christian moral causes. As the most notorious ‘anti-Semite’ in history once observed, ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’

“Mel’s ‘Malady,’ Foxman’s Fetish“—that too is good stuff (if I say so myself).

Letter of the Week by Professor Paul Gottfried

Anti-Semitism, Classical Liberalism, Free Speech, Individual Rights

Letter of the Week is by Paul Gottfried, Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College, and author of The Conservative Movement, Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory, After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy. Professor Gottfried’s new book is The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium.–ILANA

Ilana,
This commentary, “One Man’s ‘Malady,’ Another Man’s Fetish,” is entirely on target. Gibson’s stupid remarks while under the influence are grist for the mills of the leftist social engineers and coercive anti-fascists who run our cultural industry. Although Foxman may care about Jewish women who fall victim to Arab terrorists, he cares much less about such embarrassments than he does about the opportunity to play up the anti-Semitic faux pas of an avowedly conservative Catholic, who dared to make a film on the crucifixion.
By the way, the Passion, which I did see, was not only unbelievably gory but totally implausible. It is impossible for any human being, outside of the Catholic iconographic imagination, to endure so much suffering and blood loss and to survive for an entire day. A German Protestant friend who saw the movie thought it was the greatest advertisement for the Puritans that he had witnessed. The Reformation did away with such gory depictions, together with most other depictions, of religious figures. Watching the Passion was like revisiting a Sicilian shrine that I once stumbled upon in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

—Paul

P.S. I’ve always considered Gibson to be a bit of a loud-mouthed exhibitionist, and his movies have been anything but consistently rightwing. Remember the movie he played in with Danny Glover, in which American agents are trying to foil the machinations of powerful Nazi drug-dealers based in apartheid South Africa?

Mel’s ‘Malady,’ Foxman’s Fetish

Anti-Semitism, Free Speech, Hollywood, Judaism & Jews, Media

[Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League] “had more to say about Gibson than he had about Seattle’s jihadist du jour, Naveed Afzal Haq. Last week, Haq murdered a Jewish woman and critically injured five other women at the downtown Jewish Federation building…
As a representative of the Jewish community, albeit self-appointed, Foxman needs lessons in etiquette. It’s bad form to coerce or manipulate people into liking, hiring, renting, or apologizing to you. So long as haters keep their mitts to themselves, insulted parties should, if anything, rise above the fray, act gracious—even turn the other cheek. Subjecting people who don’t like you to reeducation programs smacks of busybody social engineering. Gibson may be uncouth, but Foxman is equally grubby…”

The complete column, “Mel’s ‘Malady,’ Foxman’s Fetish,” is here. In it, I also take a good long swipe at the “The Delphic oracles of the disease theory of delinquency,” vis-Ã -vis Mel Gibson’s so-called disease.