Mel Gibson's little "incident"

I've come across a couple of very good blog posts on Mel Gibson's latest foot-in-the-mouth episode: Mel Gibson given free pass by Neo-Confederates by Edward Sebesta, Anti Neo-Confederate blog 08/05/06 and The martyrdom of Mel by David Neiwert Orcinus blog 08/05/06

Both of them give a flavor of the kind of eccentric language that extremists like Holocaust deniers and New World Order conspiracy theorists use. It also gives you an idea about how the far right gets obsessed with its own version of "political correctness" and hairsplitting definitions of words.

Sebesta also links to this article, Clues Dismissed in Time of 'Passion' by Tim Rutten Los Angeles Times 08/05/06, which says:

More to the point, why hasn't the press reopened the discussion of Gibson's financially successful but controversial movie, "The Passion of the Christ"? When it was released two years ago, there were some who argued that, apart from its lurid sadomasochistic aura - critic Leon Wieseltier called it "a sacred snuff film" - Gibson's narrative was studded with the kinds of anti-Semitic caricatures once associated with medieval passion plays. A much larger number of commentators and clergymen, particularly those hand-selected by the filmmaker and his people for private screenings, solemnly assured their readers, audiences and congregations that this was all a lot of anti-religious nonsense. More important, many of them personally vouched that Gibson is not an anti-Semite. ...

Then there was Gibson's repeated refusal to disavow the views of his father and spiritual mentor, Hutton Gibson, a notorious anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, who cheerfully shares public platforms with unrepentant neo-fascists like the odious Willis Carto. No one can demand that another person repudiate their father, but it's perfectly possible to say, "I love my father, but I don't agree with his ideas." Somehow, Gibson's refusal to do that never bothered "The Passion's" fans. ...

Finally, there's the matter of the faith Mel Gibson inherited from that father - his so-called traditional Catholicism. Without making a tedious detour into the fetid theological swamp in which this movement was spawned, it should be clear to anybody who looks that it involves a lot more than simple nostalgia for the Latin Mass. Spend 15 minutes with literature of the independent traditionalists — like Gibson father and son - or their more organized brethren in the Societies of St. Pius X or St. Pius V and what jumps out at you is a pervasive, actually obsessive antagonism toward Jews and Judaism. Moreover, traditional Catholicism's American variants all are infected to one degree or another with the ideas of the Jew-baiting Boston Jesuit Leonard Feeney, who was excommunicated by Pope Pius XII. Yet the commentators and clergy who applauded "The Passion of the Christ" treated Gibson's traditionalism as a kind of minor eccentricity - sort of like a guy still holding onto his eight-track tapes.

The General points us to a bruising satire of Mel in light of his latest sharing of his thoughts about Jews from the Mike Tidmus blog.

| +Save/Share | |