Here’s what some critics said about Mel Gibson, following his arrest incident:
● July 30, agent Ari Emanuel in the Huffington Post: “People in the entertainment community, whether Jew or gentile, need to demonstrate that they understand how much is at stake in this by professionally shunning Mel Gibson and refusing to work with him, even if that means a sacrifice to their bottom line.”
● July 31, Christopher Hitchens in Slate.com: “I was just in the middle of writing a long and tedious essay, about how to tell a real anti-Semite from a person who too loudly rejects the charge of anti-Semitism, when a near-perfect real-life example came to hand.”
● July 31, Village Voice writer Michael Musto on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann:” “He doesn’t work with anybody else, and his audience is already deeply anti-Semitic, so they’re deeply proud of him after this.”
● August 1, columnist Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post: “Gibson’s rant sounds to me like classic anti-Semitism that goes beyond the country-club ‘not our sort of people’ brand of casual bigotry. He seems well on the way toward some sort of full-blown ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ conspiracy theory of Jewish world domination.”
● August 2, Joy Behar on ABC’s “The View:” “He needs to be welcomed into the Jewish community by public circumcision.”
● August 2, The Jewish Week: “The incident vindicates those Jewish leaders who had the backbone to call the film [“The Passion of the Christ”] what it was: an example of religious anti-Semitism….”
● August 2, Bill Maher in the Huffington Post: “Why, when Mels’s [sic] id is released, its [sic] about the Jews f**king everything up, just like it was with Hitler. Except Mel Gibson, when his id is in check, I believe, really knows how wrong that is, and how stupid. He, I believe, at least fights with himself about this. But he’ll never win as long as he’s so religious, because, I hate to tell you, the disease isn’t alcholism [sic], the disease is religion.”
● August 2, producer Merv Adelson in an ad he placed in the Los Angeles Times: “Let’s make ourselves proud and not support this jerk in any way, just because he’s a so-called ‘star.’ People like Mel Gibson give us all a bad name.”
● August 2, Alec Baldwin in the Huffington Post, after watching “The Passion:” “And, as a Catholic, I’m thinking, here Mel has dug down deep to glorify JC, the ultimate provider of the forgiveness program. Killed the whole film for me. Who’d a thought? Mel Gibson… the Opus Dei buzz-kill.”
● August 3, movie critic Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune: “It [‘The Passion’] is the work of a true believer who has major, major Jew issues, and who hides behind source material when asked about his film’s caricatured, subhuman Jewish rabble.”
● August 3, Actor Rob Schneider in an ad he placed in Variety: “I, Rob Schneider, a 1/2 Jew, pledge from this day forth to never work with Mel Gibson-actor-director-producer and anti-Semite.” The actor went on to say he had recently directed a movie in which there was a part for a Nazi gang leader “which apparently Mel would be perfect for.”
● August 4, Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman took the opportunity to smear the “The Passion” in The Jewish Week: “Gibson had cherry-picked some of the most vitriolic passages from the four Gospel stories and combined them to produce his own distorted version of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth nearly 2000 years ago.”
● August 4, Paul Slansky, co-author of the book My Bad: 25 Years of Public Apologies and the Appalling Behavior That Inspired Them, in the Los Angeles Times: “As automatically as you think ‘murderer’ when you hear ‘O.J. Simpson,’ the mere mention of ‘Mel Gibson’ will forevermore make you think ‘anti-Semite’…. And, finally, whatever else he does in the remainder of his life, expect to see a reference to the incident of July 28, 2006, in the first paragraph of Gibson’s obituary. This one’s not going away.”
● August 6, Michael Grunwald in the Washington Post: “Linguists note that in Chinese, the character for ‘opportunity’ also means ‘quagmire.’ And ‘Hezbollah’ means ‘Party of Mel Gibson….’ Still, Gibson insists he is not an anti-Semite, blaming his tirade on his struggles with alcoholism and depression, and also on his hatred of Jews.”
● August 7, Rachel Patron in the Sun-Sentinel: “Investigating how Jews feel about you, I approached the most forgiving of them all: Jesus of Nazareth. When I uttered the name Mel Gibson, he choked on his milk-and-honey shake. It took him a minute to catch his breath and talk to us: ‘This guy tortured me more than the Romans. He never bothered telling people about all the good I accomplished during my short sojourn on Earth—his only interest was my bloody death. Again and again he made me relive my suffering. Now I am the victim of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, which is all wrong, because you’re not supposed to have nightmares in Heaven.'”
● August 11, Daniel Fierman in Entertainment Weekly: “That’s why official apologies and offers to meet with Jewish leaders aside—it’s impossible to imagine true forgiveness for a man who had done what Gibson has done.”
