Further thoughts on Gibson

(Be sure to see Laurium’s comment below about a rabbi that came and spoke at his church at the time of “The Passion.”)

My rule of thumb on the Mel Gibson situation: Anyone who issues a definitive judgment about Gibson’s character and beliefs (and there are many in the media who have done so, the normally sensible Debbie Schlussel for example), based solely on two sentences Gibson uttered to a police officer while he was in a state of emotional upset and drunkenness, and was being arrested for driving drunk, is a moral idiot and a bully. What has this country come to, that we judge a man for what he said under such circumstances? Have people lost all common sense, all sense of fairness, all sense of proportion? What is going on here? Is this Jewish payback for “The Passion”? Is it vengeance against Gibson because his father is a Holocaust denier?

On the subject of Jews (and I am a Jew by birth and upbringing), I must say that Jews who attack Gibson for something he said while drunk show themselves to be severely lacking in, excuse me for saying this, the quality of mercy. I don’t like quoting The Merchant of Venice in this context because, while I used to like that that play very much (I studied it in college and once saw an outdoor stage production of it in Boulder, Colorado that enchanted me and remained in my memory ever afterward), on recently re-reading it in its entirety for the first time in many years and seeing the recent movie with Al Pacino, I have come, with a feeling of great regret and loss, to see it as an anti-Semitic work which I can no longer embrace. Nevertheless, in Shylock’s flat rejection of Portia’s request that he show mercy to Antonio we see a reflection of the attitude shown by all too many Jews toward Mel Gibson. There is a stunning lack of mercy in their brutal judgment of him for what was after all a drunken outburst.

As I wrote the other day, if anyone wants to interview Gibson and ask him probing questions about his attitudes toward Jews, that would be perfectly legitimate in my view. Maybe he is a serious anti-Semite after all. But to condemn a man as an anti-Semite simply because of something he said while drunk is one of the most unfair things I have ever seen.

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Stephen F. writes:

I appreciate your discussion of the Gibson issue. Once again you take what might be a peripheral issue and clarify its meaning in a unique way. There is no other source, right or left, that is treating this issue in a balanced, reasoned manner. The often-perceptive Debbie Schlussel, for instance, is ready to try, condemn, and execute him, not noting the obvious difference between Gibson’s prejudices, whatever they are, and Muslim anti-Semitism. In fact, the information you posted from the police officer on the tendency of people arrested under DUI to verbally attack the arresting officer makes the most sense of any explanation. People are forgetting that not only alcohol, but the fear and anger coming from being arrested, are at work here.

The below comment by Laurium may make some readers uncomfortable. But I think it is justified in light of the many Jewish columnists and others (including someone as normally non-anti-anti-Semitic as Don Feder) who have leaped on Gibson for two comments made while he was being arrested for drunk driving, for heaven’s sake, and said, “Aha, now you have revealed yourself, now we know what you are, now we know that you, Mel Gibson, are a thoroughgoing anti-Semite. We are telling now that you are finished, your career is over … unless you apologize like crazy, then maybe, just maybe, we’ll find some way to forgive you.” There is a quality of such pure unfairness and bullying about this that it makes Laurium’s interpretation of the rabbi’s anecdote plausible.

Laurium writes:

Mel Gibson a payback?

Nope. What Mel Gibson is, is the fulfillment of what Jews are taught from birth. Gentiles—even the nicest gentiles—suffer from a disease that causes them to go nuts and slaughter Jews for absolutely no reason. Mel Gibson is the monster that proves the rule: nice guy, even has Jews who work for him, but in his deepest gentile core he, like all gentiles, suffers from the virus of anti-Semitism. Mel is an abject lesson to Jews, the example that serves to unite Jews in every generation to the understanding that gentiles cannot be trusted.

What is that famous saying about “in every generation a gentile will rise up … “ something like that. Mel is the proof that we are all tainted Jew killers.

When The Passion came out, a rabbi made the rounds of the local ministerial alliance and expressed his concern to our liberal Methodist minister. The rabbi prevailed upon him to do a presentation to us Christians at our church, explaining the Jewish position and sensitivity where The Passion was concerned. Now the church we belonged to was an upscale liberal church in an executive bedroom community, with members from all over the country who passed through and got their executive tickets punched before they moved on to another posting.

Well, the rabbi came by and started expressing how nervous the movie made Jews. He started telling us of the pogroms in Russia that killed a few hundred Jews maximum Chmielnicki in Poland in 1648, Hitler and the “good Germans” etc., and by the time he was through there were people swearing off The Passion and apologizing for evil Christians everywhere and everywhen.

It wasn’t until I got home that my wife and I put our finger on what was troubling both of us. The rabbi was saying essentially, “Ukrainian slave/peasants rose up and killed us, their overseers, 350 years ago, and that is why we are nervous when you watch these movies.” My wife and I are not angry enslaved peasants, we don’t speak Ukrainian, we are living today and not 350 years ago, and we are not even of the same religion. Yet to the rabbi, we are all the same. There really is not difference between us and Ukrainian serfs. If the Ukrainian goyim rose up, the Memphis goyim could rise up, couldn’t we? We are all the same, right? I mean, other than the fact that we are completely different? … But of course we aren’t different. The rabbi and his followers were unable to see any difference between my wife and me and the leaders of a peasant uprising some 350 years ago. Frankly, I find that not just insulting but grotesquely bigoted.

Imagine being a white person and asking to speak to a black church and telling them why black people watching gangsta rap movies makes white people nervous, and therefore they shouldn’t, and justifying that attitude by pointing out how Dingaan betrayed the voortrekkers and slaughtered them, how Denmark Creasy and Nat Turner rose up and slaughtered innocent white people, and how the Moorish invaders used black soldiers in Spain to slaughter white Christians, and therefore, black folks must surely understand the reasonable fears of white people that black folks watching gangsta rap movies are likely to become instant psychopaths and slaughter white folks in their bed.

Yet rather than laugh the rabbi out of church, or take offense at his equation of all white Christians in Memphis with all the evil slaughtering monsters that ever were, my fellow parishioners got all apologetic and guilty, groveled and apologized. I imagine black folks would have laughed a white Southern guilt-tripping Jew right out of church had he tried that schtick on them … if not beat him senseless for the insult.

So Mel Gibson is the missing link, the gentile in every generation that reaffirms to Jews everywhere that the gentiles around them are all little Hitlers under the skin, natural born descendants of Bogdan Chmielnicki. It serves its primary function to make Jews feel completely out of place and alienated by American culture. It is institutional, cultural, inbred neuroticism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 04, 2006 11:43 PM | Send