Passionate Denial

Bob Sommerby is defending “The Passion” this week and I don’t have a lot to say about it because I haven’t seen, and have no intention of seeing, the film. However, I do find it interesting that Sommerby quotes Gibson as saying unequivocally that, contrary to his father’s views, he is not a Holocaust denier:

SAWYER: In that New York Times Magazine interview, [Gibson’s father] seemed to be questioning the scope of the Holocaust, skeptical that six million Jews had died. So what does Gibson think?

GIBSON: Do I believe that there were concentration camps where defenseless and innocent Jews died cruelly under the Nazi regime? Of course I do, absolutely. It was an atrocity of monumental proportion.

SAWYER: And you believe there were millions, six million?

GIBSON: Sure.

SAWYER: I think people wondered if your father’s views were your views on this.

GIBSON: Their whole agenda here, my detractors, is to drive a wedge between me and my father. And it’s not going to happen. I love him. He’s my father.

To be clear, Sommerby was responding to a correspondent who wondered why nobody had ever asked Gibson right out if he was a Holocaust denier. He isn’t trying to defend Gibson’s views, per se, although he does say that he didn’t find the film anti-Semitic.

Again, I haven’t seen the movie so I have no idea if it is or not. But, I did happen to read this Peggy Nooner interview with Gibson in Reader’s Digest while I was standing in the grocery store line and his answer was just a little bit more “nuanced”:

PN: I read that your father has some very conservative religious beliefs and that he has questioned some of the accepted versions of the Holocaust.

Gibson: My dad taught me my faith and I believe what he taught me. The man never lied to me in his life. He lost his mother at two years of age. He lost his father at 15. He went through the Depression. He signed up for World War Two, served his country fighting the forces of fascism. Came back, worked very hard physically, raised a family, put a roof over my head, clothed me, fed me, taught me my faith, loved me. I love him back. So I’ll slug it out until my heart is black and blue if anyone ever tries to hurt him.

PN: The Holocaust happened, right?

Gibson: I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. World War Two killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds to me like a guy who doesn’t think that the systematic genocide of Jews in WWII was much of a big deal. Moreover, like his father in the New York Times Magazine article that Sawyer references, he is clearly questioning the “scope” of the Holocaust. He even has some handy statistics to back him up as if he’s given it quite a bit of thought and has made the point before.

“Some” Jews were killed in concentration camps, sure. War is hell. Atrocities happen. What a bummer.

I can’t say absolutely that he is anti-semite based on this comment, but it’s not much of a stretch to make that assumption. No matter what, however, it’s probably a mistake to be too awfully impressed with his theological scholarship. The guy is clearly a cretinous airhead.