When Frank Rich wrote a column criticizing Gibson's cynical marketing campaign for his little vanity project, The Passion, Gibson told the New Yorker, "I want to kill him… I want his intestines on a stick. … I want to kill his dog." Now, Rich (who doesn't own a dog) has written another column, describing in detail the Jew-baiting manipulative tactics employed by Gibson in the effort to make his personal $25MM investment — the most money sunk into a dead-language movie since Quest for Fire — pay off.
As for Gibson's own speech in this debate, it is often as dishonest as it is un-Christian. In the New Yorker article, he says that his father, Hutton Gibson, a prolific author on religious matters, "never denied the Holocaust"; the article's author, Peter J. Boyer, sanitizes the senior Gibson further by saying he called the Holocaust a "tragedy" in an interview he gave to the writer Christopher Noxon for a New York Times Magazine article published last March. Neither the word "tragedy" nor any synonym for it ever appeared in that Times article, and according to a full transcript of the interview that Noxon made available to me, Hutton Gibson said there was "no systematic extermination" of the Jews by Hitler, only "a deal where he was supposed to make it rough on them so they would all get out and migrate to Israel because they needed people there to fight the Arabs."
(via MeFi)