Christopher Hitchens on Mel Gibson

“Christopher Hitchens? The former leftie gone gleefully neo-con. Why quote him?”, you say. Well, even a stopped clock is right twice a day – and this is one of Hitchen’s (rare) times.

[Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitism] is validated by his fealty to his earthly father, a crackpot who belongs to a Catholic splinter group of which our Mel is a member. This group more or less lives off the stench of medieval anti-Semitism. Allow me (as one who has Mel’s father’s books to hand) to give you an example. In an attempt a few years ago to heal the breach between the Vatican and the Jews, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger did his best to make nice. Jews did not accept Jesus as savior and redeemer, said the man who is now the pope, but they did originate monotheism. Therefore, Judaism could perhaps be regarded in some ways as an “elder brother” of Christianity. The response of Gibson senior was to say that Abel also had an elder brother. â┚¬Â¦ You know what? I think that this qualifies as anti-Semitism, too.

I do not believe for an instant that the sins of the fathers should descend to later generations. But when asked about his old man’s many effusions on this subject, from the cheery view that the Jewish population of Europe actually increased in Hitler’s day to the no less upbeat opinion that persons unknown brought down the World Trade Center, the younger Gibson stonewalled consistently by saying that “my father has never told me a lie.”