Quotable notes (02/08/04)

Quotable notes

"I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. He worked in a concentration camp in France. Yes of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The second world war killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the [sic] Ukraine several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century 20 million people died in the Soviet Union."

- Mel Gibson, co-writer, director, producer and financier of the $25 million film "The Passion of the Christ," in an interview with Peggy Noonan for the March issue of Readers Digest, as cited by various news media, including The New York Times (February 4). Mr. Gibson was responding to the question: "You're going to have to go on record. The Holocaust happened, right?" posed in reference to his father who was quoted in a New York Times Magazine article last March as denying that the Holocaust took place.

"We are not engaging in competitive martyrdom, but in historical truth. To describe Jewish suffering during the Holocaust as 'some of them were Jews in concentration camps' is an afterthought that feeds right into the hands of Holocaust deniers and revisionists."

"I think he was lobbed an easy question. He could've used the occasion to take us on a different road, instead he marginalized the Holocaust, he diluted its significance, and it's a lie."

"Either he is very ignorant of sensitivities in Jewish communities of riling survivors, those who have lost loved ones, or he is doing it deliberately."

- Rabbi Marvin Hier, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, in a letter to Mel Gibson, as quoted in The New York Times on February 4.

"At the very least it was ignorant, at the very most it's insensitive. And you know what? He doesn't get that either. He doesn't begin to understand the difference between dying in a famine and people being cremated solely for what they are."

- Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, as quoted in The New York Times on February 4.

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