EDITORIAL: Gibson gets it (02/15/04)

EDITORIAL

Gibson gets it

It should be no revelation to readers of this newspaper that actor/film-maker Mel Gibson has been in the news worldwide because of his forthcoming movie "The Passion of the Christ." Many of the headlines are due to the fact that certain major Jewish organizations have expressed their concern over how Jews are, or more precisely may be, portrayed in the film. In fact, many Jewish leaders and others have commented on the film without having seen it, based on hearsay, or after having seen not-yet-final versions of the movie. But that is not the issue that concerns us here today.

Certainly, Jewish leaders have the right to speak out forcefully on behalf of their people. But do they have the right, in the same breath, to denigrate the sufferings of others?

The latest controversy related to Mr. Gibson and his "Passion" stems from an interview in the March issue of Reader's Digest, parts of which were widely quoted in the news media. He was asked by his interviewer, Peggy Noonan: "You're going to have to go on record. The Holocaust happened, right?" (The question was posed in reference to his father who was quoted in a New York Times Magazine article denying that the Holocaust took place). Mr. Gibson's response: "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."

That response elicited immediate condemnation from leaders of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and the Anti-Defamation League. The reason: Mr. Gibson was allegedly "marginalizing" the Holocaust.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said: "... he marginalized the Holocaust, he diluted its significance, and it's a lie," adding, "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."

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said: "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."

Thus, Mr. Gibson was accused of being somewhere between ignorant and insensitive for daring to note that millions of other people also were brutally killed during the 20th century - millions of them in a genocide in Soviet-occupied Ukraine.

His disingenuous comment aside - "We are not engaging in competitive martyrdom, but in historical truth," - Rabbi Hier is doing exactly that. He is saying that one people's genocide is worse than all others. In a February 2 letter to Mr. Gibson he noted: "you diminish the uniqueness of the Holocaust by marginalizing it and placing it alongside the horrors and suffering of people caught up in conflict and famine." And this comes from a prominent leader who wrote to Mr. Gibson: "I have spent my adult life building an institution that promotes tolerance and commemorates the Holocaust." Does Rabbi Hier mean to say that others do not deserve to be remembered?

As for Mr. Foxman, there are no words strong enough to condemn his utter disregard for the sufferings of between 7 million and 10 million people systematically mur- dered via forced starvation. Is he perhaps a genocide denier, one of those who still today, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, say the Famine-Genocide was just a simple famine, a stroke of bad luck that befell Ukraine?

Having reviewed Mr. Gibson's comments, and the reactions of Rabbi Hier and Mr. Foxman, we believe the real question is: Who doesn't get it?

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