Mel Gibson and Holocaust Denial

David Frum clarifies what has been bothering me about Mel Gibson's responses to questions of Holocaust denial.

On the other hand, I have to say I was very disturbed by something Gibson said in his interview with Peggy Noonan in Reader’s Digest.

Gibson’s father is of course a notorious Holocaust denier and trafficker in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Noonan offered Mel Gibson an opportunity to separate himself from his father’s views. Here is Gibson’s reply:

“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 Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century 20 million people died in the Soviet Union.”

Sounds unambiguous, right? Now listen again. Note that Gibson did not say, “Don’t be absurd, Peggy. Obviously it is a matter of historical record that Adolph Hitler and the Nazis deliberately murdered millions of Jews.” Note that Gibson did not cite the universally accepted casualty count of between 5 and 6 million Jewish fatalities. Nor did he acknowledge that Jews were special targets of Hitler’s hatred or that anti-Semitism occupied a central place in Hitler’s ideology.

Note next that Gibson did not use the word “murder.” Instead, he used the generic term “atrocities,” which could cover anything from mass murder to assault and arson. And whatever was the point of that strange formulation, “Some of them were Jews ….”?

Notice finally how Gibson goes on to speak of Stalin’s massacres. Gibson speaks of Stalin's crimes in plain, direct language. For them, he invokes commonly accepted casualty counts. What prevented him from speaking that way of the Jewish Holocaust?

Gibson used equally stilted language when asked a similar question by Diane Sawyer on ABC: “Do I believe that there were concentration camps where defenceless and innocent Jews died cruelly under the Nazi regime? Of course I do; absolutely. It was an atrocity of monumental proportion.” Here again, Gibson seems to bypass the issues of (1) the numbers killed; (2) whether those people were deliberately murdered; and (3) whether that murder proceeded from Nazi ideology.

I am not parsing these words so closely to be pedantic. The trouble is that Gibson’s words, whether carefully considered or not, bear an uncomfortably close resemblance to those deployed by genuine Holocaust deniers.

Here for example is the credo of one large Holocaust denial website, www.revisionists.com. (I’m giving the cite so you can verify the quote if you wish. I won't sully NRO with the link.)

“Revisionists” [for so the denier s deceitfully call themselves] “do not deny that there was much Jewish suffering during WW II, that there were many Jews who had property confiscated wrongfully, that many Jews died of disease or starvation in terrible conditions or were killed, that there were terrible brutalities and atrocities committed against Jews by Germans and others. None of this do Revisionists deny. Revisionists do diminish the impact of these facts by pointing out that WWII was the bloodiest, deadliest, most atrocity-ridden conflict in the history of man and that there was criminal behavior on all sides. One need merely mention Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the deadly carpet bombing of German and Japanese working class living areas, the Soviet rape of Germany in their 1945 advance, the treatment of German civilians and German POW's after the war. One could go on almost ad infinitum in this recitation of atrocities.”

Did Mel Gibson say even one thing with which these deniers would disagree?

Is Mel Gibson a Holocaust denier? I am not asserting that he is. After reading two interviews, I still do not know. Shouldn’t I know? Sawyer and Noonan both wished to help Gibson out – to give him an easy chance to show that he does not share his father’s disdain for the murdered Jews of Europe. Yet Gibson declined to avail himself of these chances. I can’t help wondering why.