[AmishDude]

You see, I don't believe he did know about it. I think he's deeply anti-Semitic and at the same time doesn't think he is. So he's not going to have somebody scanning the Jerusalem Post and the Forward and every other paper for Jewish news. The best strategy for him is to not comment on anything Jewish. No matter what happens, he loses. He doesn't want any headlines associating him with anything Jewish. Even "Gibson comments on holocaust conference" is bad news for him on the Oscar front. "There's Mel, obsessed with the Joooos again."

Besides, it would be quite easy to avoid news of this conference.

[lentulusgracchus]

I think he's deeply anti-Semitic and at the same time doesn't think he is.

He was raised by an antisemite. How does he get rid of that influence on his own life?

OTOH he has tried, apparently, to live it down, as witness his prompt apology when sobered up, which gainsays the second half of your statement.

To try to ride him down on everything now because of his father's unseemly passion strikes me as vindictive, as if his father's antisemitism is deemed by Gibson's critics to have worked "corruption of blood" in Mel Gibson and his family, to borrow the language of the Constitution (forbidding such punitiveness even for treason).