Why this now?
What is the point of this other than some form of PR whoring?
Gibson's father is very very old and no purpose will be served by this. Let him go in his own time and just let God judge him.
Good god, not this &%^$ again..
My mom has said some pretty off-the-wall stuff. If I ever became famous, I would hate for people to think her thoughts were mine. Mel Gibson and his dad are two different people, after all.
DIANE SAWYER: Do you think people wondered if your father's views were your views on [The Holocaust]
MEL GIBSON: Their whole agenda here -- my detractors -- is to drive a wedge between me and my father -- and it's not going to happen. I love him, he's my father.
DS: And you will not speak publicly about him?
MG: I am tight with him. He's my father. Gotta leave it alone, Diane. Gotta leave it alone.
(From ABC's PrimeTime Live, February 16, 2004)
Hutton Gibson has been nuts for decades. His reason for moving to Australia was allegedly that US collusion in the 1963 assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem, a Catholic, convinced him that the US was waging an anti-Catholic war.
He therefore quit the country rather than see his sons fight in an anti-Catholic war.
There is so much wrong with this scenario it is hard to know where to start. Dien, to begin with, was the head of the allied, not the enemy, forces. His assassination was based on the usual fractious infighting among Vietnamese anti-communists and the Kennedy administration's conviction that he was a poor choice as leader. Vietnamese Catholics were predominantly anti-communist and this is obvious to anyone familiar with the events of the war and its aftermath. Diem was one man and even he was fighting the same enemy we were, though not very competently.
Beyond that, Australia already had its own troops in SVN by the time of the Diem assassination, and continued to support the US effort, at considerable cost, until the leftist tide temporarily swamped the Australian political landscape in the early 70s. Australia did use the draft during the Vietnam war, btw, so even if it had been an "anti-Catholic" war, the Gibsons were simply escaping from one "oppressor" to another.
Hutton Gibson's self-imposed exile was therefore based either on a complete, and monumentally ignorant, inversion of reality or he is not telling the truth about his reasons.
Letters to the Editor
Washington ExaminerDear Editor:
Letter writer Gary Jacobsen (Sept. 1) claims that the treatment of illegal aliens by U.S. authorities today is "similar" to the German treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. The analogy is baseless. Those who are deported from the U.S. are arrested not because of their ethnicity --as was the case with Jews in Hitler Europe-- but because they entered this country illegally. They are not shipped off to death camps where they are murdered by the millions; they are sent back to their native countries, where they can resume their lives or apply for legal entry to the United States. Describing illegal aliens as "lawbreakers" is neither "demonizing" them, nor anti-Hispanic, nor comparable to what the Nazis did, as Jacobsen claims; it has no resemblance to the torrent of German government-sponsored propaganda that portrayed Jews as racially inferior, evil, and deserving of death.
Surely it should be possible to have a sober discussion about contemporary U.S. immigration policy without resorting to false and absurd comparisons to the Nazi era.
Cordially,
Dr. Rafael Medoff Director
A collaborationist would have either dodged this altogether or been a lot more circumspect in his rebuttal, throwing in a few pro forma denunciations of the Minutemen and other critics of the ongoing invasion, for example.
Mel shouldn't have to explain his father's stand on anything, no matter how ignorant.