Claim: Actor Mel Gibson's father has dismissed historical accounts of the Holocaust as impossible and denied that the September 11 terrorist attacks were perpetrated by Al Qaida hijackers.
Example:[Collected via e-mail, 2003]
In the New York Times Magazine of Sunday, March 9, 2003 it is reported that Mel Gibson is making a film of the last 6 hours of the life of Jesus Christ in which he purports to tell the "truth", namely that the Jews are responsible for his death!
This canard has been discredited by all people of good will including the Pope. Yet Gibson, who is a member of an extreme Catholic sect called "Holy Family" which has distanced itself from the main body of catholicism and is not affiliated with the Roman Catholic Diocese is using his money and his high profile to finance and film this retrogressive and defamatory story.
Gibson, whose father, Hutton Gibson is a notorious Holocaust denier and who claims the the World Trade Center was destroyed by remote control and not by al Queda; that the Second Vatican Council was a Masonic plot backed by the Jews and that all popes going back to John XXIII have been illegitimate "anti-popes".
The article goes on much longer and is not refuted by either party. I believe in free speech, but not when it fosters hatred and gives our enemies ammunition to perpetuate the greatest crime of the century and the continued persecution of Jews.
Four 4000 years we have been blamed for every wrong in the world. We will not tolerate this additional insult.
I urge you to read the article and also forward this message to all people who you feel should know about this. I, for one will no longer pay my money to see Gibson's films, which support his continued racism.
Origins: The excerpts quoted above which are represented as appearing in the 9 March 2003 edition of the New York Times Magazine are accurate; they were drawn from a piece about actor Mel Gibson, his religion, and his father entitled "Is the Pope Catholic ... Enough?" However, rather than being a
straightforward summary of that article, the e-mailed version includes some rather selective quotes and lopsided commentary.
Mel Gibson is a Catholic traditionalist who has used some of the monies he has earned as an actor to fund construction of a church in the Agoura Hills, California, area. His Holy Family Catholic Church includes one of 600 traditionalist chapels in operation today (where, unlike most modern Catholic churches, Sunday Mass is still conducted entirely in Latin) and is not recognized by the Holy See. Catholic traditionalists view modern church reforms as the work of either foolish liberals or hellbent heretics, preferring for themselves a version of Catholicism as it was practiced prior to the reforms enacted by the Second Vatican Council (commonly known as Vatican II) between 1963 and 1965.
Mel Gibson's 84-year-old father, Hutton Gibson, may be considered an eccentric, a crackpot, or an anti-Semite (or some combination thereof) depending upon how charitably one views his utterances and beliefs about religion and politics, but Mel himself has neither explicitly affirmed nor denied the opinions voiced by his father, responding to questions about them by ambiguously asserting that "My father has never told me a lie." One paragraph from the original New York Times article not mentioned in the e-mail cited above addresses how much commonality of viewpoint there may be between father and son:
Whether any of this has rubbed off on Hutton's son Mel is an open question. A church elder at Holy Family says that while the two share the same foundation of faith, Mel Gibson parts company with his father on many points. "He doesn't go along with a lot of what his dad says," he says. And beyond claiming to have seen the plans for Holy Family and attended services with the congregation, Hutton Gibson [who lives in Houston] has no apparent connection to his son's church in California.
Given the younger Gibson's anti-semitic outburst when he was arrested for driving under the influence in Malibu, California, on 28 July 2006, the general public is much less inclined nowadays to give him the benefit of the doubt regarding how much his world view truly diverges from that of his father.
Last updated: 9 September 2006
The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/gibson.asp
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