Blogwatch: Gibson is not a holocaust denier

On Paleojudaica, Jim Davila has a very sensible post on the topic of Mel Gibson as a holocaust denier and criticizes those who are perpetrating this for (at best) selective quotation and not checking their sources properly. I spotted yesterday another egregious example of this but did not get a moment to comment on it. Christopher Hitchens writes the following in his polemical article in Slate, Schlock, Yes; Awe, No; Fascism, Probably:

It's important to scan the Reader's Digest interview with Mel Gibson. He was questioned by Peggy Noonan, who was almost as simperingly lenient in print as Diane Sawyer was on the small screen. Noonan asked him a question that he must have known was coming, and which he must have prepared for, and she asked him in effect to "make nice" and agree that the Holocaust actually had occurred. His answer was, to all effects and purposes, a cold and flat "no." A lot of people, he agreed, had died in the last war. No doubt many Jews were among the casualties. It's one of the most frigid and shrugging things I have ever read. You would not know from this response that the war was begun by a fascist ruling party that believed in a Jewish world conspiracy, and thus that all of those killed were in part victims of anti-Semitism.

His answer in this interview was not "to all effects and purposes, a cold and flat 'no'"; he actually answered "Yes, of course" and attempted to add to this some personal context (viz. that he personally knew holocaust survivors). See my blog entry on this. It really comes to something when a reporter can manage to turn "Yes, of course" into "to all effects and purposes, a cold and flat 'no'". This is irresponsible. And it is as bad that Hitchens apparently knows of the Diane Sawyer interview too (note his reference to this interview in the paragraph quoted above) in which, as I have commented before, his affirmation that the holocaust happened is even clearer, if you can get clearer than "Yes, of course".

I have not yet seen The Passion of the Christ, which has not been released yet in the UK, and so I cannot yet comment on the charges of alleged anti-semitism. But it seems to me a shame that the proper discussion about how the film depicts the passion narrative should continue to get clouded by what is clearly an irresponsible charge of holocaust denial.