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Part of the brouhaha stems from Gibson's interest in Anne Catherine Emmerich, a 19th-century Augustinian nun in Germany who recounted visions of Christ's Crucifixion that some regard as anti-Semitic. Gibson, who carries a piece of her habit as a relic, asks:
"Why are they calling her a Nazi? Because modern secular Judaism wants to blame the Holocaust on the Catholic Church. And it's revisionism. And they've been working on that one for a while."
"To me, this [comment] is classic anti-Semitism," ADL National Director Abraham Foxman told us.
Foxman, who survived the Holocaust because Catholic clergy baptized him to shield him from the Nazis, added, "I think [Gibson] is on the fringes of anti-Semitism."
Gibson also lays his lash on New York Times columnist Frank Rich. Responding to remarks about the Holocaust made in The Times by Gibson's father, Hutton Gibson, Rich accused the actor's camp of using "PR spin to defend a Holocaust denier."
Mel Gibson says of Rich, "I want to kill him. I want his intestines on a stick. ... I want to kill his dog." (Rich told us, through a Times spokeswoman, "I don't have a dog.")
The article says Gibson reluctantly took out a scene in which Caiaphas, a Jewish high priest, says of Christ, "His blood be on us, and on our children." The passage, from the Gospel of Matthew, has been interpreted by some as implicating the Jewish people in Jesus' Crucifixion.
"I wanted it in," Gibson tells Boyer. "But, man, if I included that in there, they'd be coming after me at my house, they'd come kill me."
I think we've answered the "is Mel Gibson an anti-Semite?" question.