It has been said that Mel Gibson should be eternally punished, in some unspecified way, for having on several drugged or drunk occasions, said, or shouted, several anti-Semitic things, for having said or shouted several Jew-hating and Jew-baiting things, while working on a screenplay about some Jewish heroes, with a man with a Jewish wife and son.
It has been said he had no right to say or feel these things, and he shouldn’t be allowed near the subject he is making, or was making, a film about.
As a descendant of twenty million Jews I have a problem with this. I’m not sure we should punish anyone for what is after all, in Orwell’s expression, Thoughtcrime. If we can do this we surely have to go on to the next stage, which is burning Mein Kampf, and the books of David Irving, in the public square. And the poems of TS Eliot and Ezra Pound.
And the novels of Charles Dickens.
Freedom of speech is not just the freedom to say acceptable things. It is absolute, and covers Moonies, Greenies, Jehovah’s Witnesses who rail against blood transfusions, Mormons who used to believe in twelve-year-old brides, and Cardinal Pell who hopes Hell is empty and even Hitler, I guess, is out on day-leave now. It includes the freedom to hate, and hate as a generality.
Does a Changi survivor who saw his best mate beheaded have the right to hate the Japanese, as a generality? Does a Jewish woman, like one I know (her name, absurdly, Eva Braun), who saw the smoke that used to be her parents go up in the sky over Auschwitz have a right to hate the Germans, as a generality? Do Carlton supporters have a right to hate, whatever that means, Collingwood supporters, as a generality? Do their victims have a right to hate, as a generality, the Scientologists who against their protests aborted them for having insufficient thetans? As a generality?
Will somebody answer this please.
Because if the answer is, in any of these cases, yes, it must then mean that a Gazan man whose wife and infant daughter were killed by an IDF helicopter-gunship at midnight in mistake for someone else, has the right to hate Jews as a generality.
I need arguments against this proposition.
I do not say Mel Gibson has just cause for his intermittent hatred of Jews, or that his father does. I only suggest it is within his human rights to have, and express, such feelings.
He was not so anti-Semitic in the past. He played Biff in Death of a Salesman, a play by a Jew, with a Jewish co-star, Warren Mitchell. He made four Lethal Weapons, whose director of photography was called Goldblatt, and whose producer was called Joel Silver. He made The Passion of the Christ, a story of a heroic Jew, in the languages he actually spoke, Aramaic and Latin, with Maia Morgenstern, a practising Jew from Romania, as the Virgin Mary. He has striven for eight years to make a Maccabees film, about a family one might describe as the Jewish Castros of their day.
But he may believe, like a hundred million Protestant and Catholic Americans, that the Jews will burn a billion years in Hell if they do not convert, and still have a trillion years to go. It seems wrong to me, a sort of Jew, and likewise bound as an atheist for infinite burning, that he should be singled out for vilification when a hundred million others, a hundred and fifty million others, perhaps, and a billion more in the Middle East and Africa, are by this definition as anti-Semitic as he. Why not go after Billy Graham? Why not go after George Bush, who likewise believes the Jews must be converted, or fry in Hell?
What does this bizarre Tinseltown vendetta add up to? To the idea, simply, that the punishment of Mel Gibson must be henceforth without end.
In medieval times, he would have been put in the stocks for two days and pelted with rotten vegetables, and then let go about his business.
But, for some of us, alas, the thirteenth century has not yet dawned, and the unstrained mercy Christ and Shakespeare spoke of — you must love even those who revile and persecute you — is a hundred years away.
And it’s a pity.
Name:
Thank you, Bob, for what has become rare intelligence over this stuff, especially in the midst of the Dawkins v. Pell ’15 minutes of news’ public interest. There most certainly IS a Cosmic Force – it is the limitless capacity for humans to wreak suffering on others. We have come face to face with that god, and just won’t admit it. The implications are unpalatable. Best, JW.
If you are the John Ward who played in Alex Buzo’s cricket team against a team containing Mel Gibson, bless you.
Any remembrance of his ability in slips that accords with mine would be appreciated.
What about KKK members yelling racist epithets at Afro-American children, does that pass the “generality” test?
Probably not. It comes under the verbalising of physical threat. Mel has never threatened any Jew that I know of, not Warren Mitchell, not Joel Silver, not Arthur Miller, not Maia Morgenstern his Jewish Romanian Virgin Mary.
What he does comes under ‘fuming’. If there is any instance in his fifty-six years of threatening or punching or glassing any Jew can you tell me what it is?
He is certainly guilty of drunken vituperation but so, I think, are we all.
I met an old Greek man on one of the islands on the Aegean many years ago. He refused to speak to young German backpackers because of the sins of their grandparents, and the occupation of his island home in WWII.
Part of me understood him, part of me thought him a fool. It is easy to hate Germans, Moonies, Jews, it is so much harder to hate individuals. If we continue to think of people as nothing more than representatives of an abstract concept first, what hope do we have at all. I am a human being first, being an Australian, Caluthumpian, Anglo Saxon etc is so far down the list, it hardly matters.
I’ve never reckoned Gibson as an actor, there is a metallic sheen to all of his film portrayals I have seen that I dislike. I have no answer for your questions in regard to Gibson, is it ok for the Klan member to think of black children as less than human without uttering a word? Your right about thoughtcrime,but we live in an a world governed by incrementalism, it is just a matter of time before we willingly censure our own thoughts from a sense of duty.
Is it right for you to think of a foetus as less than human, and cut its life away?
In my view it is not right, but I otherwise believe it is YOUR right to think of it — him, her — in this way. Many young Israelis think of Arabs as less than human — cockroaches, and the rest of it. Is it their right to think in this way?
I am trapped inside the logic, and I think it is.
How about you?
Mel is a good actor. You never saw his Biff, or Tim, or Harry, or his Man With No Face.
Hamlet, fuck him and what he did to us. Thoughts, words, actions, mayhem.
Why didn’t someone report Breivik,when he undoubtedly uttered words that fueled his intention to friends or acquaintences, or smack Hitler in the mouth when he ranted in the homeless men’s dormitories in Vienna, when once again he bored his cohabitors with another tirade against the Jews.
We have to get ourselves right before we set out to right the world.
I see the attraction of blind obedience a la North Korea as being a viable alternative.
“As a descendant of twenty million Jews I have a problem with this.”
What bollocks. What lies and frauds is this you perpetuate, sir? Were you born a Jew, of a Jewish mother? If not, then you are no more a ‘descendent’ than I am a member of the Imperial Russian Czars because some big-cocked Cossack raped great-great-great auntie Hilderblouse one dank, dark night in the Urals.
You are not a descendent. What you are is a fucking phony.
You ‘claim’ to be Jewish how exactly? You married into a converted family – is that your fiction? If so, that is a fraud. If I marry a woman whose parent converted from Islam, I am not a descendent of the prophet Mohammad nor indeed can I claim to be a Muslim, or nearly a Muslim.
You accused me of being nasty, well j’accuse of being a fake.
Judaism is passed on maternal lines from people who practice and identify with that religion. Not converts. Not those who reject a religion, become another, and then decades later some woe-begotten loin-fruit jumps up with his prayer shawl and matzo ball soup and says ‘look at me, I’m one of you, so I have a right to defend some anti-Semitic wife beating Holocaust denying fuckweasel’.
You’re a Christian Bob. Remember all those stories about being brought up believing in Jesus and being picked on ‘cause you belong to a branch of Christianity that isn’t popular? Does that ring a bell, or were you secretly playing with your dreidel behind the school dunny pretending you were wandering through the Sinai with Moses.
Go ahead, make my day. Tell us about your mother’s Jewish teachings, tell us about your Jewish family life, less us about your Bar Mitzvah. Tell us about your Passover last week.
Next Week: Bob Ellis reveals his lesbian tendencies
Hm. As I told you yesterday, my grandmother Rachel Larkman, of Polish-Jewish descent, had twenty million Jewish ancestors. She converted to another Sabbatarian religion, Seventh Day Adventism, the one I was raised in, the one with the same diet strictures and Sabbath as Jewry. The convention is that my father was a Jew and I am not.
I didn’t say I was a Jew, I said I was ‘nearly’ a Jew, with, however, twenty million Jewish relatives, a thousand of them, probably, dead in the Holocaust.
By your defintion Woody Allen is not Jewish, nor Phillip Roth, nor Mel Brooks, nor Dustin Hoffman, nor Arthur Miller.
What an anti-Semitic thing to say.
You apologised to me yesterday.
Who told you to change your mind?
Your view that I am not a Jew because I don’t deserve to be is, on the face of it, anti-Semitic.
And reminiscent of Andrew Bolt.
Discuss.
Arabs are semites but jews have hijacked the term.
You simply cannot be the descendent of believers in a religion they invented.
Read Shlomo Sand’s “Who Invented the jews” before shooting me.
I could say that I am the descendent of 20 million Lutherans but that is not the truth, I am the descendent of 20 million or so Silesian citizens, millions of Welsh, Irish, English, French and Cornish citizens.
I am not and cannot be the descendent of people who choose to follow some deluded religion, all of which were invented by men to subjugate women.
Very interesting Marilyn. I hold your view to extents but also realize that other days got the bravest warriors, whole armies,voluntarily- every woman, to run under community umbrella’s of religious togetherness and demanded standards.And all prey and beg a multitude of entities for fear relief, safety and gentle life and passing in a wild world.
Religious habits have taken a turn here from modern amenity, police force, telephone etc than the flocks rubbing together in solidarity like frightened horses. Then going home to brave living alone in wilderness amongst wandering anger, alcohol, sword,other groups ambitions on them, and fist.
That so much past total necessity for safety and peace and tribal village biorhythm persists by habit and in some cases – convenience is a problem of peace and politics today. Overhang.
Where we have grown and built away from frail survival, old education, the oppression of women today was a total necessity and totally woman voluntary necessity in other days of dangers.Each region shaped the human bounds for survival.
And it is an immense toll of warriors, mostly male, that bring us away from other days necessary and voluntary frictions and course uneducated rules but were the bounds and steps for survival.
What will it take and what attitude of education is needed to relieve male and female of stigma,fears, habits and heritage enforcements of unnecessary old world bounds without bloodshed ?
That is the chore today not to single out and condemn the men netted as well. The opportunism of men doesn’t go unnoticed here but neither does their founded fears of change and heritage or the very big one. The endless Human nature.
Presidents and Prime ministers the world over would thank for answers.
Such problems kill the Earth and futures as matters go unaddressed and waylaid by, in many cases now, what has become hypocrisy through time and centuries changes.
Thanks for that, I nearly choked on my chicken soup.
So your converted grandmother was once Jewish but no longer and that gives you bragging rights? Sorry, I’m still laughing at 6 millions degrees of separation.
You’re a Seventh Day Adventist. Note the difference, your lot believe in Jesus and that’s a bit of an issue with the Hebes. You don’t keep kosher, lop the end of your nob off for religious purposes, shun Christmas and Easter and think the Messiah is still awaiting his boarding pass.
But go ahead, don the yarmulke and tzizit. If that makes you ‘nearly’ Jewish, that’s just a mitzvah.
I’m nearly Keith Richards, given I own every Rolling Stones album and saw them in New York in 1969 at Madison Square Garden.
Also, and please don’t take this the wrong way when I call you flatulent and spurious, but Woody Allen’s mother, and Phillip Roth’s, and Mel Brooks – well they were Jewish! Amazing I know. And they worshipped too, in the synagogue. With other real life Jews; not ‘nearly’ ones, but actual flesh and bones Hebrews.
You see you bumbling bumbleheaded bumbrain, it’s the practicing mother’s line that makes one a Hebe or not. Not some grandmother convert.
But believe what you like, it just makes you look more like an apologist for a Holocaust denier and anti-Semite.
They WERE Jewish but they gave it away. They are, or were, agnostics now. So what does that make them? Like me, or like their fathers and forebears?
If like me, how can you say, you impolite person, that I’m not like them?
You’re getting very narrow in your focus, Terrance.
Why not answer the basic question, do we have the right, the human right, to hate a nation, or not?
Or should Louis Mountbatten be vilified for barring Japanese from his funeral?
No-one has the right to hate any nation.
But it is easy as hell to hate America who encourages us to hate and kill anyone they don’t like,
Are you saying that nobody has the right to hate any nation but America?
Is there not a difference between being born into a religion and undertaking the rituals (Bar Mitzvah etc) and then later rejecting religion; to not being born into that religion, not converting, and then claiming you are somehow ‘nearly’ of that faith?
To me this is akin to someone having a sex change and identifying with the opposite sex to their birth, as opposed to someone once dressing up and claiming they are transgender.
You have no rights to make this claim unless you practice or convert.
And can you show me proof that Allen, Roth etc are not Jews? I find this preposterous. You cannot make this assertion based on their movies or books – these are fictions and comedies. That’s like saying Mel Gibson is a police officer because he acts like one.
Face it Bob, you’ve over stretched here. You are not, have never been, and never were of the Hebrew faith. You never practiced that religion, grew up identifying with that religions or schooled your children in that religion.
You are making this ‘claim’ simply to defend your friend, the nasty Nazi-like anti-Semite.
I find this beneath a man of your learning and intellect and urge you to think through your motives.
He’s not my friend, we had a public fight in which I said on camera, ‘Brave heart, lame brain’ and we haven’t spoken in, oh, thirteen years.
Let us imagine you’re right and in spite of my Jewish father I have no affinity with that people. Let us imagine that your equivalent of Holocaust Denial is true. I’m Gentile through and through, masquerading, dissembling, a Nazi in a yamulke and a long red beard.
Let us then imagine, Terrance, that I never existed. Let us imagine that I am not here. Let us imagine then that somebody else, however, asked the basic question:
‘Did the survivors of the Seige of Nanking have a right, or no right, to hate the Japanese people because of the slaughter there in 1937? ‘
Is there a human right, or no human right, to hate a nation?
What would your answer be?
My answer would be yes, you are right that they would hate.
My father in law fought the Japanese and hated them for the next 60 years.
In Vietnam I saw hate against all Asians, in the Middle East hate for both Israelis and Palestinians because of war and death and suicide bombers.
So I see your point and I do not take issue – hate is the emotion many of us feel from the point of being victim.
But Mel Gibson is not the victim of some crime against humanity. He was not in war, in a war torn country. He never took up arms, nor his home invaded, his womenfolk defiled, his livelihood vanquished. So where does his hatred come from?
It is immaterial, and it may be none of your business. It may be connected with his diagnosed manic depression, his diagnosed alcoholism, his crazy father’s crazy religion.
He hasn’t killed anyone. He hasn’t punched anyone. He’s given a lot of talented Jews a lot of work.
Get out of his life.
Terence, I have “Jewish” blood in the lineage amongst a sound bitsa base. Scottish, Irish ,Welsh, German, English, Scandinavian, Chinese,Prussian. What is a human called that doesn’t practice Jewish Religion but is born of the race that carries it?
jim: “born of the race that carries it”.
What race is that, Jim? Is a blue eyed blonde Polish Jew of the same race as a dark eyed dark haired Hungarian Jew? Or just of the same religion?
I don’t know for sure but the lineage is interesting. Many may marry into it. As much as racial physical difference played a part in turmoil’s the world over, so too did tolerance. The original tribes of the religion had a range of skin and race. Easy to see from the region position and those whose colour ranges have long lineage.
As long as religious turmoil keeps it’s head down, to itself, and strives to better and grow humanely, rid itself of choking traditions and blend peaceably into the world, I am happy. I’ve no time for it’s violent obsessions at all. My 50 years here have been born into the newspapers full of the ridiculous turmoil.I’m sick of it.
Jim, you can call yourself whatever you like. You call call yourself African-American or say you’re a direct descendent of King Julip III of Angola, only some people may think you’re a crackpot or fruit-loop.
You can say you’re a Buddhist who eats meat, drinks booze and believes spirituality can be found on the 9 Network.
And in return, people can laugh at you, think you’re a nut, think you make shit up in order to make bogus claims or say shit that others can’t.
You can fly to America and go around calling black folk “nigger” in Atlanta and when they beat the crap out of you, tell them your grandmother was once black but she converted to white, bro, so tru dat Holmes.
Rabbi Ellis can call himslef ‘nearly’ Jewish, ‘nearly’ Aboriginal, ‘nearly’ sober, ‘nearly’ a defender of race hate; heck he can call himself Tinkerbell and walk around in a florid tutu singing the theme song from The Last Waltz for all I care – but in return he invites ridicule, scorn, contempt, and a devaluing of his intellect.
It’s called free speech.
I enjoy your free speech.
I would say that tribalism and holding and selling branded stigma’s still inflicts the Earth.
To Terrance:
No, it’s your equivalent of Holocaust Denial.
Ellis’s Jewish grandmother never lived. Her Polish relatives never died. In spite of his twenty million Jewish ancestors, and his interest in the subject and his five Jewish girlfriends in former days, and his omniverous reading of the Old Testament, Ellis has no affinity with the Jewish people.
You sound crazier and crazier, and more and more like David Irving.
I’m not a Jew – raised Anglican.
But so you had girlfriends, so you had a relative who was one… so what? You wrote that you were ‘nearly’ a religion based on some converted forebear and that gave you the right to defend Gibson, to claim the concentration camp victims as a part of your identity and belief system.
It’s a phony to claim you are akin with some group because you read about them, date them, maybe once way back when one of you may have said they were one.
Go to Harlem. Tell the brothers you’ve read lots about them, you love Sammy Davis Jr, Ella Fitzgerald, President Obama, the Harlem Globetrotters and James Baldwin; how you shagged some of the sisters, feel like you’re with them, oppressed like, funky.
Is that the same? Can you also be nearly black or feel black no matter how much you read, see, know, live with – or it something you have to have based on practiced culture, race, religion, ethnicity. Can you feel Greek, or Bosnian if you marry one or read a lot about them?
I don’t think so, but maybe you can.
But if you claim to be Jewish, or can speak on their behalf, then you should also practice the faith and not just mouth platitudes.
A Jew is not a religion, he is the son of a person descended from Abraham. It is not a religious term. Disraeli, an Anglican, was also a Jew. Kissinger, an agnostic, is also a Jew.
Get off your idiot denialist planet and tell us about Mel’s freedom of speech.
Does he have it? Or not?
I am not speaking on their behalf. About eighty percent of them disagree with me.
I merely said I had some sense of how they felt.
That’s right Colonel Clink.
Comparing me with a dumb loyal soldier of the Third Reich, are you?
Wow.
Is the discussion semantic?
The difference between saying “I am near to soldiers who were in the trenches in WW1″, and saying “I am a near soldier in the trenches in WW1″.
Bob Ellis, let me conclude our discourse thus.
Mel Gibson is a deranged, dangerous race-hater, a violent man, a wife-beater (alleged) and a vile human being, according to some who know him.
Imagine was a great song too,
So let him be kicked out, shunned, excluded, fucked up the arse, sent to Iran to make Afterdinnerjacket bio-pics, let him go against his faith and top himslef, who gives a shit.
Most of his films are sadistic, violent rubbish. He’s a washed up, narcisstic cunt and if he dropped down dead tomorrow I wouldn’t care.
You, on the other hand, are an entertaining, literate writter whose contribution leaves Gisbon’s for dog food.
Don’t stoop to defend the gutter dweller. Rise up man, you’re 10 times better than Mel!
No, you said I was a fraudster, a charlatan, a Nazi bullhorn in Jew’s clothing, a fabricator of my grandmother’s lineage and an exploiter of my dead sister. You said I was a friend of Mel’s, a hater of Jews and a liar with no reputation left. I bore this patiently, for patience is the badge of all our tribe, while you said Mel should be fucked up the arse and sent to Iran for beating his wife and making lousy Oscar winning movies that were all of them violent rubbish.
Do you know what you are saying, and how much I could sue you for if I chose, and Mel could sue you for? Mel has committed no crime and you call for his ‘exclusion’ from human company. Do you not comprehend what legal danger you are in? Do you not understand your likely plea, that you were drunk, is Mel’s plea too?
You don’t get it, do you?
What a fool you are. Mel at least admits his violent language. You just keep it spurting out.
I might just see you in court.
ELLIS: Suing is the hobby of the rich.
Apocalypto is a brilliant movie.
Now THAT’s class warfare for you, Bob.
I ask Terrance to withdraw his many heinous libels of Mel, lest I ask Mel’s lawyers to go after him.
And to go easier on me. I am, after all, the son of a Jew and my people have suffered enough.
I am a daughter of Finnish Lutherans, a total Finn from the paternal side and some Swedish ancestors from mum’s side.
No persecusions before I started blogging, now every one is after one’s blood…
I love Crowded House and Tim Finn.
We’ll have to nickname you Huckleberry.
Of course a man has a right to his thoughts and feelings. It should go without saying. (But I love how you said it, Bob….and you said you never sue, remember?)
To Terrance: Practise what you preach re: getting out of the gutter – calling people “c…”s.
Perhaps we should all abandon this thread before we say something we may regret?
Is it really worth the aggravation?
Some of Terrance’s comebacks and disputes with Bob crack me up and worth framing.
Well, we all certainly got to the bottom of that one. Many angles many answers. Now who’s going to sew Joe and Mel back together?
The joke of it is, as the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand (mentioned by Marilyn) points out in’The Invention of the Jewish People’ it was only after Christinity came on the scene did Jews stop converting others and made the ‘rule’ about having to be descended from the mother’s religion. Before that it was a missionary religion just like Christianity and Islam have become. Whole regions of Africa and Europe were ‘converted’ by a king’s whim or by conquest.
I see no apology from Terrance for calling me a pro-Nazi false Jew exploiter of my dead sister and Holocaust denier. He should know how illegal this is.
He should apologise to Mel too, a significant employer of Jews, including one who played the Virgin Mary, for urging he leave the film industry and recommending that he be fucked up the arse and sent to his death in Iran.
He should understand that this violent language is as bad as what he accuses Mel of, and in the case of my dead sister Margaret Jean Ellis, 1930-1953, worse.
Okay then Bobby boy
I apologise that you, a 7th Day Advertist, claim you are a Yid and your people, the Jewish Adventists, dies in Nazi Germany.
I apologise for not knowing 7th Day Advertisers are really Jewish and you all suffer equally.
I apologise for not realising you were a practicing member of that faith and that I accused you of being raised as a member of the Christian sect. Your stories of being an Adventist threw me
I apologise because some of Mel’s best friends are Hebes. No really, he let some of them work on his films, he may have shared a meal with some … like the Boers of South Africa with the Kafir workmen, he actually doesn’t hate them all, no really, just the ‘other’ ones. He let them work on his films, my god, he’s an Oscar Schindler in disguise!
I apologise to Mel that you think the Holocaust was “mostly bullshit”. Obviously that is your right to deny the deaths of millions, but it is not my right to tell him to get f**ked. I see the issue here: deaths of 6 million vs insult. I see now my insult is a crime and I should be sued for it. To deny the Holocaust, while a crime in Germany, is in fact welcome here in your world. I see that and apologise.
Like John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, what I wrote is vile, uncalled for, offensive and I deserve to be taken to court for free speech, something Mr Ellis passionately opposes.
I apologise to Mel for suggesting that when he went to court for domestic violence, that this was in some way “a crime”. Heck no, beat away Mel, I got that one real wrong, obviously. And when you allegedly said you’d stab the mother of your child, mate, I knew you were joshing, so did the 15 year old you said it to. You, you’re such a prankster Mel!! My fault for misunderstanding the stabbing the c**t jibe. Silly silly me.
And to Mr Ellis, I grovel under the threat of legal action. My knees tremble. You and Mel – lover of all mankind (except Libs, Gerard Henderson, David Williamson, Murdoch, Newspoll) – I have much to learn from your humanity. You hate not, you and Mel love all and my words crossed the line. I see that now too. I am chaste.
Mel, all is forgiven. You are a Righteous Gentile. A tree will be planted in an Israeli forest in your name. You once employed a Jew, god bless you son. They may have faked the death camps, but you employed some of them. Boy of boy did I get the jew-hate rants wrong.
I have just booked economy call ticket to hell, where I will burn for the sin of contradicting the Great One.
Excellent, truly heartfelt apology. Mel and Bob should praise your name and cry “oy vey!”
Doug Quixote damn you! You took those words right out of my mouth. A classic in ersatz apologia. Now can we all get some sleep!
To Terrance:
You are making it truly hard for me to like you.
No, the Adventists followed to the letter the Jewish dietary laws and the hours of their Sabbath and embraced, as you rightly point out, the Nazarene Messiah and his virgin mother. They are the Christian sect most like the Jews which my Jewish grandmother joined because of the resemblance.
No Adventists died in the Holocaust to the best of my knowledge, though it is rumoured a good few Jews did, among them some, not all, of my Jewish grandmother’s relatives, and my father’s, and consequently mine. I will see how many Larkmans there were in the ovens and let you know.
I doubt if Mel has denied the Holocaust. It is certain his father has. He may dispute the numbers of the dead. If you have evidence that he denied the whole thing (‘mostly’ is the operative word in Joe’s account of his view of it) please ring the Los Angeles Police and tell them what you know.
I address your attention to my column about Mary, the Mother of Christ, being played by a practising Jew at Mel’s insistence, and how this casts doubt on the virulence and constancy of his hatred of Jews.
I ask you now to call for the public burning of the work of Phillip Larkin, a pro-Nazi in World War Two and an unreconstructed proto-fascist through all his life. I ask you also to call for the banning of Dickens’s two anti-Semitic novels Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, and the banning of all public performance of the music of the anti-Semite Wagner. If Mel is to be punished for his opinions with the violence you advocate, buggering, strangling and so forth, then Phillip, Charles and Richard should surely suffer, albeit posthumously, likewise.
I also ask you to call for the banning of all religions that assert the Jews must convert, or burn for a billion years in hell.
I am, as it happens, in contact on another matter with Mel’s co-producer Mark Gooder at Icon, and I will ask him if he has time to read what you have said and if he is inclined to ring Mel’s lawyers and tell them you said in print that he should be fucked up the arse and imprisoned and hanged in Iran. They may think this of little importance in the present context of a world-wide campaign go drive their client to suicide; or, on the other hand, they may not.
I now patiently ask you to clean up your apology, removing the libel and violent language and have it in these columns in an hour or so, lest I make the relevant phone call by the close of business today, Tuesday the seventeenth of April, 2012.
Terrance? Where are you?
Terrance, you have some issues you need to work out with yourself. I have a friend who is not Jewish but his full blooded sister is. Them’s Jewish rules. A practicing Jew probably has more ideological conviction regarding the holocaust but no more emotional connection than anyone who’s family was directly involved. The holocaust does have an inherent ideological component because the Jews were so specifically targeted and the reasons for that were so firmly rooted in German history. But as a race, it’s the same as any other whereby certain instincts and forms of knowledge, possibly even certain forms of memory, get passed on genetically. I am one eighth German, I should know. My people were from Hanover. I originally had my fingers crossed for Leipzig but whatever.
The Jews deny Jesus, Some Christians deny the holocaust. It’s all for children.
The Iroquois (not their real name), a conglomeration of tribes ruled by a league council with veto power in the hands of women, used to adopt all the remaining members of a conquered tribe and treat them as family to make up for all the original tribe members who had been lost in the fighting. They really expanded their power base that way.
So too did Aboriginal.
The Red Chief by Ion Idriess. A recommended good read. Girl theft was common too.
The Iroquois were a highly politicised people. They did deals with the French to get the better of enemies, and at other times the English. Long before the Europeans they were “consolidating” their fur trade and business interests. I was making reference in the political sense, from what I gather, Native Americans were much more cosmopolitan and at the centre of things than Aboriginal people, who apart from maybe some interaction with Indonesians, were alone for so long. Perhaps Native Americans were more empire minded, as the Maori were more culturally elitist, almost snobbish, if you consider the meeting between a Maori man and Aboriginal people that was arranged back in early settlement days. Aboriginal history is a whole other entity unto itself and is not for outsiders to fathom, it’s a secret culture.
I was trying to be vaguely politically relevant. What has “girl theft” got to do with anything? You throw it in there like a piece of salacious gossip. This is exactly like what happened to Mel Gibson.
Aboriginal was owned and shaped by the land much more than people figure.Seasons, rain. The depth of it opens new doorways if you can experience it and take it in.
I mentioned girl stealing because of tribe expansion in your terms of tribe politics. Not meaning to demean anyone, I think it’s a great idea.
The Red Chief is a true history of a tribal chief narrated by an old man to Ion Idriess. An accurate insight.
Jim, can you write a sentence please that does not require deciphering? If you continue speaking in tongues I will have to ban you for life.
I will be seventy soon, and have no time for gobbledigook.
Bob, it is complex; excuse me Jim, may I rewrite it :
The Aboriginal race was owned by the land, rather than owning the land. Their society was shaped by their environment far more than most people consider; things like the seasons, such as they are, with long droughts and periods of rain and flood all contributed to shaping their society. The depth of the ownership opens new doors of perception, especially if you can experience it for yourself.
Reader1, you said that the Iroquois “used to adopt all the remaining members of a conquered tribe and treat them as family to make up for all the original tribe members who had been lost in the fighting” so I referred to girl stealing. I did not want to demean anyone, simply to agree with your statement.
The Red Chief is a true historical account as related by an old man to Ion Idriess; it seems to me to be an accurate insight.
You didn’t say it, Doug, it was jim, and his explanation that he quite likes the practice satisfactorily explains where he is coming from. Indigenous cultures weren’t perfect in the peacenik, rainbow sense but all cultures of antiquity dabbled in the spirit world, all using thematically the same elements. Spooky.
I merely rewrote Jim’s post.
‘Spooky’ in a way Reader1, but we are all human beings; recent documentaries have analysed DNA and conclude that all of us descended (ascended?) from a few hundred individuals in Africa.
So it necessarily follows that we all react in similar ways to psychotropic substances, to stimulus deprivation and to trauma – hence the same “spirituality” comes to us all.
“Thematically the same elements” as you put it so well.
Reader1 ,my post of the matter is below. I have had a code to type with three lll or III’s:) My postings are out of order.
Below in a minute explanation,is my religion.My love. Man’s verbal, survival and self serving political politics, to me is an abomination to the whole nature of “god” first translation- the wind.The whole. People and priests can parrot what they’re taught, apply it with abuse and demand to others but they know nothing of the whole of what they parrot praying to.
Religion of men is mostly standards and politics in verbal of and for the naked ape’s nature and power.
The whole is magnificent.
I doubt that the Iroquois Confederacy was alone in the bride stealing caper, Reader1 and Jim. Many tribes all over the world raided their neighbours, took cattle and women, and slaves. History is such fun!
In fact it is going on even today – Dateline last night showed (India) Indians taking back a girl abducted by a nearby rival clan.
Thanks Doug. That was legible but without knowledge or the book it may look as double dutch as some others topics do. Others lack of knowledge. More than self explanatory.
It was a short note because you have to experience it and people don’t get it or true aboriginal spirituality. It is a book length long and some things are unexplainable as in another level. To be experienced. To see with your own eyes. To feel.Delve in nature and anthropomorphism, what would shape a religion, a way of being amongst the “no choice ” matters.
One aspect. Budgie’s eggs hatch out the same day millet comes to head. They know in still air to the day, weeks, to couple of months away, when the winds will blow in what direction to disperse after breeding up. The hypothalymas gland reads surrounds, scents and weather and seasons like a computer and budgies as many other birds and animals and humans react. European man has had some adjusting to do here and to him, some actions are unexplainable. Animals do talk.Every movement, every sound. So does the weather. So does your surrounds.The creek, the trees, the grass, the mood of birds.Can the kinetics of all be worked? I know they can. Do people fully understand why many of the race have gone to pieces with European “help” ?
Tongue in cheek- yes I would like to go girl shopping.Today- two Taylor Swifts with honey and cream thank you very much.
jim: I think that some of what you speak of overlaps with the work of Rupert Sheldrake, a scientist with a difference.
I will look him up, thanks F.I.