Steven I. Weiss asks Discovery Institute fellow and Forward columnist David Klinghoffer about Mel Gibson's antisemitic outburst:
Booze goes in, truth comes out. Yes, it does seem that Gibson has an anti-Semitism problem as of this past weekend. What we don’t and can’t know is whether, if he’d got drunk three years ago and been pulled over for DUI by Malibu cops, he’d also have delivered a disgusting anti-Semitic rant. Is it possible that he wasn’t an anti-Semite before making the Passion, but that the continual and deeply personal attacks on him from the ADL and the
rest of the Jewish establishment affected his feelings about Jews? Yes, I would say that’s possible …
Could Gibson have become antisemitic because of Abe Foxman and Rabbi Marvin Hier? Sure, in theory this is possible, but unprovable. And because it cannot be proved, it cannot be disproved. Gibson may be a johnny-come-lately to Jew-hatred, and one day a pig may fly. Until then, the words of Christopher Hitchens win the day:
[T]he difference between the blood-alcohol levels—and indeed the speed limits—that occasioned the booking are insufficient to explain the expletives…One does not abruptly decide, between the first and second vodka, or the ticks of the indicator of velocity, that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion are valid after all.…
Gibson is a pig, and he has not left ground.
Like Michael Medved, Klinghoffer is a disciple of Rabbi Daniel Lapin.