Jackie Mason defends Mel Gibson, Ridicules Abe Foxman

On Your World (Neil Cavuto, FoxNews)

". . . this guy Abe Foxman, this head of the ADL. Another fake from top to bottom. I don’t talk about people, it’s not my nature, but he’s a total fake. Let’s be honest about it. Anybody who makes a life out of fighting racism in effect has to blow-up racism in order to justify himself and the job he has, otherwise he’d have to go to work. Otherwise he’d have to get up in the morning and get a real job."

Counterpunch, August 9, 2006

The Flogger recently opined that Congress, in giving practically unanimous support to Israel’s murder* of Lebanese noncombatants in retaliation for Hezbollah’s kidnapping of Israeli combatants, “made Mearsheimer and Walt prophets with honor.” With the last seven words a Jewish writer for The Nation, Norman Birnbaum, concurs:

The Israel lobby’s successful campaign coordinated with the Israeli Embassy, to persuade Congress to back the White House decision to give Israel a free field of fire in Lebanon can be read as an unintended postscript to another campaign: This spring professors John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard published in The London Review of Books and as a paper of the Kennedy School of Government an analysis of the “stranglehold” on US policy exerted by Israel's unconditional backers. Those backers responded with loud denunciations of the authors as malevolently anti-Semitic or (in the most benign of their criticisms) intellectually incompetent. . . .

Jehovah, for many American Jews, of course gets a respectful hearing—but Israeli prime ministers and chiefs of staff are taken to speak directly for the Lord of Hosts.

See the whole article, “Is Israel Good for the Jews?”

* “. . . killing the innocent, even if you know as a matter of statistical certainty that the things you do involve it, is not necessarily murder. . . . On the other hand, unscrupulousness in considering the possibilities turns it into murder.” G. E. M. Anscombe, “Mr. Truman’s Degree.”

The full text of the original 1956 pamphlet by G. E. M. Anscombe, "Mr. Truman's Degree," is now available online for the first time.

"For men to choose to kill the innocent as a means to their ends is always murder . . ."

Note Gibson's implicit subscription to the category of "intolerable thought."

For excellent commentary, see Michael Hoffman, "Let's Shed No Crocodile Tears for Mel Gibson."

Every minute spent on Gibson's drunken tirade diverts attention from Ohlmert's sober holocaust.

Gibson Apologizes, Appeals to Jewish Community for Help
From Associated Press, Times Staff Writer
8:30 AM PDT, August 1, 2006

Mel Gibson's statement, released to the news media early today, five days after his drunken driving arrest in Malibu:

There is no excuse, nor should there be any tolerance, for anyone who thinks or expresses any kind of anti-Semitic remark. I want to apologize specifically to everyone in the Jewish community for the vitriolic and harmful words that I said to a law enforcement officer the night I was arrested on a DUI charge.

I am a public person, and when I say something, either articulated and thought out, or blurted out in a moment of insanity, my words carry weight in the public arena. As a result, I must assume personal responsibility for my words and apologize directly to those who have been hurt and offended by those words.

The tenets of what I profess to believe necessitate that I exercise charity and tolerance as a way of life. Every human being is God's child, and if I wish to honor my God I have to honor his children. But please know from my heart that I am not an anti-Semite. I am not a bigot. Hatred of any kind goes against my faith.

I'm not just asking for forgiveness. I would like to take it one step further, and meet with leaders in the Jewish community, with whom I can have a one on one discussion to discern the appropriate path for healing.

I have begun an ongoing program of recovery and what I am now realizing is that I cannot do it alone. I am in the process of understanding where those vicious words came from during that drunken display, and I am asking the Jewish community, whom I have personally offended, to help me on my journey through recovery. Again, I am reaching out to the Jewish community for its help. I know there will be many in that community who will want nothing to do with me, and that would be understandable. But I pray that that door is not forever closed.

This is not about a film. Nor is it about artistic license. This is about real life and recognizing the consequences hurtful words can have. It’s about existing in harmony in a world that seems to have gone mad.