Comments Elsewhere

David,

Here’s an example from around when the Passion came out:

“‘YOU’RE GOING to have to go on record. The Holocaust happened, right?’ Peggy Noonan asks of Mel Gibson in the Reader’s Digest for March.

Gibson: ‘I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. He worked in a concentration camp in France. Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century, 20 million people died in the Soviet Union.’”

The phrase “The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives, especially when followed by the gratuitous change of subject to the horrors of Marxist-Leninism in the 20th century, minimizes and obscures the nature of the mass murder of Jews under the Nazi regime. It is also typical of the kind of weaseling routinely engaged in by Holocaust denial outfits such as the IHR (in which something called the “Holocaust” is sometimes admitted to have happened, so long as the word “Holocaust” is revised to mean something other than what everyone else means when they say “the Holocaust”).

It is possible that Gibson could utter something like this without intending to go on record as denying or minimizing the Holocaust, but given the conversational context of the question (including accusations of anti-Semitism and the controversy over his father’s clearly Holocaust-denying views), Gibson certainly should have known that such a weasel-worded statement would be understood as Holocaust denial, and the fault for the misinterpretation, if it is a misinterpretation, lies on him, not on the reader.

David Bernstein has a good discussion at Volokh Conspiracy ( http://tinyurl.com/z74wt ).