MEL GIBSON AND THE HOLOCAUST: This is one I missed. On 30 January the New York Post reported the following exchange between interviewer Peggy Noonan and Mel Gibson. It appears that the whole interview hasn't been published in full. At least I couldn't find it online.

January 30, 2004 -- '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."

Blogger David Bernstein of the Volokh Conspiracy is disquieted by the quotation, which never quite comes out and says that, yes, millions of Jews were murdered in an attempt at genocide. Bernstein thinks this sounds suspiciously like the carefully phrased waffling of the Holocaust deniers. See his post, "Mel Gibson: Holocaust Denier?"

UPDATE: Reader Paul Connors e-mails:

Re: MEL GIBSON AND THE HOLOCAUST

In the article you refer to in your recent blog, David Bernstein said last
month of Mel Gibson: "if someone would ask him directly, 'do you believe
that the Germans murdered approximately six million Jews during World War
II' and he said 'yes' I would leave it at that."

In the more recent and well-known interview with Diane Sawyer (transcript
here:

http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/sixtyminutes/stories/2004_02_22/story_1034.asp
Mel Gibson clearly agrees that six million "defenceless and innocent Jews"
had died in concentration camps in "an atrocity of monumental proportion".

So he does. I'm afraid I haven't been keeping up with Gibson interviews. The full quote in context is:

DIANE SAWYER: Gibson's father, Hutton Gibson, age 85, who has written books and a newsletter with some decidedly provocative terms of phrase. He has called the Pope "Garrulous Karolus, the Koran kisser". And in that New York Times magazine interview, he seemed to be questioning the scope of the holocaust, sceptical that six million Jews had died. What does Gibson think?

MEL GIBSON: Do I believe that there were concentration camps where defenceless and innocent Jews died cruelly under the Nazi regime? Of course I do, absolutely. It was an atrocity of monumental proportion.

DIANE SAWYER: And you believe there were millions, six million, millions?

MEL GIBSON: Sure.

DIANE SAWYER: I think people wondered if your father's views were your views on this.

MEL GIBSON: Their whole agenda here, my detractors, is to drive a wedge between me and my father and it's not going to happen. I love him. He's my father.

DIANE SAWYER: And you will not speak publicly about him beyond that.

MEL GIBSON: I am tight with him. He's my father. Got to leave it alone, Diane. Got to leave it alone.

I'm relieved to see the clarification. One of David Bernstein's readers suggested that Gibson's careful phrasing in the first quote was to try to avoid personal conflict with his father. Perhaps that's right.