THE-MEL-GIBSON-AS-HOLOCAUST-DENIER MEME rears its ugly head again. In The Nation, Katha Pollitt has an essay on The Passion of the Christ which is provocatively titled "The Protocols of Mel Gibson" (via Bible and Interpretation News). It includes the following paragraph (my emphasis):

You'd think it was impolite to make anything of the fact that Gibson's father is a Holocaust denier who claims the European Jews simply moved to Australia. True, we don't choose our parents, but Mel Gibson has not only not dissociated himself from his father's views but indirectly affirmed them ("The man never lied to me in his life," he told Peggy Noonan in Reader's Digest; pressed to affirm that the Holocaust was real, he replied that many people died in World War II and some were Jews--the classic Holocaust-revisionist two-step). Nor would it do to dwell on the "traditional" (i.e., ultra right-wing) Catholicism Gibson practices, which specifically rejects the reforms of Vatican II, presumably including its repudiation of the belief that "the Jews" are collectively responsible for the death of Christ.

As has been pointed out in the link in the header to this post, Gibson has explicitly affirmed in his interview with Diane Sawyer that the Holocaust happened:

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.

Now Pollitt has a lot of criticisms of the movie that are correct (and a lot that I suspect are correct but won't know for sure until I see it myself). Why couldn't she stick to those? Why does she have to be so eager to find some reason to make Gibson a Holocaust denier as well? The inaccuracy in this paragraph undermines an understanding of the movie that otherwise is supported with some good arguments.

UPDATE: I should add that The Nation seems not to have e-mail addresses for communicating with its editors or individual writers. Instead it has a form for letters to the editor which demands an intrusive amount of personal information. That's not a good way to encourage feedback and corrections. If anyone out there has an e-mail address for Katha Pollitt, I'll be happy to drop her a note to alert her to my comments in this post.

UPDATE (21 March): Mark Goodacre points out some additional flaws in the article and concludes "This is a very poor piece of journalism."