IS MEL GIBSON A HOLOCAUST DENIER? His dad has certainly been described that way, but I don't believe in guilt by association. Men as diverse as Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan have had awful fathers, but that doesn't mean that their sins get automatically passed down to their sons. But David Frum has some disturbing quotes by Gibson about the Holocaust. As Frum writes, both Peggy Noonan and Diane Sawyer pitched him softball questions about the subject, "to give him an easy chance to show that he does not share his father’s disdain for the murdered Jews of Europe. Yet Gibson declined to avail himself of these chances. I can’t help wondering why."

Me neither. And while I take many things printed by Fleet Street with a large grain of salt, these quotes of Gibson in The Telegraph (by way of Andrew Sullivan) are equally disturbing.

Jami Bernard of The New York Daily News is having to deal with an enormous backlash as a result of her negative review of The Passion, and her comments that The Passion "is the most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II".

My own take, and my wife's, are much more sympathetic to the movie. But Gibson's comments are very, very disturbing.

UPDATE: As is this.

ANOTHER UPDATE: William Safire also has some thoughts.