[imagesource: FanShare]

The news that Mel Gibson is an anti-Semitic halfwit isn’t, well, news.

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane.

When the actor tried to make a movie about Jewish hero Judah Maccabee back in 2011, the Anti-Defamation League released a statement asking Warner Bros. to reconsider his involvement in the film.

The outrage over his attempts to make the film, which eventually didn’t go into production, came in the wake of an outburst after he was pulled over for driving under the influence in 2006.

He levelled anti-Semitic slurs at police officers and accused Jews of being responsible for all the world’s wars.

Sounds like Mel and Pretoria’s ‘Hitler Barbie’ would get on rather well.

This wasn’t his first offence, either. Winona Ryder accused him of hurling anti-Semitic slurs at her at a party back in 1995, which she told GQ about in 2010.

Since then, he seems to have been sitting pretty and landing roles despite his bigotry, until recently, when the story resurfaced during Ryder’s recent interview with the UK’s Sunday Times:

Over to NewsAU:

“We were at a crowded party with one of my good friends, and Mel Gibson was smoking a cigar,” Ryder, 48, told the news outlet. She added that something came up about the Jewish faith, at which point the Mad Max actor said, “You’re not an oven dodger, are you?” – an apparent reference to the way Jewish prisoners were incinerated in Nazi death camps.

At the same industry soiree, Ryder claims Gibson asked her friend, who is gay, “‘Oh, wait, am I gonna get AIDS?’” She’s also alleged that he later tried to apologise for his offensive statements.

He is also known to have made homophobic comments to a Spanish newspaper in 1991, and said that he “wanted New York Times writer Frank Rich’s “intestines on a stick” after the reviewer took apart The Passion of the Christ.

Then there’s this:

In Gibson’s most notorious incident in 2010, tapes surfaced of epic misogynistic and racist tirades recorded by former girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva, with quotes including, “If you get raped by a pack of (N-words), it will be your fault.”

Yeah, an apology doesn’t really cut it when you look at everything that he’s done.

Gibson’s spokespeople have said that Ryder’s statement is “100 percent untrue”, claiming that she lied in the GQ article, and again in the Sunday Times interview.

Ryder said this:

“I believe in redemption and forgiveness and hope that Mr. Gibson has found a healthy way to deal with his demons, but I am not one of them. Around 1996, my friend Kevyn Aucoin and I were on the receiving end of his hateful words. It is a painful and vivid memory for me. Only by accepting responsibility for our behavior in this life, can we make amends and truly respect each other, and I wish him well on this lifelong journey.”

Ryder, who was recounting her experiences of anti-Semitism in Hollywood, also mentioned that an unnamed studio head said she “looked too Jewish” when she was auditioning for a role.

Gibson has now been fired from the cast of the sequel to Chicken Run which was supposed to start production next year.

It’s unclear if the rest of the original cast, which includes Julia Sawalha, Phil Daniels, Imelda Staunton and Timothy Spall, will be returning to the 20-years-in-the-making sequel.

Responding to the resurgence of Winona Ryder’s story, Seth Rogen tweeted the following:

If you’re wondering what he’s referring to, Gibson famously once gave an interview in which he declared the Holocaust “fiction”.

Seriously, how has this guy managed to keep his career alive?

Mel Gibson needs to be stopped.

[source:newsau]