What if Mel Gibson isn't Anti-Semite?

What if he's just a liberal?

I honestly don't pay much attention to celebrities. Someone has to be really and truely obnoxious before I fail to forget whatever remark or antic I found so annoying when it happened.

Is Mel Gibson a self-identified liberal?

If he is, he may not be anti-Semitic at all, despite his alcohol induced rant about the Jews.

You see, liberals are the good guys when it comes to tolerance and ethnic sensitivity. What this means is that they are often not at all *careful* about their language. Why should they be?

In order for a conservative to slip into an anti-Jew rant they'd either need to be *heavily* anti-semitic or else far more drunk than a 0.12 alcohol level. Someone who isn't used to watching what they say... well, it doesn't take much. Not too much alcohol and not too much anti-semitism.

I grew up being told (by television and my culture) that I could be, and almost certainly was, racist without realizing that I was racist. The only reason that I wasn't also sexist was because I wasn't a man.

I've talked to blacks who said that their experience was that the South was less racist than the North. I've talked to gays who said that Red state neighbors were more tolerant of them as people than Blue state neighbors. I've worked for a liberated woman who saw nothing at all untoward with going through a pile of job applications and throwing away all of the ones with male names on them.

It's about self-examination. If it's not happening, if someone is too confident that they aren't one of *those* people, then racism, sexism, any sorts of prejudice can grow. People don't watch their language and they don't examine their own motivation when they *know* they are one of the good guys.

I don't doubt that Mel meant what he said... that wars are started by Jews. What we can't know is if he's just upset about what is happening in Lebanon or if he's actually anti-semitic.

What I do know is that anti-semitism is not a liberal virtue. Nor is racism, even the soft sort based on low expectations. Nor is sexism that favors women. And neither is pacifism in the face of human suffering. Things have become so twisted that sticking up for the oppressed has come to mean allowing *anything* if it's committed by the underdog... and blaming the war on Israel.