I am not known for my celebrity dish. I pretty much don’t give a rip about famous people. But since Mel “Watch me, I’m a train wreck” Gibson went and followed up his anti-semitic Passion play with a drunken Jew-hating tirade, I just can’t resist. After letting the Jewish community stew over the weekend on his non-apology, Mel’s publicist released a statement that owned up to the anti-semitism while maintaining that Mel is not really anti-semitic—maybe he just plays one in real life?—and asks the Jewish community to help him make it all better. That, my friends, is chutzpah!

The Jewish community was generally warm to the apology. But Monsters and Critics reports “Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center…cautioned in a statement that, like substance abuse and alcoholism, anti-Semitism ‘cannot be cured in one day and certainly not through a press release.'”

You could read Mel’s mealy-mouthed apology, or you could read my translation here (patience, TTers, by TT list follows):

Dear Jews,

Boy, I really screwed up, and I know it. As if the Passion of Jeebus wasn’t enough of an insult to the jewry of Hollywood, I went and said it out loud.

I’m a raging Jew hater!

Look, I learned it from my wacky extremist Catholic dad, but that’s not the problem. It’s that I’m a raging alcholic. Or an alcoholic rage-aholic. Yeah, that’s it, I don’t really believe those things I said, it was, uh, temporary insanity. Yeah, the booze was talking, right?

But I still want to work in this town. Please? Oh PLEASE I’M BEGGING YOU!!

I’ll stop getting drunk in public and spilling my vitriol if you’ll PLEASE just let me keep making movies. Oh GOD PLEASE don’t shun me!

You’ve got to help me heal my image. I can’t do it alone! I need you to love me.

Sincerely,
Mel “The Mad Catholic” Gibson

Crude? Yeah, but at least it’s more honest than the pap his publicist put out. So here are 13 things Mel could do to really show he’s sorry:

1. Stop making movies. They’re all crap anyway.
2. Move back to Australia or whatever hole it was you crawled out of.
3. Publicly denounce your wacky extremist Catholic beliefs, from which your anti-semitism surely springs.
4. Never, ever, ever threaten to make a Holocaust mini-series again. (Thank you ABC!)
5. While you’re at it, apologize for your crappy movies. All of them. I don’t care what my 40ish contemporaries say about the Mad Max movies, they all sucked, too.
6. Apologize to those star-struck women you posed with at Moonshadows. They obviously had no idea what an ass clown you are.
7. As religious wars go, you Catholics have a lot of explainin’ to do regarding a little something called the Inquisition. Apologize for that.
8. Take Joy Behar’s advice: Get a public circumcision.
9. Take Rabbi David Baron’s advice: Speak on Yom Kippur (the day of atonement) at the Temple of the Arts. (Hey, this one’s serious, folks!)
10. Quit procreating. You’ve got what, a dozen kids? Maybe you could man up and get a vasectomy after your public circumsision.
11. While you’re at it, apologize to your wife. I’m sure you’re not the nicest person to be married to.
12. Don’t forget to apologize to all your kids.
13. And, most importantly, don’t teach your kids to hate Jews the way your father taught you. It’s despicable.

But really, there’s not much you can do, Mel, to atone for this. It’s not that you said it, it’s that you evidently actually believe it. The best thing for you to do is to just melt into obscurity.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006 at 10:13 pm and is filed under Thursday Thirteen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.