Thanks for the Missiles, Mel

Mel Gibson's Hollywood career is over, and that's not a bad thing. I kind of liked him in the Mad Max movies, but it was all downhill after that. The worst thing to come of his anti-Semitic outburst is that it will be used to justify another expedited shipment of missiles to Israel.

In the course of my lifetime, American racism, misogyny and anti-Semitism have diminished perceptibly. From separate drinking fountains, we have had two black secretaries of state. From separate job listings for females, we have women in every echelon (okay, maybe not the CEO quarters) of business. From country clubs that routinely excluded Jews, we now have Jews sharing power with Gentiles across the United States.

The question of course is whether race, religion and gender prejudice have truly diminished or just been driven underground, to bubble up out of the mouths of drunken millionaires. We surely have not entirely eradicated the sentiments, but we have succeeded in stigmatizing them. That is a big step toward eradication.

Now when a real, frothing public racist or anti-Semite or misogynist reveals himself among us, most of us are appalled. Lynchings, rapes, ghettoes and Nazis come to mind. We ask ourselves: How far have we advanced, really?

The truth is that we kind of knew where Mel was coming from, did we not? To have it confirmed this way, to see him isolated and never work in Hollywood again, is hardly shocking, except in the way it is always shocking to see a famous person implode.

The fact of this one anti-Semite's existence in the entertainment industry should not be seen as proof that there's a Nazi groundswell in the United States, just waiting for the opportune moment to rise up and erect gas chambers. There's a big difference between the raging whack job that is Mel Gibson and the notion of a kind of organized, anti-Semitic sentiment so often used to silence debate about Israel, or criticism of U.S. Middle East policy in general.

Mel's an anti-Semite all right, but who is really paying the price right now? According to the last report I saw, civilian deaths in the Lebanon war are running 50 Israelis to 500 Lebanese. This was the death count before the recent expedited shipment of American missiles had arrived at the Israeli bases. Outside the United States, this lopsided kill toll has provoked almost universal outrage. Here in Canada, where I'm writing from today, the papers are full of condemnation and horror. Inside the United States, however, the response is muted and at the higest levels of government it's all tacit approval. In the United States, Israel's policies toward the Arab people are off the table. For merely suggesting this, I risk getting tarred as an anti-Semite. Plus ça change.

During the unimpeded run-up to the Iraq War in 2003, my husband had the temerity to suggest that the New York Times' curiously laissez-faire attitude about the impending folly had something to do with the paper's historical pro-Israel stance. Our dinner guest, an otherwise liberal member of the journalism faculty at one of the nation's premier colleges, looked him dead in the eye and called him an anti-Semite for making that suggestion.

Imagine for a moment, that the New York Times was owned by three generations of a Lebanese family. Would the paper not have had a reporter on staff more attuned to the Arab world's realities than Judith Miller? Would the suggestion that its pro-Lebanon stance had something to do with it's owners' roots be seen as racist?

When a real anti-Semite rears his head, as Mel Gibson just did, we can all see the sickness, which makes it that much more offensive to be tarred with that ugly label for criticising Israeli violence or American Middle East policy. There is a big difference between the sickness and a reasoned opposition to the policies of the United States and Israel when it comes to the indiscriminate killing of Arabs. Let's try to keep that difference in mind as Mel stops getting taken to lunch in Beverly Hills.