<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1255"> <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2600.0" name=GENERATOR> <STYLE></STYLE> </HEAD> <BODY bgColor=#ffffff> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><A href="http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/news/030903_nw_gibson.html">http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/news/030903_nw_gibson.html</A></FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Gibson Family Under Fire for Anti-Semitism</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2> <DIV><BR>LOS ANGELES — Mel Gibson and his parents are under fire today from a leading Jewish group for reportedly anti-semitic impulses in the former's new film and the latter's denial that Al Qaeda executed the Sept. 11 attacks. <BR>The actor's father, Hutton Gibson, told The New York Times he flatly rejected that the terrorist group led by Usama bin Laden had any role in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon Sept. 11. </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>"Anybody can put out a passenger list," the elder Gibson told The Times. </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>"So what happened? They were crashed by remote control." </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>He and the actor's mother, Joye Gibson, also told The Times that the Holocaust was a fabrication manufactured to hide an arrangement between Adolf Hitler and "financiers" to move Jews out of Germany to the Middle East to fight Arabs. </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>"Go and ask an undertaker or the guy who operates the crematorium what it takes to get rid of a dead body," Hutton Gibson told The Times. "It takes one liter of petrol and 20 minutes. Now six million?" </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Said Joye Gibson: "That weren't even that many Jews in all of Europe." </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Rabbi Marvin Hier, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, shot back. </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>"To bigots and antisemites, no amount of evidence of scientific proof is ever enough. In their world, only hate matters." </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>The comments from the Gibson family come just after the actor built a church in near Malibu that caters to a revisionist version of Catholocism. According to The Times, the church has a congregation of 70, including the star of such films as "Braveheart" and "Conspiracy Theory." </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Mel Gibson, a devout Catholic, is directing and co-wrote an upcoming movie "The Passion," rooted in a theological movement known as Catholic traditionalism that seeks to return the faith to its pre-1962 period, before the Pope issued what is known as Vatican II, a series of proclamations that did away with the notion that Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>"If the new film seeks to undo that," Hier told The Times, "it would not be uncovering truth. Rather, it would unleash more of the scurrilous charges...directed against the Jewish people, which took the Catholic Church 20 centuries to finally repudiate." </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Copyright © 2003 KABC-TV and the Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV><BR></FONT> </DIV></BODY></HTML>