„LATE IN July, a Hollywood honcho uncorks a blast of anti-Semitic bile, the sort of malignant stereotype about Jews one might expect from David Duke or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Is that newsworthy?
It certainly was in 2006, when Mel Gibson, arrested in Malibu for drunken driving, demanded to know whether the arresting deputy was Jewish, and then launched into an anti-Semitic rant: “[Expletive] Jews,’’ he raged. “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.’’
What followed was a Category 4 media hurricane.
Within a week, according to the Nexis news database, the number of articles mentioning “Mel Gibson’’ and “Jews’’ had soared to 1,077. The New York Times reported the incident in a Page 1 story on July 30, and followed it up with much longer stories on Aug. 1 and 2. The coverage in the Los Angeles Times was even more extensive, with three front-page stories and another half-dozen inside. Numerous other papers gave heavy play to Gibson’s tirade and its aftermath. The network and cable news shows were all over the story, broadcasting scores of segments about it in that first week.
Pervading much of the media’s coverage and commentary was a tone of unforgiving revulsion. (...)
But when, almost exactly four years later, another Hollywood bigfoot uttered an anti-Semitic rant, the reaction couldn’t have been more different.
In a July 25 interview with the Times of London, filmmaker Oliver Stone complained that “Jewish domination of the media’’ focuses too much attention on the Holocaust, and prevents Americans from understanding Hitler (and Stalin) “in context’’ — a wrong he intends to right in a documentary he is making for Showtime. Stone described these media-controlling Jews as “the most powerful lobby in Washington’’ — “hard workers’’ who “stay on top of every comment,’’ and are responsible for the fact that “Israel has [expletive]-up United States foreign policy for years.’’
Like Gibson blaming Jews for the planet’s wars, Stone’s lament about Jewish control of the media is classic anti-Semitism, straight out of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’’ and Henry Ford’s “The International Jew.’’ Unlike Gibson, however, Stone gave vent to his bigotry while perfectly sober.
Yet far from triggering a media storm, Stone’s anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongering barely stirred a breeze.”