The Oscar, please…

The Gibson affair keeps getting stranger. First there was this statement from him today:

There is no excuse, nor should there be any tolerance, for anyone who thinks or expresses any kind of anti-Semitic remark. I want to apologize specifically to everyone in the Jewish community for the vitriolic and harmful words that I said to a law enforcement officer the night I was arrested on a DUI charge.

I am a public person, and when I say something, either articulated and thought out, or blurted out in a moment of insanity, my words carry weight in the public arena. As a result, I must assume personal responsibility for my words and apologize directly to those who have been hurt and offended by those words.

The tenets of what I profess to believe necessitate that I exercise charity and tolerance as a way of life. Every human being is God's child, and if I wish to honor my God I have to honor his children. But please know from my heart that I am not an anti-Semite. I am not a bigot. Hatred of any kind goes against my faith.

I'm not just asking for forgiveness. I would like to take it one step further, and meet with leaders in the Jewish community, with whom I can have a one on one discussion to discern the appropriate path for healing.

I have begun an ongoing program of recovery and what I am now realizing is that I cannot do it alone. I am in the process of understanding where those vicious words came from during that drunken display, and I am asking the Jewish community, whom I have personally offended, to help me on my journey through recovery. Again, I am reaching out to the Jewish community for its help. I know there will be many in that community who will want nothing to do with me, and that would be understandable. But I pray that that door is not forever closed.

This is not about a film. Nor is it about artistic license. This is about real life and recognizing the consequences hurtful words can have. It's about existing in harmony in a world that seems to have gone mad.

What’s most striking to me is the panic in his voice. I completely doubt the authenticity of his remorse here, but I don’t doubt for a second his fear as to what may befall him thanks to his showing his true colors. The L.A. Times pointed out yesterday just how tough it would be for Gibson to go it alone professionally in this town, regardless of the purported several hundred mil payday he walked away from “Passion” with.

Disney’s already pulled the plug on his Holocaust-era miniseries, and it may very well do the same with its distribution deal of his upcoming feature “Apocalypto”.

Still, in this town (and nation) in which any and all celebrities have unlimited get-out-of-jail-for-free cards, his time may yet be long from over. Hollywood execs have yet to speak out against Gibson, fearing a reverse black-listing by the star himself.

And, as if that wasn’t enough, he was offered today the keynote speaker slot at the Temple of the Performing Arts’ Yom Kippur service (a spot filled by Hillary Rodham Clinton last year). I hope my mother and girlfriend enjoy, as there’s no way in Hell I’d sit through this hypocrite’s atonement act. The Oscar, puh-lease…