December 08, 2005
Mel Gibson, the actor and director whose film "The Passion of the Christ" provoked charges of anti-Semitism last year, has caused a new stir with the news that his production company is working on a mini-series about the Holocaust for ABC. The US television network confirmed that it was working with Con Artists Production, headed by Gibson, to produce an epic based on the wartime experiences of Flory van Beek, a Jew who was sheltered from the Nazis in the Netherlands by her non-Jewish boyfriend and neighbors. The project is causing a furor despite the fact that it has not yet been formally approved by ABC. It is not clear whether Gibson will involve himself directly with the film, let alone personally produce it. Yet even the fact of his company making it is raising eyebrows " and, perhaps not unhelpfully generating early publicity for the network. Gibson, who is in Mexico making a film for Disney about Central America before the Spanish arrived, tried to defuse the row, by saying that some of his best friends "have numbers on their arms". He said: "Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them Jews in concentration camps".
