LONDON (JTA) -- The biographer of Jacques Cousteau has uncovered evidence that the late underwater explorer harbored anti-Semitic attitudes.

A letter written 58 years ago by Cousteau during the wartime rule of the pro-Nazi Vichy government was published last week in the French daily Le Monde after being found by the biographer.

Cousteau, then a 31-year-old naval officer, wrote to a friend on May 1, 1941, to say that he and his family could find nowhere suitable to live in Marseilles.

"There will be no decent apartment available until we have kicked out all these ignoble yids who are burdening us," wrote Cousteau, who died two years ago.

http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/11534/edition_id/221/format/html/displaystory.html

Cousteau killed sea-life for documentaries, admits son

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=39&objectid=3561274
His name was indelibly linked to a wonderful technicolour world of marine life. But the legendary French explorer, Captain Jacques Cousteau, mistreated and even killed sea creatures while staging scenes for his films, according to a shocking new book by his son.

But Jean-Michel Cousteau, 65, who participated in many of his father's adventures, said such behaviour - although "intolerable" - was normal practice among wildlife film-makers in the 1960s and 1970s.

Captain Cousteau's reputation as one of the "fathers of environmentalism" should not be thrown overboard because of his occasional ill-treatment of dolphins, killer-whales and fish, first exposed by a US TV documentary in the 1980s, the younger Cousteau says.

"We wouldn't consider it for a second now. For him the ends sometimes justified the means. Isn't the important point that, at the end of the day, he served the cause of animals?"

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=39&objectid=3561274

(Years ago I read a book which described some actions in WW2, and one chapter was about the sinking of the French fleet. Had to be done so it couldn't be used against the Allies. Cousteau fired on Allied planes to protect the ships. Might've killed your grandaddy or mine. And that Jewish thing...never heard about that. He seems to have had the Nazi mentality though, if "the ends justifies the means." Did Irwin ever go through controversies like that? I think he had a bad hair day once...something like that, something pretty major for the TV generation).