14 DAY TRIAL // Though it’s not the first time that he puts his foot in his mouth, just recently, Oliver Stone has attracted severe criticism for making anti-Semite remarks in an interview meant to promote his latest documentary, “South of the Border.” Stone said that Hitler would not have stood a chance if he didn’t have the support of the German industrialists, the Americans and the British, and that the Holocaust was still such a hot topic because of “Jewish domination in the media.”
One day after making the unfortunate remarks to a British publication, Stone issued an apology after several groups went public with their criticism of such an anti-Semite stand. By saying these things, Stone showed that he was no better than Mel Gibson who, 4 years ago, while being arrested for drunk drinking, said that Jews were responsible for all the wars in the world, in more or less words. However, Stone’s intention was not to offend, but to put things into a different perspective, the filmmaker says in a press statement cited by CNN.
“In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret. Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry. The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity – and it was an atrocity,” the director says in his statement.
His apology may not be enough, though. “By invoking this grotesque, toxic stereotype, Oliver Stone has outed himself as an anti-Semite. For all of Stone’s progressive pretensions, his remark is no different from one of the drunken, Jew-hating rants of his fellow Hollywood celebrity, Mel Gibson,” The American Jewish Committee says. However, the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants accepts the apology, albeit saying it’s not enough. “His apology was necessary and we accept it. But whether he acted out of sincerity or as a desperate response to the moral outcry at his comments is an open question. He must be judged by his future words and deeds,” the organization says in a separate statement.
As also noted above, this is the second time that Stone comes under fire for making comments of this type. In January this year, he said that Hitler was a “scapegoat throughout history,” hinting that his crimes hadn’t been that atrocious as some made them to be.
Follow me on Twitter @ElenaGorgan