We all know Oliver Stone is a prominent leftie and highly critical of the US foreign policy, which one can conclude after reviewing his latest documentary that basically cheerleaded the Hugo Chavez regime. Not to mention the fact he’s a border-line conspiracy theorist. But now it seems his criticisms of the United States have achieved a new low. According to a release interview he did with The Times, Oliver Stone makes the claim, a claim that is commonly used by known anti-semites, by asserting that the United States foreign policy is influenced by Jewish interests and that Jew control the US media:
The Jewish domination of the media. There’s a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has fucked up United States foreign policy for years.”
This isn’t the first time Stone has made such insensitive comments. In January, 2010, while describing his new documentary about Hitler and Stalin he was planning, Stone basically downplayed the Holocaust:
The 10-part documentary [which Stone is planning] will address Stalin and Hitler “in context”, he says. “Hitler was a Frankenstein but there was also a Dr Frankenstein. German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support.”
He also seeks to put his atrocities in proportion: “Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30m.”
In response, Norman Geras, Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Manchester, said Stone’s was being “contemptible and brutish”:
No one who has taken any close interest in the history of the Second World War could be unfamiliar with the extent of Russian suffering and death under German occupation. So ‘more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people’ is a purely apologetic trope, since at that level of human catastrophe the insistence on maintaining a sense of proportion about five to six million Jewish dead is a plain attempt to diminish. And what follows that is then standard anti-Semitism: the Jews control the media and they work hard at it; and this is what accounts for the focus on the Holocaust (rather than any features of the genocide itself).
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