Oliver Stone apologises for Holocaust remarks

Director Oliver Stone has hurriedly backtracked over comments he made in a British Sunday paper which led to him being labeled an anti-Semite and compared to Mel Gibson. Last night Stone apologised for claiming in the course of an interview that America's focus on the Holocaust was a product of the "Jewish domination of the media" and arguing that Hitler "had done more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people".
 
In a contrite statement Stone, whose next film, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, will be released in September, said he was sorry for his comments which he regretted. "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... Jews obviously do not control the media or any other industry."
 
He added: "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."
 
Stone made his remarks - which were quickly condemned by Jewish organisations - in a Sunday Times interview to promote his new Hugo Chavez film South of the Border. He said his forthcoming documentary series, Secret History of America, would put Hitler and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin "in context". Elaborating further, Stone claimed that Hitler had killed "25 or 30 million" Russians - in contrast to the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
 
Stone also argued that there were others who were as much to blame for the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities, thanks to their role in the creation of Hitler. "Hitler was a Frankenstein but there was also a Dr Frankenstein," he said. "German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support."
 
Pressed further by interviewer Camilla Long about why so much of an emphasis had been placed on the Holocaust, Stone raised the spectre of a "major [Jewish] lobby" within the American media. "They are hard workers," he went on. "They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has fucked up United States foreign policy for years."
 
It is not the first time Stone has made controversial comments about Hitler. In January he told a gathering of US TV critics, during a presentation to promote Secret History, that the Nazi leader was "an easy scapegoat".
 
Yesterday the American Jewish Committee attacked Stone's "grotesque and toxic" remarks. The committee's executive director David Harris wrote: "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." ·