Angry in the Great White North

More fallout from the Harry Belafonte "shut up and sing" moment. From US Newswire:

A leading Holocaust Studies institute is urging entertainers Harry Belafonte, Woody Allen, and Dick Gregory to retract their recent statements comparing the Bush administration, Israelis, and black conservatives to Nazis.

Belafonte even claimed that there were "a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of (Adolf Hitler's) Third Reich."

"Some entertainers simply don't know much about history," said Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, a research and education institute focusing on America's response to the Holocaust. "The fact is that there were no Jews in Hitler's hierarchy, the policies of America and Israel are not similar to those of Hitler, and African-American conservatives are not comparable to Nazis."

The Wyman Institute is urging the three entertainers to publicly retract their "inaccurate and hurtful" remarks about Hitler and the Holocaust. Dr. Medoff said: "Such analogies pollute public discourse, by trivializing the brutal horrors committed by the Nazis. Hitler was a maniacal dictator whose regime systematically annihilated six million Jews, and launched a world war that caused the deaths of more than forty million people. How can any reasonable person put Hitler and the Nazis in the same sentence as American or Israeli leaders, or black conservatives?"

Woody Allen?

Earlier this summer, comedian and filmmaker Woody Allen said in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel: "The history of the world is like: he kills me, I kill him. Only with different cosmetics and different castings: so in 2001 some fanatics killed some Americans, and now some Americans are killing some Iraqis. And in my childhood, some Nazis killed Jews. And now, some Jewish people and some Palestinians are killing each other." (Der Spiegel, June 20, 2005)

Some Nazis killed Jews? Is that like there were some car accidents last week?

And who is Dick Gregory? Apparently a comedian. He who thinks black conservatives essentially wear swastikas. Very witty comment in some quarters, I guess.

If George W Bush or some other administration official had said something as ridiculous as the nonsense spouted by Belafonte, Allen, and Gregory, the screeching from the media would be non-stop (and rightfully so). The only time these "entertainers" get into any trouble at all is when they start acting like pedophiles, and even then, they get a pass from their Hollywood friends and keep getting awards.

[Michelle Malkin has updated her post on the subject with more reaction and a link to a round-up.]