Oliver Stone has apologized for his anti-Semitic rant, but is the damage already done?

It's such a quintessentially American thing to do that I'm surprised that someone hasn't already engraved it on our $20 bills: If you shoot off your mouth and hurl stupid insults at innocent people, the best thing to do is to apologize as quickly as possible. It's why Oliver Stone isn't going to become Mel Gibson, even though Stone's crackpot remarks about the "Jewish domination of the media" and the Holocaust sounded just as bad as anything Gibson said in his infamous drunken rant about the Jews after he was picked up by Malibu police for drunken driving.

I know this is going to be portrayed as yet another example of the terrible double standard in Hollywood, where lefties can say whatever they want and get away with it while conservatives are pilloried and symbolically burned at the stake. Or as Big Hollywood's John Nolte so succinctly put it: "Don’t expect Oliver Stone to get the Mel Gibson treatment. Gibson’s sin against Hollywood was producing 'The Passion of the Christ,' not the vile things that came out of his mouth. After all, this is the same industry that honors, continues to work with, and defends fugitive child rapist Roman Polanski. As long as your politics are in order, no 'Jewish domination of the media' comments can hurt you."

That's the right wing mantra about the way the media handles these outbursts, which is filled with some considerable irony, since Big Hollywood is run by Andrew Breitbart, the mischievous conservative bomb thrower who ignited the Shirley Sherrod media conflagration last week by putting up an edited tape of a speech she'd given, which made it appear that she was a racist. Of course, when seen in its entirety, the tape showed the exact opposite. By then, Sherrod had been forced to resign. After the unedited tape surfaced, Sherrod was deluged with contrite apologies from everyone from the White House, the NAACP and the Secretary of Agriculture to Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, who'd been among the first to call for her firing.

So where does this leave Oliver Stone? First off, unlike Gibson, who took forever to issue a weak apology for his anti-Semitic rant -- and still hasn't apologized for more recent racist, misogynistic ravings reported to have been made to the mother of his young child -- Stone issued a quick, forceful apology. He said very clearly that "Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry," adding that the Holocaust was indeed an "atrocity." Has he really changed his views overnight? Perhaps not. But sincerity is hard to measure, especially in show business.

I don't know how it works anywhere else, but in America, if you apologize with speed and sincerity, people forgive you. They may not forget, but they'll forgive. Jews have long memories, so even a haphazard Jew like myself can easily call to mind Henry Ford, David Dukes, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and all the other infamous anti-Semites who've never done much in the way of apologizing for their vile words.

The conservative argument about Hollywood's double standard toward Gibson versus Stone is full of holes, the biggest one being that until Gibson went off into the wackosphere with his latest rant, he'd been quietly accepted back into polite Hollywood society. When his longtime agent Ed Limato's agency merged with the agency run by Ari Emanuel, who'd loudly said that Gibson should be shunned by one and all, Emanuel happily received Gibson as an agency client rather than risk Limato leaving with all his other top stars. No one in the supposedly liberal media criticized Emanuel for accepting Gibson with open arms. And hardly anyone in the showbiz press bothered to dredge up Gibson's past offenses when he was out promoting "Edge of Darkness" earlier this year. Forgiveness was in the air. It was only when Gibson went off of a new rampage, adding blacks and women to his hit list, that he officially became a Hollywood pariah.

I suspect that when Stone is out promoting "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" this September that he'll occasionally be required to issue a few more mea culpas. But not often. After all the crazy things Stone has said through the years, from signing a petition that compared Germany's treatment of Scientologists to the Nazi's oppression of the Jews to his unabashed embrace of tinhorn Latin American dictators like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, it takes a lot for people to get worked up over his latest foot-in-mouth antics.

Of course, for a filmmaker to make dark insinuations about a Jewish media cabal is sort of like a Republican officeholder advocating tax increases -- it can get you into a whale of trouble, even if, as this wry Jewish Journal post points out, it's not considered out of bounds for Jewish filmmakers to josh among themselves about the decline in Jewish domination of the film industry. If Stone were a comedian, he'd be able to push the envelope oh, so much further, since comics can get away with all sorts of outlandish, politically incorrect remarks without provoking a hailstorm of criticism. I guess if there is any lesson here, it's that Stone is a lot better off in American than in his beloved Venezuela, Cuba or Iran, where artists have languished in prison for years for making remarks far less rude than what Stone had to say about the Jews. Stone is a free man, which I suspect means that he'll saying something crazy again any day now.   

Photo: Oliver Stone at the British premiere of his film "South of the Border." Credit: Max Nash / AFP/Getty Images

 

Comments

[Alan Palanker]

Someone needs to tell Mr Stone,and Mr Penn that Woodstock is over (died in Rome NY in 1999!) Always got to protest the man , yeah!!!

[zas]

Good God, how many anti-Semites or ignoramuses are there!!
That include some of the comments made here.

[Murray Rothstein]

Mr. Stone is correct. We do control the media.

[T. Traub]

Some commenters ask, what's the big deal? Others say, it's true, Hitler did kill more Russians than Jews.

The general thrust of these off-the-cuff responses is that all moral judgments are based on relativistic standards. In other words, there is no absolute right or wrong.

These same apologists would likely be appalled and outraged if Stone had said, the Blacks are an inferior and violent race, or some similar stereotype.

The bottom line is that in America, certain phrases evoke hot button issues that are anathema to the sensitives among us. What's hypocritical about this behavior is that these hot buttons appear to change from moment to moment.

For many years, it was fashionable to be morally outraged at Hitler's specific campaign of extermination against the Jews, and their treatment in the death camps remains the quintessential case for moral depravity--the surgical experiments, the gas chambers, the torture, the separation of children from parents, the dehumanization of an entire ethnic group into a pen of animals to be experimented on and then slaughtered.

Recently, the liberals of Hollywood have smelled a sea change in the air. The Nazi deeds are no longer morally abhorrent but merely distasteful to discuss in polite company. Under the surface, they are thinking the same things--there's a grain of truth to Gibson's and Stone's accusations. Just look around you. There are Jews all over the entertainment and news industries. Ergo, in a simple leap of faith, "the Jews" must control these industries.

It's actually not surprising that a man like Stone would say (and, presumably, believe in) such things. He is a person constantly pushing the envelope, challenging current assumptions, thinking outside the box. Yesterday's sacred cows are today's fodder for documentary.

Why, then, does Stone not produce a documentary on the breakdown of Black community, on the very high crime rates among the Blacks and how they have destroyed every urban neighborhood in which they have settled, and driven out the other ethnic groups with their bad behavior? This is still a no-go zone and yet it is widely accepted among Blacks and Whites that such is the case.

It takes real courage to stand up to an entire ethnicity, except when you notice others of your kind also standing up to them. The moral tides are shifting and the attacks on the Jews as though they were a monolithic group are now a "do-go" zone. How long before the other pillars of morality fall as well and we become a completely decadent field of manure as has happened in Europe and other places that are past their prime? Where go the Hollywood elites, I fear so goes the nation, and it's not a pretty sight.

[Henry Ford]

A sorry state when in the country that pioneered free speech one is allowed a general freedom of expression, but finds it verboten to criticize a Jew. Why are the chosen exempt?

[Beige]

Are you seriously invoking the Sherrod incident, which is typified by lazy media outlets not putting her remarks into context, but by going one further than that, and not only NOT putting the Oliver Stone remarks in context but writing a commentary and not including Oliver Stone's remarks at all! Seriously LA Times - why not start recruiting from a schools of journalism, so your 'columnists,' will stop getting owned every day by message board posters.

[DrNOSA]

If Oliver Stone got treatment for his obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), he'd be less likely to make outlandish remarks, even under to influence of alcohol.

[Chris]

Well said that he'll be putting his foot in it soon. However, the big difference IMO between these two is the amount of personal dirty laundry Mel has lately had aired in addition to the media storm. A lot of women and men didn't think the same about good ol Mel when he left his wife of 27 years and mother of umpteen kids for a gold-digging young tramp. And him driving drunk and then being a mean, abusive jerk when the good guys, the cops arrested his butt. If Oliver had done the same(or had it reported on), I suspect his fall in the public eye would be no less swift or disgraced.

[Lon]

Darfur! Where is Jewish outrage?
Rwanda! Where is Jewish outrage?
Serbia! Where is Jewish outrage?
Cambodia! Where is Jewish outrage?
Armenia! Where is Jewish outrage?

Oliver Stone! Oh, there it is!

[Phillip]

@Russ

***and the head of Hollwood's most powerful talent agency, a Jew, Ari Emanuel ****

Ari would have to be head of CAA for that statement to be true, but the head of CAA is also Jewish.