FEATURED JOBS
Comments (0)Basketball all-star Amar’e Stoudemire reportedly was on his way to Israel after learning he had Jewish roots.
“On the flight to Israel. This is going to be a great trip,” Stoudemire, who recently joined the NBA’s New York Knicks as a free agent, wrote on Twitter, according to Haaretz.
Stoudemire, a power forward formerly of the Phoenix Suns, was heading to Israel for a voyage of discovery after finding out he has a Jewish mother, Haaretz reported.
According to an Army Radio report, Stoudemire plans to spend time in Israel learning Hebrew.
“The holy land. Learn about it,” he wrote, adding “ze ha’halom sheli”—Hebrew for “this is my dream.”
Oliver Stone apologizes for Jewish accusations
(JTA)—Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone apologized for saying in an interview that the Jewish lobby controls Washington’s foreign policy and that Hitler’s actions should be put “into context.”
Stone in an interview with the Sunday Times also had said that “Jewish domination of the media” has prevented an honest discussion about the Holocaust.
“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,” Stone said in a statement released late Monday, the day after his remarks were published in the British newspaper.
Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, was among the Jewish organizational and Israeli officials to condemn the remarks.
Steinberg in a statement said Stone’s 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 added. “He must be judged by his future words and deeds.”
The article by reporter Camilla Long is not available online without a paid subscription to the newspaper, although British bloggers and other newspapers have printed excerpts.
During the interview, Stone said that Jews were dictating U.S. foreign policy and that the Jewish lobby “are hard workers.”
“They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington,” he said, adding that Israel has “f—-ed up U.S. foreign policy for years.”
“Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry,” Stone said in his apology statement. “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, the winner of three Academy Awards, including as best director for “Platoon” and “Born on the Fourth of July,” has a Jewish father. He also directed such films as “Wall Street,” “JFK” and “Nixon.”
On Hitler, Stone said that the German leader “did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30 million. Hitler was a Frankenstein, but there was also a Dr. Frankenstein—German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support.”
Israel’s public diplomacy minister, Yuli Edelstein, was among those who had condemned Stone’s remarks early Monday.
“They are nauseating, anti-Semitic and racist,” the Jerusalem Post quoted Edelstein as saying. “Not only is he showing ignorance, he is demonizing Jews for no reason and returning to the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’
“When a man of Stone’s stature speaks in this way, it can bring waves of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment, and may even damage Jewish communities and individuals.”
Stone recently completed a documentary on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and is working on a documentary series about American history.
ADL audit: Anti-Semitic incidents at ‘troubling’ level
(JTA)—The number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States remained at a “sustained and troubling” level, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s annual audit.
The 2009 audit of anti-Semitic incidents, released Tuesday, recorded 1,211 incidents of vandalism, harassment and physical assaults against Jewish individuals, property and community institutions across the U.S. last year.
The number fell from the 1,352 incidents reported in 2008, but some of the decline was likely because of revised methodology for reporting and tracking incidents that was unveiled in the ‘09 audit, the ADL said.
In the latest audit, the incidents include 29 physical assaults on Jewish individuals, 760 incidents of anti-Semitic harassment and threats, and 422 cases of anti-Semitic vandalism, according to the report.
Some incidents that occured in 2009 were not tallied under the new methodology, which takes a more conservative approach to counting certain types of incidents, including graffiti and swastikas.
“We know that the swastika has, for some, lost its meaning as the primary symbol of Nazism and instead become a more generalized symbol of hate,” ADL National Director Abraham Foxman said. “So we are being more careful to include graffiti incidents that specifically target Jews or Jewish institutions as we continue the process of re-evaluating and redefining how we measure anti-Jewish incidents.”
Major incidents included the shooting attack on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., by an avowed Holocaust denier, which led to the death of a security guard; a thwarted plot by four Muslim converts to bomb synagogues in Riverdale, N.Y.; and the repeated picketing of institutions and community centers by members of the avowedly anti-Semitic, Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church.
The states with the highest number of incidents were California, with 275 incidents; New York, 209 incidents; New Jersey, 132 incidents; and Florida, 90 incidents.
The audit noted that 2009 was marked by a severe intensification of anti-Semitic expression on the Internet, including a significant increase in the amount of anti-Semitism found on online social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, and user-generated content sites such as YouTube.