What's Up With Hollywood's Hitler Moment?

July 28, 2010 — -- First came Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic rants, the sequel.

Then, Oliver Stone's slam that maybe the movie industry made too much about the Holocaust.

After that, Paris Hilton's latest pose: one hand above the upper lip, the other angled in the air, military hat cocked slightly to the side.

And just like that, Hollywood dragged the 70-year-old tragedy of Nazism back into the limelight.

It's not clear what spawned the current fascination with all things anti-Semitic, or seemingly so. What's certain: a lot of people are unhappy about it.

In Gibson's case, the hateful slurs he spewed during his 2006 DUI arrest made it obvious that he wasn't right in the head. His latest rants -- telling his ex-girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva, "I want Jew blood on my hands," according to a report from RadarOnline.com -- corroborate the now commonly held theory that he's just plain nuts.

Stone's musings were more surprising. In an interview with The Sunday Times of London, the director, promoting his documentary "South of the Border" about South American politics, called out the "Jewish domination of the media" and asserted that Israel had "f**ked up United States foreign policy for years." Stone's most controversial comments came when he defended Adolf Hitler. (It didn't help that he's currently sporting some Hitler-esque hair above his upper lip.)

"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. Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people."

Monday, both the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee took Stone to task. Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the ADL, called Stone "absurd" and said his words "conjure up some of the most stereotypical and conspiratorial notions of undue Jewish power and influence."

AJC executive director David Harris issued a statement saying "Stone has outed himself as an anti-Semite," adding, "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."