Updated 3:30 p.m. Monday:
"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 late Monday.
"Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry. 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."
Earlier:
Oliver Stone is at it again.
During a Television Critic Association panel on his 10-hour television Showtime documentary “A Secret History of America” in January, Stone got started with this little ditty: “Hitler was an easy scapegoat.”
This weekend he amped it up a notch. The controversial director complained to the London’s Sunday Times of "Jewish domination of the media” and claimed that Hitler did more damage to Russia than he did to the Jews.
Stone, who is half-Jewish, told the Times: “There's a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has f---ed up United States foreign policy for years.”
While "Hitler was a Frankenstein [monster],” Stone said, “there was also a Dr. Frankenstein: German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support."
Stone continued: "Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30 million [killed]."
Israel minister of public affairs Yuli Edelstein quickly slammed the director.
"Beyond the ignorance he proves with his comments, his demonization of the Jewish people could be a sequel to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion," Edelstein told the Jerusalem Post. "When a man of Stone's stature says such things, it could lead to a new wave of anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism, and it may even cause real harm to Jewish communities and individuals."
The American Jewish Committee blasted the director, too.
"By invoking this grotesque, toxic stereotype, Oliver Stone has outed himself as an anti-Semite," said AJC executive director David Harris said in a statement. "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."
"We are deeply offended," Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivor, said in another statement. "These are words of hate and a disgraceful evocation of anti-Semitism. Shame on Oliver Stone."
Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, also attacked Stone. "Oliver Stone has once again shown his conspiratorial colors with his comments about ‘Jewish domination of the media’ and control over U.S. foreign policy," Foxman said in a statement. "His words conjure up some of the most stereotypical and conspiratorial notions of undue Jewish power and influence.
