Harvey Weinstein: Turning Jews Into Nazis
The new Tarantino movie, Inglorious Basterds hit number one this weekend. Lots of people will see the film, think it is based on a true story, and say "Gee. The Jews were just as barbaric as the Nazis."
The film tracks the separate attempts to kill Hitler by two disparate forces, one being the "Basterds", a motley crew of Jewish American soldiers out for revenge against the Nazis. The Basterds have a modus operandi whereby each man must cut off the scalpof a dead Nazi soldier, with orders to get 100 scalps each. The Basterds allow one German soldier to survive each incident so as to spread the news of the terror of their attacks. However, the Basterds carve a swastika into the forehead of that German. The other force concerns Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), the only survivor of a Jewish family killed by the Jew Hunter, who plots her own revenge on the Nazis. The Basterds and Shosanna remain unaware of each other throughout the film.[snip]Author and critic Daniel Mendelsohn was disturbed by the portrayal of Jewish-American soldiers mimicking Nazi atrocities done to European Jews, stating, "In Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino indulges this taste for vengeful violence by-well, by turning Jews into Nazis....in history, Nazis carved Stars of David into the chests of rabbis before killing them; here, the "basterds" carve swastikas into the foreheads of those victims whom they leave alive."[70]