Actor Tim Allen is under pressure over a comment he made suggesting that being a Republican in Hollywood is like 1930s Germany.
The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect came out strongly against the comment Allen made on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” You can see the “Kimmel” clip by clicking here.
The center posted a message on its Facebook page calling on Allen to apologize. “Actor Tim Allen has made a deeply offensive characterization that trivializes the horrors imposed on Jews in Nazi Germany,” the center says in the post.
Steven Goldstein, executive director of the Anne Frank Center, is quoted in the post saying: “Tim, have you lost your mind? No one in Hollywood today is subjecting you or anyone else to what the Nazis imposed on Jews in the 1930s — the world’s most evil program of dehumanization, imprisonment and mass brutality, implemented by an entire national government, as the prelude for the genocide of nearly an entire people. Sorry, Tim, that’s just not the same as getting turned down for a movie role. It’s time for you to leave your bubble to apologize to the Jewish people and, to be sure, the other peoples also targeted by the Nazis.”
Allen’s comment came after host Jimmy Kimmel brought up that Allen had attended Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Ummmm, are all the liberals that compare President Trump to Hitler and Nazi’s going to apologize too? Yeah, didn’t think so. Please people, put your faux outrage away. This is becoming so trite.
No need to apologize for comparisons of Trump to Hitler. They are on the money. All of Trump’s wives have said that he sleeps with Hitler’s writings by his bedside and reads them often. And, as someone who lost 90% of my family in Auschwitz, and someone whose in-laws have their concentration camp numbers tattooed on their arms, and as someone who has talked to many people from Nazi Germany, I think I’m allowed to have that opinion, especially based on the facts of today’s REALITY.
Everyone knew exactly what he meant – even Jews, Gentiles, Agnostics, Hindus, Atheist, etc., etc. Nobody had any impression that he was trivializing the actual events the Third Reich perpetrated on the world. Hyperbili is a useful communication skill used by many people to emphasize their point. In this case everyone understood that but some want to make liberal noise about it. They think the rest of us are stupid!
Tim Allen’s comments just demonstrated how clueless he really is.
Yeah, I get that being a conservative in Hollywood is not likely to be a lot of fun. But when he equates people disagreeing with him (and, yeah, sometimes being rude about it) with the systematic destruction of the lives of Jews that happened in Nazi Germany, he really does more damage to the image of conservatives than any number of liberals ever could. Nothing he faces as a conservative in Hollywood comes close to having everything taken from you, as happened in 1930s Germany.
I taught Holocaust Studies to 8th graders for 13 years. When a student who didn’t like that I told him to sit down and stop bothering the young lady next to him said that I was acting like the Gestapo, I didn’t react by taking his hyperbili literally. I instead used the comment as a stepping off point for a class discussion. Tim Allen’s comment was used in the same way. It should have started a discussion about the lack of tolerance for any opposing view in Hollywood. But fearing that exact response the false sensitivity derailed the discussion. “Useful idiots” as Saul Alinsky named them then jump in to carry the discussion in the wrong direction!
Did you teach your students how to spell hyperbole?
Also, it is ironic to me that you bring up the term “useful idiots”. It’s actually been bandied about lately in reference to Trump, in most cases labeling Trump himself as the useful idiot, whether on behalf of the Russians or scheming Tea Party wackos. But I find the most amusing application is when taken from Trump’s point of view in reference to his many uninformed followers. They truly are the useful idiots, voting for a monger of fear and hate with little knowledge of the facts and in many cases voting against their own self interests and benefits. Only now are some starting to realize how they will personally be disadvantaged by his policies. The problem is most are not realizing, and will never realize, because they are simply enchanted by the delight of having a racist, sexist, celebrity businessman in office.