Will Smith hearts Hitler. Wait, what?

From the moral outrage department, movie star (and former Fresh Prince) Will Smith has apparently been taking flak for the last couple of days for a remark he made to a Scottish newspaper that Hitler "didn't wake up going, 'Let me do the most evil thing I can do today.' ... I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was 'good.'"

As of Monday, the Jewish Defamation league, according to TMZ, was "calling on Barack Obama [whom Smith has publicly supported] to repudiate Smith's comments, and [wanted] theaters to pull Smith's new flick 'I Am Legend' from their screens," saying that his words, "spit on the memory of every person murdered by the Nazis. His disgusting words stick a knife in the backs of every veteran who fought (and sometimes died) to save the world from the intentions of Adolf Hitler." For his part, Smith subsequently tried to defuse the situation, issuing a statement that said, "It is an awful and disgusting lie. It speaks to the dangerous power of an ignorant person with a pen. I am incensed and infuriated to have to respond to such ludicrous misinterpretation. Adolf Hitler was a vile, heinous vicious killer responsible for one of the greatest acts of evil committed on this planet."

Seriously, guys? Are we really that sensitive today that you can't even mention Hitler except to denounce him? I think we're all in agreement here that the Holocaust was a travesty (minus a few crazies, like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ron Paul), and I'm pretty sure that Will "Get Jiggy With It" Smith is not a neo-Nazi, so what exactly are we getting so riled up about? Frankly, while I don't necessarily agree with Smith's comments -- personally, I'm more inclined to believe that Hitler's rhetoric was a calculated effort to gain power through hatemongering (kind of like President Bush's...) -- I don't think that they are particularly radical. He didn't say that Hitler was a fun guy to be around, or that the Jews had it coming, he just said that the Nazis thought they were doing the right thing. And...?

Of course, I'm not entirely sure what business Will Smith -- star of "Wild Wild West" and "I, Robot" -- has waxing philosophical about Hitler's motivations, but I don't think he should be crucified for it, either. On the bright side, maybe this will finally teach celebrities not to act like they're experts on everything under the sun just because they read a script about WWII once, or teach the rest of the world not to listen to them if they're talking about anything besides how they did their own stunts (probably not, though, on both counts).

On a deeper level, I think we need, as a society, to be able to discuss historical events like the Holocaust without having to fear this kind of unmitigated backlash, because all this ideological bullying does is to alienate anyone with a different point of view from our own. I know that these are sensitive subjects for a lot of people, but freedom of speech is guaranteed by the Constitution in order to facilitate debate in this country -- are we really choosing, of our own accord, to undermine that?

At least if Will Smith thought that people were "basically good" before this shitstorm, he's probably nice and cynical like the rest of us now. What would Uncle Phil say?

Sources:
Will Smith angry over Hitler comment interpretation [CNN]
Will Smith -- Hitler, Schmitler; He Wasn't That Bad [TMZ]
Smith: 'Hitler was a good person' [Yahoo News]