Correction: In Story 'Will Smith Loves Hitler,' 'Loves' Should Have Read 'Hates' Throughout
A story circulated Friday afternoon in which Biggest Movie Star in the World Will Smith, who's built an unparalleled career trading on his intense likability, offered a Scottish reporter some of his seemingly sympathetic thoughts on Adolf Hitler's motives—comments that were quickly extracted and repackaged by several online out-of-context-celebrity-quote-farming outlets, accompanied by judicious headlines such as "Smith: 'Hitler Was a Good Person.'" Seeing as Smith's fabricated love of Hitler and Jesus's gift-exchanging birthday extravaganza seemed to us an uneasy pairing, we ignored it, but it nevertheless got enough play to warrant the issuance of an angry statement in which Smith reasserted his rejection of all things Hitlerian:
In a story published Saturday in the Daily Record, Smith was quoted saying: "Even 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.' "
The quote was preceded by the writer's observation: "Remarkably, Will believes everyone is basically good."
Over the weekend, dozens of celebrity gossip Web sites posted articles about the comment, many saying that Smith believed that Hitler was a "good" person.
"It is an awful and disgusting lie," Smith said in a statement Monday provided by his publicist. "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," read the statement.
Not even we are so cynical as to draw connections between this sudden resurgence in Führer discourse and lifelong Smith bromance partner Tom Cruise's upcoming Valkyrie—a film whose premise, after all, hangs upon the fact that Hitler was evil enough to warrant assassination by a dashing, one-eyed German in the first place. (Or was he? See the movie, and discuss!) Hopefully, this statement will be the final word on any perceived sympathies between the megastar and the dictator, curtailing the production of homemade parody videos with titles like, "I Killed 6 Millions Jews, He's the Rapper," before they can be uploaded to YouTube.
UPDATE: The Anti-Defamation League accepts Will's clarification! Could it be long before he's tapped to play Israel's own one-eyed war hero, Moshe Dayan?
