$tay ¢old

Steven Spielberg has been catching heat lately for his involvement in the 2008 Olympics, which some liberals and activists are calling “The Genocide Games.” Why? It’s simple: Mass murders, rapes and ethnic displacement have ravaged the Darfur region of Sudan for the past four years. Sudan’s leadership is basically responsible for this. China will block any U.N. Security Council resolution aimed at stopping the genocide in Darfur. China buys 70 percent of Sudan’s oil and is its chief arms supplier. Beijing is hosting the 2008 Olympics.

Oh yeah, so Steven Spielberg. He’s serving as an artistic adviser and ceremonial orchestrator to the Genocide Games. He was also lauded for creating a foundation to record the testimonies of people who survived a different genocide: the Holocaust. Conflict much?

Anyway, Spielberg recently joined the ranks of other Hollywood stars who are pressing China to intervene in Darfur’s humanitarian crisis, admitting, as Nat Hentoff writes in this week’s Village Voice, that he only recently learned of China’s role in Sudan. OK, maybe we can give him that. After all, who actually reads the international pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. But Hentoff also points out that Spielberg said “he’d not known about the genocide” in Darfur, which could only mean that for the better part of this decade, he’s either been banned from looking at computer/television screens and newspapers,  or living under a rock.