Will Smith is angry over celebrity gossip Web site articles that he said misinterpreted a recent remark he made in a Scottish newspaper about Adolf Hitler.
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.
A Jewish group said Wednesday that it accepts the actor’s explanation that he never praised Hitler in remarks.
“We welcome and accept Will Smith’s statement that Hitler was a ‘vicious killer’ and that he did not mean for his remarks about the Nazi leader to be mistaken as praise,” Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a statement.
Smith “took immediate steps to clarify his words” and condemn Hitler, Foxman said.
Foxman said words “can be twisted by those with hate and bigotry in their hearts.”
“This is why all celebrities bear a special responsibility to weigh their words carefully, and an obligation to speak out against racism and bigotry whenever even a whiff of it appears, as Will Smith has done in this instance,” he said.