Farrow: "Spielberg Could Become Leni Riefenstahl of Olympic Games"

Actress Mia Farrow has condemned director Steven Spielberg for aiding China's staging of the 2008 Olympic Games, warning he could become known as "the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games." Farrow, a United Nations UNICEF goodwill ambassador, launched an impassioned appeal on behalf of African victims in the over-spilling Sudan crisis earlier this month. And The Omen star, 62, is astonished so many big names and corporations like Coca-Cola and McDonald's are also readily lending their support to what they have dubbed 'The Genocide Olympics', because China openly supports the government of Sudan. She writes in a Wall Street Journal article, "That so many corporate sponsors want the world to look away from that atrocity during the games is bad enough. But equally disappointing is the decision of artists like director Steven Spielberg - who quietly visited China this month as he prepares to help stage the Olympic ceremonies - to sanitize Beijing's image. Is Mr. Spielberg, who in 1994 founded the Shoah Foundation to record the testimony of survivors of the Holocaust, aware that China is bankrolling Darfur's genocide?" Farrow went on to warn the Schindler's List director that he risked becoming a modern version of Nazi propaganda filmmaker Riefenstahl, who is famed for her 1936 Berlin games film Olympia. She writes, "Does Mr. Spielberg really want to go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games? Do the various television sponsors around the world want to share in that shame? Because they will. Unless, of course, all of them add their singularly well-positioned voices to the growing calls for Chinese action to end the slaughter in Darfur." According to official United Nations figures, more than 200,000 people have died and more than two million have been displaced since the rebels and government forces first clashed in Dafur in 2003.