(sigh)

Gone are the days when you could say: "Well, at least Tom Hanks isn't a loony!"

Actually- those days disappeared during the "The Da Vinci Code" fiasco.

Mr. Hanks' latest gaffe is just troubling, so troubling that one hopes he misspoke.

“Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”

If one never, ever reads a book and ignores the militarist government which emerged in Japan in the Thirties and held its population in an iron grip, its expansionist policies which led to the brutal domination of Korea, China, Indonesia and much of the Pacific, the abandonment of true bushido, the fanatical devotion to their emperor, the attack on Pearl Harbour, the treatment of citizens and POWs and the ends to which the Allied powers had to go in order to secure world peace, then perhaps. In order for the comparison to be complete, one would also have to forget the September 11th attacks and other Islamofascist atrocities but that would be just nutty.

Perhaps Mr. Hanks should cease from commenting on that of which he apparently knows nothing.