Gość: snow_ball
IP: *.commercial.cgocable.net
28.08.03, 20:50
August 22, 2003
Mr. Nobuyuki Idei, Chairman & CEO
SONY Corporation
7-35, Kitashinagawa 6-Chome
Shinagawa-ku
Tokyo 141-10, Japan
Dear Sir:
Movie S.W.A.T.
The Polish American Congress is the umbrella organization of the Polish
community in the United States and acts as its representative and spokesman.
As a unit of the Congress, the Anti-Bigotry Committee fights prejudice and
discrimination aimed at our ethnic group. It identifies and exposes those
individuals and organizations which use such bias.
We are contacting you because SONY is promoting prejudice against us through
its distribution of the film S.W.A.T. It contains several references to our
ethnic group intended to portray us as a stupid and an intellectually
inferior people.
During World War II, Hitler and his Nazis presented themselves as a superior
race and people like Jews, Gypsies and Poles were branded inferior. It
disturbs us that some of this attitude now shows up in a product which
carries the SONY label. We can only ask why SONY would want to associate its
good name with a product that creates so much ill will against some
Americans.
The Anti-Bigotry Committee is concerned that this SONY film defames and
injures our ethnic group. Your audiences are encouraged to look down on us
as a lower class, similar to the way Nazis had looked at Jews and us before.
S.W.A.T. may also be damaging to the Japanese people. It could easily give
the impression the Japanese management at SONY shares such a racial
philosophy and is attempting to instigate discord and division in American
society by setting one group against another.
It also does a great injustice to African Americans when it depicts them as
anti-White bigots. In S.W.A.T. it is the Black actor, Samuel Jackson, who is
the one making the anti-Polish insults.
These ethnic references are not essential nor would they detract from the
storyline if they were removed. Their gratuitous inclusion suggests they
simply reflect the personal and exclusive prejudices of the playwright
himself.
We would like to ask you to intervene in this matter and have these harmful
ethnic references deleted from the film. They would merely be cosmetic
changes which do not alter the story at all.
Sincerely yours,
FM:mo
Frank Milewski, Chairman
