Scott's World -- UPI Arts & Entertainment

Current events in the Middle East have stirred racial and religious tensions worldwide regarding Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other faiths. It has invaded the entertainment capital to a degree that appalls several Hollywood Jewish organizations and many individuals who are concerned by reports of increased anti-Semitism in Europe and in the United States.

The large Jewish community in the performing arts is uneasy about increased hostilities and deaths involved in the undeclared war between Palestinians and the Israelis.

Stepped-up hostilities have echoed especially in Hollywood with every story and broadcast reporting loss of sympathetic support for Israel.

It is, therefore, interesting that in the midst of escalating terrorist attacks and retaliating deployment of Israeli tanks that the Discovery Channel has announced the premiere of a new TV special documenting a key figure in the Nazi death camps.

Timing of this one-hour special titled "Eichmann" may or may not be significant in the face of growing disaffection with the Israeli cause.

But unquestionably, "Eichmann" will garner emotional support and generate sympathy for Jews following the holocaust that took 6 million Jewish lives in Nazi death camps during World War II.

Much of "Eichmann" features rare interviews with men and women who met and knew Adolf Eichmann, the man in charge of "Jewish Affairs" and the infamous "final solution to the Jewish problem."

The show will make its North American debut from 9 p.m.-10 p.m. on Wednesday, May 8.

A spokesperson for the Discovery Channel says, "There are exclusive interviews with a diverse group of interviewees -- including co-workers, victims, neighbors and the people who ultimately hunted him down in South America.

"Some, like Zeev Sapir, a Ukrainian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1944, recalls Eichmann as a psychopathic monster, who promised a wonderful life while knowingly putting his family on a train to a death camp." On the other hand, Eichmann's secretary describes him as "charming and loyal," a man who enjoyed table tennis and playing the violin.

A narrator declares Eichmann rationalized his actions as those of a man who was "just doing his job, a model of bureaucratic industriousness and steely determination."

Eichmann claimed he "personally" had nothing against Jews. Captured in Argentina in 1960 by agents of the Israeli secret service, the Mossad, Eichmann was charged in an Israeli court with 15 counts of crimes against the Jewish people and humanity. He was found guilty after a 14-week trial and hanged in Israel's Ramleh prison on May 31, 1962.

During the trial Eichmann said, "My interest here was only in the number of transport trains I had to provide ... Whether they were bank directors or mental cases, the people loaded on these trains meant nothing to me. It was really none of my business."

A frightening element of Eichmann's personality was his detached demeanor, an indifference to the consequences of his actions that is difficult to analyze, much less comprehend. His prosecutor, Gavriel Bach explains, "People are never ONLY something -- only a murderer, only a robot, only a bureaucrat, only a Nazi. People are a combination of things ..."

Apparently wholesale gassing of Jews at concentration camps was already under way in 1941 when Eichmann was made a lieutenant colonel and ordered to deport Jews from Germany and Bohemia.

He helped organize a conference at Wannsee in Berlin where it became official Nazi policy to eliminate all of Europe's 11 million Jews, not just those in Germany.

At his trial, Eichmann said, "When it came to the outcome of Wannsee ... I felt like Pontius Pilate -- entirely innocent of any guilt. The leaders of the Reich had spoken at Wannsee; I had to obey. And that's what I told myself in the years that followed."

Eichmann was nothing if not efficient. By 1944, he had transported Jews from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, France, Belgium, Holland and Greece to their deaths.

In 1957 Eichmann said, "I carefully set up my timetables for the transports with the Ministry of Transportation and the trains were soon rolling.

"I never watched the Jews being loaded onto trains. It was a minor matter for which I had little time."

"Eichmann" is a wake-up call for people worldwide about the consequences of man's inhumanity to man. It suggests prejudice of any kind is blind, destructive and indefensible on any level at any time.

The message is hatred and prejudice, whether religious, political or racial, can lead to war, a scourge to mankind since the beginning of time.

Worse still, it elevates wallpaper hangers, bureaucratic nerds, milquetoasts and other subspecies to positions of power enabling them to vent their barbaric wrath on innocent people.