Blood Diamond director Edward Zwick's outspokenness didn't win him any accolades from an audience of his fellow Jews on Monday. Delivering a speech at the Rapaport International Diamond Conference in New York, Zwick made the classic gesture of rhetorical overreach, comparing the vicious consequences of the gem trade to the Holocaust.

"To say ...'None of us even knew it was happening,' is to miss the point," he said, according to a copy of his remarks. "Complicity is not just a phrase of art. Many of us in this room are Jews. How many of us would accept the argument that those in Nazi Germany who stood idly by and watched the slaughter of 6 million are free of blame because they now claim not to have known what was happening?"

This passage was met with silence and blank stares from the largely Orthodox audience. Later, an argument broke out between Zwick and World Diamond Council Chairman Eli Izhakoff, who challenged Zwick's assertion that the diamond industry has been fueling conflict in Sierra Leone for 75 years.

(At least Zwick was seeking consideration for somebody other than himself when he invoked the Shoah, unlike Judith Regan, who tried to save her job at HarperCollins by comparing her bad press over the O.J. Simpson book to the "big lie" Hitler used against the Jews.)

Martin Rapaport, the conference's organizer and publisher of a listing that sets international diamond prices, says he was less bothered by Zwick's genocide talk than by his suggestion that financial restitution for diamond-trade depredations is the best way to help Africans.

"It's not about the diamond industry," he says. "It's not about the Holocaust or what's already done. It's about people coming together to help other people get out of extreme poverty."

Zwick, he adds, "is a good guy, and whether everyone agrees with him is secondary to the fact that he's a good guy."