The official verdict in the Wide World of New York Stadium Naming Rights?

1) The Holocaust is offensive.

2) Slavery, English colonialism, apartheid, the Congolese civil war, supporting the Mugabe regime...not so much.

After an amazingly brief explosion of justifiable anger at New Jers-- er, New York's two NFL teams' potential naming-rights deal with Allianz, the deal is dead.

It should be. Allianz was up to its neck in helping the Nazis do dispicable things -- including insuring the makers of Zyklon B gas should, you know, things go wrong during its intended use. Was there a fear of liability lawsuits if those shower nozzels didn't work?

Allianz's head at the time was cozy with the highest levels of the Third Reich, and the company cancelled Jewish families' insurance policies.

Today, Allianz says they've copped to their sordid past and paid restitutions. Holocaust survivor activists dispute that, claiming that Allianz has been the most reluctant and begruding of all the companies targetted for restitutions, having only offered $12 million after agreeing to a much higher figure.

They're willing to spend $25 million a year to splash their name on a football stadium in the Jersey swamps, but not make good to people whose lives they helped destroy.

If this sounds familiar, it should. Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards project stormed down the same trash-strewn path when they inked a $400 million deal with Barclays Bank, whose history includes involvement with the U.S. slave trade, South African apartheid, European colonialism, the Congolese civil war and support for Robert Mugabe's internationally condemned regime in Zimbabwe.

In fact, Ratner went further -- he actually completed the deal. The Giants and Jets, no models of sports-industry decency, actually did the right thing and told Allianz to take a hike.

The two deals have a lot in common:

* A corporation with a morally and ethically offensive history;
* A corporation that hasn't adequately addressed the misery they once inflicted;
* Sports team owners so greedy and tone-deaf that they thought nothing of entering into negotiations with companies loaded down with this kind of baggage;
* Owners putting profits over moral justice and human dignity;
* Outraged activists justifiably making a fuss.







Birds of a feather, no doubt...

The similarities end with the way the deals played out. The Giants and the Jets listened, and put a halt to the Allianz bid. Maybe they did it for moral reasons, and maybe it was simply a bottom-line fiscal decision. Whichever, the Allianz deal is dead, and that's a good thing. Congrats to all the politicians, activists, sports fans whose heart said "this deal will harm us all, we must stop it."

If the Allianz deal was killed after a 48-hour whirlwind of indignation, CYA maneuvers, and a corporation made to capitulate with its tail between its legs, why is Bruce Ratner's deal with Barclays still alive eighteen months later?

The Holocaust was horrible, and Allianz was a miscreant corpo both then and now, dragging their heels on paying their massive debt to humanity.

But for the media and local sports team owners, is the Holocaust worse than the holocuast of slavery and apartheid, the decimation of New World indigenous cultures by European settlers, and Barclays terrible machinations in Africa over just the last twenty years? Allianz's vile acts, at least the ones that sank the Meadowlands Stadium naming-rights deal, ended in the '40s. (Well, if you don't count their refusal to fully pay up.)

Barclays vile acts continue to this very day.

Oh, and yes, Barclays was involved with the Nazis too -- they helped the Third Reich freeze French Jews' bank accounts.

Gander or goose, it should be good for both.











One of these is not, you know, real yet.

The reasons given by both Allianz and Barclays for their involvement is this: "we had no choice. We had too."

That's just so insultingly wrong. If Allianz's actions over the past sixty years disqualified them, why not Barclays over the last three centuries?

To be fair on one tiny point, at least Allianz puts out the line that they accept responsibility for their Holocaust-era malfeasance. Barclays, with three-hundred-plus years of bad acts in the books, won't even do that. Instead, Barclays does what guilty allies of evil always do -- claim the suffering would've been worse if they hadn't been there to limit the damage.

How about not bankrolling the carnage in the first place?

One astonishing element to these stories is the media's unbelievable inability to link the Allianz and Barclays deals. That's shody journalism at its worst. It's like being outraged that the North Tower collapsed on September 11th but not even noticing the South Tower fell.

And the South Tower fell first.

It's pretty simple. If all of us were repulsed by the Allianz deal -- and we should have been -- then we should be equally disgusted about the Barclays deal.

That goes for all the media members who wrote about it; for activists whose admirable two-day onslaught sank the Allianz deal; for politicians who knew a good, easy, moral issue to take a stand on, and amazingly followed through; for sports fans who rightly refused the comforts offered by a bad neighbor like Allianz; and for the Giants owners the Tischs and Jets GOP-fundraiser owner Woody Johnson, who finally turned down Allianz's blood money.

There are a lot of people who won't stand up to the Barclays deal: Bruce Ratner, Mayor Bloomberg, Borough President Markowitz, local pols David Yassky and Bill DeBlasio, ACORN's Bertha Lewis, former community activist the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, the Rev. Al Sharpton, Ratner's brother and activist attorney Michael Ratner. All of them people you'd think would get all sorts of worked-up over ties to slavery, apartheid and Nazism.

It starts with Bruce Ratner, who's turned a blind eye to both his own community's suffering sixty years ago, and those communities that have suffered under Barclays' heels for hundreds of years.

The same communities, it should be noted, that Ratner has wined-and-dined in a so-far vain attempt to build his Atlantic Yards boondoggle.

It's not villainous to ask "is Allianz's enabling of the Holocaust more detestable than slavery, apartheid and all the other ills assisted by Barclays?"

The Villainy label gets applied to those who answer "yes," or worse, those who ignore these issues altogether.

Bottom line: if the Giants and Jets won't take Allianz's money, then how can Bruce Ratner take Barclays?

Moreover, how can we let him?