He also hints that powerful Jews in the media are stifling talk about Israel in America.

ALGIERS (AFP) — Film director Oliver Stone has launched a critical rant against America’s love of money, its role in war and Barack Obama whilst at a film festival in Algeria where he’s promoting his latest documentary.

Speaking mostly in French at a press conference in Algiers yesterday, Stone said he was shocked by the global financial crisis and “to see how money was venerated by America”.

Its middle class “is the biggest victim” said the US director, though nothing could be done to change a system that he called “undemocratic, even after the arrival of Obama”, he added.

But the 65-year-old had little sympathy for his compatriots.

“Americans are not really interested in problems abroad,” he said. “They have no empathy.”

The Occupy Wall Street movement would do better to move to “Washington and not New York, to have more impact”, said Stone, the son of a Wall Street trader and French mother and director of the aptly named 1987 film Wall Street and its sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps(2010).

Questioned over America’s support of Israel, Stone said it was a subject “that couldn’t be talked about in the US.

“There is such power, money, media and lobbying are so (powerful) that the truth can’t come out.”