With no LGBT love from Russia

While persecution of gay people is unacceptable, it can be a bit overblown in demanding every country in the world conforms to the norms of much of the Western hemisphere immediately.  Stephen Fry has been banging the drum about abuses in other countries for so long (and changing nothing) he has got a tinnitus ear.  His demands for a boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi has led to intemperate language.  Russia is not Nazi Germany and the 2014 Games are in no way like Berlin in 1936.  His claim that homosexuals are being treated as scapegoats in Russia, proves a) that he doesn't understand the meaning of the word (because Russians don't blame this minority at being at the root of all their problems) and b) he is tying it to what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany, who were scapegoated (homosexuals were persecuted but not held up per se by the Nazis as being behind every bad thing).  Yet for Fry to use such exaggerated phrases just makes people tune out because it is patently not true, especially as the situation of Jews (or for that matter gay people) in the 1930s Germany is in no way comparable to that of homosexuals in Russia today.
But then we've here before.  When David Cameron re-aligned the Conservative Party in the European Parliament with some unsavoury Eastern European parties known for gay-bashing, of whom the largest was Polish, Fry popped up and said, "We know which side of the borders the ovens were on."  Any goodwill he had in Poland, Fry squandered instantly.  The death camps were conceived in Germany and managed by Germans but some just so happened to be built on Polish soil or soil that subsequently became Polish with the border changes in 1945.  Indeed, at the time Poland had been wiped from the map and replaced by the Nazi colony of 'General Government'.  It is illegal in Poland to state that places like Auschwitz-Birkenau were Polish.  And to use the Holocaust to protest the treatment of gays (who are not being exterminated wholesale, on an industrial scale or otherwise) is very, very low (note, again, the trading on association with what happened to Jewish people).  Fry's attempt to dissuade Cameron from his course of action was not just a failure but involved Fry being taken apart as well.
For his latest outburst, one of the places he suggest as an alternative venue for the 2014 Games is Utah - that bastion of LGBT tolerance!  This is despite the fact that at the time of the 2002 Salt Lake City Games (which was awarded after massive bribery), same-sex activity was criminalised under Utah's sodomy laws.  These laws were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2003, but I didn't hear Fry piping up at the time about the USA being like Nazi Germany.
Boycotts of sporting events have a mixed history of success.  When the USA and many of its allies boycotted the 1980 Moscow Games over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (something which the USA had covertly encouraged by funding Islamic guerillas in the country, the USSR did not pack its bags from Kabul and head home.  Indeed, British participation led by Sebastian Coe (against Margaret Thatcher's wishes) won the enduring gratitude of Juan Antonio Samaranch and after Madrid was knocked out, Samaranch swung his entire backing behind London's bid for the 2012 Olympics - where Britain could show off the benefits of diversity and tolerance to the whole world.  There were calls for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics over a myriad of causes (though not from Fry who seems to believe gay rights is the only cause worth pursuing).  Beijing's protest parks where no-one was allowed to protest were a Kafkaesque joke inside an Orwellian riddle, wrapped in a Bradburyan enigma, but would a boycott have made a difference?
Maybe Fry should stick to his love of technology because when he makes comments about geopolitics and history, he comes across as a more urbane version of George W. Bush and that we can all do without.