You make excellent points and are, logically speaking, correct. We are emotional creatures and we usually respond emotionally. If the list was called "hitler is my hero" there would be a visceral reaction. The framing, the contextual anchoring of a comment does matter and it should matter since we are social creatures that respond emotionally.

I very much agree with the top comment made by Const-me and the overall points you made. Unfortunately fear and anger are what drives political discourse and media feeds that fire.