Whoopi Goldberg faces backlash after repeating false comments about the Holocaust

Whoopi Goldberg is facing a new round of backlash following her latest historically inaccurate statement about the Holocaust, which she claimed was “not originally” about race in an interview. with the British newspaper The Sunday Times.

The controversy marks the second time this year Goldberg, 67, has come under fire for what Jewish leaders and Holocaust experts say are inaccurate and offensive comments about the Nazi-sponsored mass murder of six million european jews between 1933 and 1945.

Goldberg made the latest comments in an interview published Saturday, after the reporter said that “the Nazis saw the Jews as a race,” referencing Goldberg’s earlier comments from January, in which he claimed that the Holocaust ” It’s not about race.”

“Yeah, but that’s the killer, isn’t it?” Goldberg told The Sunday Times reporter. “The oppressor is telling you what you are. Why do you believe them? They are Nazis. Why believe what they are saying?

“Originally it wasn’t [about race]Goldberg continued. “Remember who they were killing first. They weren’t killing racially; they were physically killing. They were killing people they considered mentally deficient. And then they made this decision.”

When the reporter told Goldberg that “the Nazis measured the heads and noses of the Jews to ‘prove’ that they were a different race,” Goldberg replied: “They did that to blacks, too. But that doesn’t change the fact that “That you couldn’t tell a Jew on the street. You could find me. You couldn’t find them. That was the point I was making. But you would have thought I had taken some big old stinking crap on the table, bare bottom.”

The backlash and correction of the comments, which comes amid rising anti-Semitism in the US, was immediate.

Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum Monday tweeted a passage from a letter Adolf Hitler wrote in 1919: fourteen years before being appointed chancellor of Germany and opening the first concentration camp, stating that “the Jews are definitely a race” and calling the Jews a “foreign race, unable and unwilling to sacrifice its racial distinction.”

“This text is one of the first important statements made by Hitler regarding the Jewish question,” reads the Auschwitz Memorial tweet that accompanies the excerpt.

While the Auschwitz Memorial tweet did not mention Goldberg by name, several other Jewish leaders used the tweet to denounce the inaccuracy of Goldberg’s comments.

David Harris, former chairman of the American Jewish Committee, an advocacy organization, retweeted Hitler’s passage and addressed Goldberg, writing: “Stop claiming the Holocaust wasn’t about race. It was about race.”

A Holocaust survivor, Lucy Lipiner, condemned Goldberg’s comments. in a tweetwriting that she “continues to use the Holocaust as her punching bag”.

“We told him his comments hurt us and he just doesn’t care,” Lipiner wrote, referencing Goldberg’s comments on “The View” in January.

Those earlier comments led ABC News to suspend Goldberg for two weeks, with Chairman Kim Godwin calling the comments “wrong and hurtful.” Goldberg apologized for those comments within hours.

Goldberg’s representative and a spokesperson for “The View” did not immediately return requests for comment Monday afternoon.

Representative Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., wrote in a tweet linking to a story about Goldberg’s most recent comments: “Anti-Semitism is anti-Jewish racism. Period. To claim the Holocaust had nothing to do with racism is historical revisionism at its worst.”

Goldberg gave the interview to The Sunday Times following her appearance in “Till,” the recent film about the brutal kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till by two white men, in which she plays Emmett’s grandmother. , Alma Carthan. Goldberg was also a producer on the film.