Whoopi Goldberg suspended by ABC over Holocaust comments

AFP

Actress Whoopi Goldberg was suspended on Tuesday for two weeks from her show on ABC after she was criticized for saying the Nazi genocide of six million Jews was not “a matter of race”.

Although The View host apologized, ABC News president Kim Godwin said it wasn’t enough.

“With immediate effect, I suspend Whoopi Goldberg for two weeks for her misleading and offensive comments,” Godwin said in a statement posted on the channel’s public relations Twitter account.

“While Whoopi apologized, I asked her to take the time to reflect and realize the impact of her comments.”

The actress, who won an Oscar for supporting actress for “Ghost” (1990), claimed in an issue of The View that the Holocaust involved “two groups of white people”.

“On today’s show I said that the Holocaust ‘is not a question of race, it’s man’s inhumanity to man’. I should have said it’s both,” Goldberg wrote on Twitter Monday night.

“The Jewish people all over the world have always had my support and that will never change. I am sorry for the damage I caused,” added the 66-year-old actress.

Following Goldberg’s comments, critics responded that race was a determining factor in the genocide, as the Nazis believed they were a superior race.

“No @WhoopiGoldberg, the #Holocaust was the systematic annihilation of the Jewish people by the Nazis, who considered them an inferior race,” tweeted Jonathan Greenblatt, director of the Anti-Defamation League.

“They were dehumanized and used this racist propaganda to justify the murder of six million Jews. The distortion of the Holocaust is dangerous,” he added.

For its part, the United States Holocaust Museum wrote on Twitter that “racism was central to Nazi ideology”.

“Jews were not defined by religion but by race. Nazi racist beliefs fueled genocide and mass murder,” the institution declared without referring to Goldberg’s comments.

The actress, who has starred in films that denounced racism against blacks such as “The Color Purple”, spoke during a discussion about the ban at a Tennessee school of the 1986 graphic novel “Maus”, about life in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning book, which portrays Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, is considered a powerful and accurate depiction of the Nazi murder of millions of Jews during World War II.