Whoopi Goldberg criticised for new Holocaust remarks: ‘Deeply offensive and incredibly ignorant’

Earlier this year Whoopi Goldberg had apologised for her comments on Jews and race on her talk show The View. Whoopi again reignited her remarks, and said that the Holocaust “wasn’t originally” about race in a new interview. (Also read: Whoopi Goldberg suspended by ABC for Holocaust comments, issues apology: ‘Sorry for the hurt I’ve caused’)

Whoopi, 67, has faced backlash for her new remarks, where she followed the same strain of argument that the estimated 6 million Jews who were systematically killed during the Holocaust from 1933 to 1945 were not targeted based on their race.

In the new interview with The Sunday Times, Whoopi said, “Yes, but that’s the killer, isn’t it? The oppressor is telling you what you are. Why are you believing them? They’re Nazis. Why believe what they’re saying? It wasn’t originally [about race]. Remember who they were killing first. They were not killing racial; they were killing physical. They were killing people they considered to be mentally defective. And then they made this decision.”

The Academy Award-winning actor also suggested that people of African descent were also targeted in the same way, and that Jews had it easier blending in with White people and hiding from the Nazis, than Black people did at the time of the Holocaust. When reporter told Goldberg that “the Nazis measured the heads and noses of Jews to ‘prove’ they were a distinct race,” Whoopi replied with the rhetoric, “It doesn’t change the fact that you could not tell a Jew on a street. You could find me. You couldn’t find them. That was the point I was making. But you would have thought that I’d taken a big old stinky dump on the table, b*** naked.”

The comments were met with backlash from Jewish activists and the community. Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted, “Whoopi Goldberg’s comments about the Holocaust and race are deeply offensive and incredibly ignorant. When she made similar comments earlier this year, we explained how the Nazi regime was inherently racist. Whoopi’s comments show a complete lack of awareness of the multiethnic, multiracial makeup of the Jewish community. She needs to apologise immediately and actually commit to educating herself on the true nature of anti semitism.”

The Times of Israel called the actor’s comments “incendiary.” International Legal Forum CEO Arsen Ostrovsky tweeted, “So, after supposed ‘apology’ earlier in year, Whoopi Goldberg doubles down on her vile remarks that the Holocaust was not about race, and instead ‘white on white’ violence. Someone get this ignorant fool off the air!” Author of Long Journey Home: A Young Girl’s Memoir of Surviving the Holocaust, Lucy Lipiner lashed out at the actor in her tweet: “Whoopi Goldberg continues to use the Holocaust as her punching bag. We told her that her comments harm us and she simply doesn’t care. I survived the Nazis and the Holocaust, so I’ll be damned if I let a comedy has-been, peddling a fake Jewish name get the better of me.”

Responding to the criticism of her comments, Whoopi Goldberg apologised in a statement that read, “It was never my intention to appear as if I was doubling down on hurtful comments, especially after talking with and hearing people like rabbis and old and new friends weighing in. I’m still learning a lot and believe me, I heard everything everyone said to me. I believe that the Holocaust was about race, and I am still as sorry now as I was then that I upset, hurt and angered people. In this time of rising antisemitism, I want to be very clear when I say that I always stood with the Jewish people and always will. My support for them has not wavered and never will.”