Never underestimate the ability of a leftist to say something stupid and double down on it. Today’s example: comedian-turned-actress-turned-TV-host Whoopi Goldberg.
The Oscar winner and co-host of The View made some idiotic, antisemitic comments about the Holocaust earlier this year that resulted in ABC suspending her from the show. In January, Goldberg referred to the Holocaust as “white-on-white violence” and about “man’s inhumanity to man.”
After a commercial break on the same episode, Goldberg issued an apology.
“I said the Holocaust wasn’t about race and was instead about man’s inhumanity to man, but it was indeed about race because Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race,” she said. “Now words matter and mine are no exception. I regret my comments, as I said, and I stand corrected. I also stand with the Jewish people as they know, and y’all know, because I’ve always done that.”
However, the damage had been done. Viewers and critics called for ABC to fire Goldberg, but the network suspended her instead. The suspension lasted for just over a week, and the controversy died down.
Nearly a year later, Goldberg has decided to dig herself into a deeper hole. In an interview with the Times of London, which the paper published on Christmas Eve, the star chose to revisit the controversy and double down on the antisemitism she expressed in January.
Related: The New, New Antisemitism
One of the most interesting things about Goldberg’s return to antisemitism is that she brought it up on her own. Interviewer Janice Turner prefaces that part of the article by noting that “On a list of topics I’m forbidden to raise, The View is highlighted in red. But no one seems to have told Whoopi.”
Turner referenced a recent British book and documentary to challenge Goldberg’s assertion that the Holocaust wasn’t about the Nazis’ treating Jews as a race. Goldberg pushed back.
“It wasn’t originally,” insists Goldberg. “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.”
Goldberg continued to contrast being Jewish to being black, saying that the comparison is apples and oranges.
“They did that to black people too,” Goldberg said when Turner pointed out that the Nazis measured the facial features of Jewish people for specific characteristics. “But 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.”
Turner concludes that Goldberg views issues like these from a distinctly American lens, an assumption that America’s “specific racial politics, defined by slavery and Civil War, are the universal and only experience of race.”
The journalist also makes a salient point that one could make about almost any leftist.
“Also, frankly, Whoopi doesn’t seem to work her views out too thoroughly, and has an unfashionable tendency to think aloud on hot button topics live on TV,” Turner writes.
As astute and honest as that assessment may be, it doesn’t excuse Goldberg for her antisemitic statements. She shouldn’t necessarily face cancelation for statements like these, but she should definitely do her homework before weighing in on the Holocaust the next time.
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