#FireWhoopi is trending after Whoopi Goldberg made offensive comments about the Holocaust during a recently published interview. While she subsequently apologized, it is the second time she has come under fire for her controversial views on the Holocaust.
In the interview, Goldberg doubled down on her view that the Holocaust wasn’t “about race.” She made similar views earlier this year that got her temporarily suspended from The View.
In this latest interview, the reporter challenged Goldberg’s previous comments and stated that “Nazis saw Jews as a race.” However, Goldberg disagreed and alleged that it wasn’t initially about race.
Instead, she claimed that the Nazis “were killing physical. They were killing people they considered to be mentally defective” before it became racial. The reporter pointed out that the Nazis “measured the heads and noses of Jews to ‘prove’ they were a distinct race.”
Goldberg countered, “They did that to Black people too. 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.”
Her comments quickly received backlash from Jewish leaders and Holocaust survivors and experts who slammed her comments as inaccurate and offensive.
Whoopi Goldberg apologized amid backlash
The backlash was swift as users started the hashtag #FireWhoopi to call for her permanent removal from The View. Meanwhile, users also challenged her view that the Jews weren’t a race, even though there is strong evidence to show that the Nazis did classify Jews as a race.
Auschwitz Memorial posted a historical document, which was an excerpt from a letter from Adolf Hitler from 1919. In the statement about Jews, Hitler adamantly defined Jews as a “race,” referring to them as a “race” three times within the first sentences.
Survivors of the Holocaust and the Nazis also spoke out to slam Goldberg, stating that her comments were deeply harmful to the Jewish community, but that Goldberg seemingly didn’t care.
Others also accused her of “historical revisionism” and of spreading harmful views at a time when anti-Semitism has been on the rise in America.
Goldberg issued an apology on Tuesday following the backlash and claimed it wasn’t her intention to double down on the previously “hurtful comments” she had made.
She stated, “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.”
Goldberg’s initial Holocaust controversy explained
Goldberg’s apology was strikingly similar to the first apology she issued back in February after coming under fire for controversial Holocaust comments she made on January 31 on The View.
This was when she first stated her view that the Holocaust wasn’t about race. Instead, she stated the Holocaust was “white people doing it to white people,” and about “man’s inhumanity to man.”
Following swift backlash and a two-week suspension from The View, Goldberg apologized. She stated that she was sorry for the hurt she caused and repeated a statement from Jonathan Greenblatt from the Anti-Defamation League that the Holocaust was about the Nazi’s genocide of Jews, whom they viewed as an “inferior race.”
Goldberg also stated that she stood “corrected.” However, even though she conceded she was wrong back then, she once more repeated almost the exact same ideals during her most recent interview.
Given that this is her second offense, social media users are doubling down on their calls for her to be permanently fired from The View. They have begun to pressure Disney’s ABC to make the move to fire Goldberg immediately.
ABC has not yet publicly responded to Goldberg’s latest controversial Holocaust statements.