ABC has suspended Whoopi Goldberg from âThe Viewâ for two weeks over comments she made Monday claiming that the Holocaust had nothing to do with race.
âEffective immediately, I am suspending Whoopi Goldberg for two weeks for her wrong and hurtful comments. While Whoopi has apologized, Iâve asked her to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments,â ABC News President Kim Godwin said in a statement, according to ABC News.
âThe entire ABC News organization stands in solidarity with our Jewish colleagues, friends, family, and communities,â Godwin said.
Goldberg tried to stave off consequences for the remark with an apology on Tuesdayâs show.
âYesterday on our show, I misspoke. I tweeted about it last night but I want you to hear it from me directly,â she said on the air Tuesday, according to CNN.
âI said something that I feel a responsibility for not leaving unexamined, because my words upset so many people, which was never my intention. I understand why now, and for that I am deeply, deeply grateful because the information I got was really helpful, and it helped me understand some different things.
âI said the Holocaust wasnât about race and was instead about manâs inhumanity to man,â Goldberg said.
âBut it is indeed about race because Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race,â she said.
That wasnât her message Monday night on âThe Late Show with Steven Colbert,â when Goldberg indicated that skin color is the only form of racism she knows, saying, âas a black person, I think of race as being something that I can see.â
âWhen you talk about being a racist, you canât call this racism,â she said, according to the Daily Mail. âThis was evil. This wasnât based on skin. You couldnât tell who was Jewish. You had to delve deeply and figure it out. My point is: They had to do the work.â
âIf the Klan is coming down the street and Iâm standing with a Jewish friend, Iâm going to run, but if my friend decides not to run, theyâll get passed by most times because you canât tell who is Jewish. You donât know,â she said.
When Colbert pointed out that the Nazis themselves considered the Holocaust a racial matter, many saw Goldbergâs response as doubling down.
âThe Nazis lied,â she said. âThey had issues with ethnicity, not with race because most of the Nazis were white people, and most of the people they were attacking were white people.
âSo to me, Iâm thinking, how can you say itâs about race if you are fighting each other?â
Those comments irked conservative commentator John Podhoretz.
âThatâs nice that she thinks about it that way. But itâs monumentally ignorant, stupid and almost jaw-droppingly offensive,â Podhertz wrote in a column published by the New York Post Tuesday.
âSix million people literally died because that wasnât how the people who killed them thought about race. And as for the âsomething Whoopi can seeâ doctrine, letâs remember that Hitlerâs goal was the extermination of all Jews on the planet â and then as now, there are millions of Sephardic Jews with skin hues that would not classify them as âwhite.â Even Whoopi wouldnât âseeâ them that way,â he wrote.
âNo, what Whoopi clearly meant was that the Jews she knows have light-colored skin, and the Jews she has seen in movies about the Holocaust have light-colored skin. Therefore they were âwhite.â And since racism only involves black and white, they were also âwhiteâ to the Nazis, and the genocide was a white-on-white genocide.â
Many on Twitter thought the suspension was not very much punishment at all.
Some within ABC were also seething, according to the U.K. Daily Mail.
âThese comments are absolutely abhorrent and outrageous and itâs time Disney and ABC grew a pair and fired her,â the Daily Mail quoted a âa senior ABC sourceâ as saying.
âThere is a blind spot on âThe View âwhen it comes to Anti-Semitism. It is never a big enough hate crime for them.â
Behind-the-scenes anger was also reported by the New York Postâs Page Six.
âABC staffers and Disney Network execs are saying Whoopi went way too far. And board members are not happy with her apology and want a fuller retraction. The word is that Whoopi is in âdeep sât,ââ Page Six quoted what it called âone ABC insiderâ it did not name as saying.
âWhy does Whoopi seemingly get a pass when others donât? Perhaps this time she wonât. Many at the network â including her fellow hosts â believe Whoopi is too controversial now for the show,â Page Six quoted its source as saying.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
