Whoopi Goldberg is Innocent — But Some of Her Critics are Shameless Hypocrites

Whoopi Goldberg got herself into a mess of trouble recently for her remarks about the Holocaust. David Boyajian takes a look at the hypocrisy of those who led the charge against her, Jewish and otherwise.


Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan receives the ADL’s ‘Courage to Care’ award from ADL National Director Abraham Foxman in New York. June 10, 2005. (Photo: jta.org)

Whoopi Goldberg is Innocent — But Some of Her Critics are Shameless Hypocrites

by David Boyajian
February 10, 2022

The award-winning actress/comedian/author Whoopi Goldberg, co-host of ABC-TV’s “The View”, has been suspended for two weeks for a minor, though understandable, slip-up (Monday, January 31) regarding the Holocaust.

Meanwhile, some of her Jewish accusers have been guilty of far worse — including genocide denial/diminishment — although mainstream corporate media have rarely reported that fact.

Born Caryn Elaine Johnson in NY City in 1955 to black parents, Goldberg has no Jewish ancestors but merely feels Jewish. She invented her name.

While The View was discussing the Holocaust, Goldberg interjected that it wasn’t about “race” since both Germans and Jews were “white.” It was “about man’s inhumanity to man.”

Co-host Joy Behar — an Italian Catholic with two Jewish husbands and a Hadassah Woman of the Year award — justifiably disagreed: Nazis considered Jews a “different race.” Added co-host Ana Navarro, the Holocaust was “white supremacy… going after Jews.”

American Jews and non-Jews, plus organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC), swiftly, and sometimes harshly, criticized Goldberg. Some want her fired.

Goldberg Acknowledges and Apologizes

On Stephen Colbert’s Late Show on Monday (taped in the daytime), Goldberg explained herself. “Being black… race [is] a very different thing to me so … I thought the Holocaust wasn’t about race.”

Indeed, like Goldberg, mainstream media discourse and most Americans see race as mainly about skin color: Blacks and whites. Think of Black Lives Matter.

Similarly, most Americans regard Jews as a religious or ethnic group (and white) and Germans as a white ethnic group.

Thus, Goldberg’s reasoning was understandable, even if historically incomplete.

On the freewheeling The View, is the liberal, black Goldberg obliged to know and explicate 1930s Hitlerian racial ideology?

After the Colbert taping, Goldberg tweeted that the Holocaust is about both “race” and “man’s inhumanity to man… The Jewish people… have always had my support … I’m sorry for the hurt I have caused.”

On Tuesday’s The View, she again acknowledged that the Holocaust “is indeed about race because Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race… I regret my comments.”

Nevertheless, fellow black and ABC News President Kimberly Godwin gave Whoopi a whippin’: “Take time to reflect and learn … The entire ABC News organization stands in solidarity with our Jewish colleagues, friends, family, and communities.” Translation: You and I must yield to ABC’s power hierarchy.

Who led the stampede against Goldberg? Jonathan Greenblatt (ADL’s CEO/National Director) and David Harris (AJC’s longtime CEO).

Holocaust Hypocrisy

Nazis saw Jews as an “inferior race,” tweeted Greenblatt. “Holocaust distortion is dangerous.” He also guested on Tuesday’s (Feb. 1) The View.

Harris tweeted, “Goldberg absurdly claims the #Holocaust ‘isn’t about race’.” Jews were considered a “subhuman race.” “Please rethink & apologize.”

Yet for decades the ADL and AJC colluded with Turkey and Israel to deny or diminish the Armenian Genocide committed by Turkey (1915-1923) and to defeat Congressional resolutions on that Genocide. No one disputes that.

William Parsons, the late U.S. Holocaust Museum’s Chief of Staff, personally told me that the ADL stealthily opposed the recognition of the Armenian Genocide.

Showdown Set in ‘Genocide’ Debate by Rebecca Spence (Jewish Daily Forward, September 1, 2006) contains this damning boast:

Some Jewish groups claim credit for ensuring that such a [Armenian Genocide] resolution never passes.

Jewish advocacy groups, including the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs [Jinsa], the American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC], B’nai Brith and American Jewish Committee [AJC] “have been working with the Turks on this issue” for more than 15 years, said Yola Habif Johnston, director for foundations and community outreach at Jinsa.

“The Jewish lobby has quite actively supported Turkey in their efforts to prevent the so-called Armenian genocide resolution from passing.”

In early 2007, the veteran Los Angeles Times writer Mark Arax, an Armenian American, penned an article documenting the ADL’s anti-Armenian policies.

However, Managing Editor Douglas Frantz decided that an Armenian couldn’t be objective about the ADL. So he assigned the task to the Jewish writer Richard Simon.

Simon gutted Arax’s research and deleted incriminating statements by the ADL’s then National Director Abe Foxman, including:

  • “Was it [the Armenian deaths] genocide? It was wartime. Things get messy.”
  • “If helping Turkey helps Israel, then that’s what we’re in the business of doing.”

Had Goldberg made analogous statements about the Holocaust, her career would now be over.

Imagine Armenian American organizations’ fate had they opposed the scores — if not hundreds — of Holocaust legislative initiatives in America.

The Times later forced Arax out.

Inspired by Arax and others, I initiated a campaign in Massachusetts against the ADL in 2007.

Human rights activists, Armenian American organizations, and principled Jews later joined in. The campaign grew quickly. National and international media couldn’t ignore it.

A diplomatic uproar between Turkey and Israel ensued.

In 2007-2008, a dozen Massachusetts cities and the umbrella Massachusetts Municipal Association kicked out the ADL’s so-called No Place for Hate program.

They realized that the ADL was unfit to lecture anyone about civil/human rights.

The campaign hasn’t ended.

The AJC is Worse than the ADL

The AJC has been even more hostile to Armenians than has the ADL.

In the Turkish propaganda film Blonde Bride, AJC Strategic Affairs Director Barry Jacobs (now deceased) claimed that the Armenian massacres couldn’t be genocide since the Holocaust was “unique.”

On another occasion he crudely boasted that the AJC’s stance on the Armenian Genocide was “B.S.”

The AJC, said Jacobs, “will be Turkey’s friends officially in Congress.” And it was.

AJC board member/ superstar Cheryl C. Kagan, a Maryland State Senator, said that an Armenian Genocide resolution was like designating a state cat. And what happened to Armenians was “an alleged massacre.”

Imagine if Whoopi Goldberg had uttered similar things about the Holocaust.

The AJC is also the greatest Jewish friend of the utterly corrupt, dictatorial, culture-destroying, terroristsupporting regime of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.

In 2012, David Harris proudly accepted the tyrant’s coveted “Order of Friendship” award in New York City. Read that sentence again.

Azerbaijan’s “lobby in the U.S.,” Aliyev has announced, “is the Jewish community.”

One wonders if the AJC and Harris know about America’s FARA (FOREIGN AGENTS REGISTRATION ACT).

And yet Harris dares to criticize Goldberg.

The AJC should remove “Defending democratic values for all” from its motto. The ADL slogan “to secure justice and fair treatment to all” is pathetic.

Only after many years of pressure did the ADL and AJC finally acknowledge (insincerely, no doubt) the Armenian Genocide. Many principled Jewish academicians, human rights advocates, organizations, and elected officials did so decades before.

The ADL and AJC have never apologized for their war on Christian Armenians. It’s too late now. Contrast that with Goldberg’s apologies to Jews.

Nor have they and similarly smug, genocide-denying/diminishing Jewish organizations opened their archives to expose the full details of their war on Armenians.

Jewish organizations say that Holocaust denial/diminishment is anti-Semitic and, consequently, “hate.” By analogizing the Armenian Genocide to the Holocaust, can we say that certain Jewish organizations are “hate groups”? I don’t see why not.

In the meantime, the ADL, AJC, and similar organizations need to leave such blameless people as Whoopi Goldberg alone, stop intimidating others, and pray for redemption.

David Boyajian is an Armenian-American freelance journalist. His primary foreign policy focus is the Caucasus. Many of his articles are archived at www.armeniapedia.org/wiki/David_Boyajian.

For his previous essays at Gates of Vienna, see the David Boyajian Archives.

9 thoughts on “Whoopi Goldberg is Innocent — But Some of Her Critics are Shameless Hypocrites

  1. The whole thing seems like a tempest in a teacup to me.

    Nazis had the idea of Jews as a race. But Jews aren’t a race: Jews are an ethnoreligious group – a tribe with its own religion.

    It’s a tribe that accepts outsiders, however.

    I just don’t see what the big deal is to get all worked up about.
    I’m sure that the Nazis would have been perfectly happy to toss someone who merely “felt” Jewish into Auschwitz.

  2. She touched the third real in revealing what the precious diversity pets really think about a certain ethnic group.
    Some just can’t handle reality and will go into cornered animal mode when you expose it.

  3. I’ve read my fair share of history in regards to national socialism, and the nazis didn’t declare all white people to be equal. Read Michael Burleigh’s book “The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945”

    • Yes, the Slavs were not “white enough” as well, just a grade or two “whiter” than the Jews.

      There was a plan to exterminate 50% of Czechs and move the rest beyond the Urals. That is why Czechoslovakia felt justified, after the War, moving 2 million “Germans” out from Bohemia back to their beloved Germany.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost

      But that was 80 years ago, our granddad’s struggles… This Whoopi Goldberg stuff is just a phony bone of contention, IMHO.

      • Indeed. My partner still uses the (Czech Jewish) surname of her half-Jewish former husband, whose father and grandfather fled Brno in Slovakia, thinking their mother/grandmother would be safe. Decades later, when living in Australia, she visited a Holocaust memorial exhibition in Canberra for the victims of Theresienstadt, and saw the name of her (potential) grandmother-in law listed.

    • Indeed. I’d go so far as to say that “white” is a US concept with some quirks that are not well understood abroad, like excluding Irish and Italians. The Nazis had no such concept.
      The Nazis talked about Aryans, not white people. They included the Finno-Ugrics and Persians, and regarded the “alpine germans” as non-pure aryan. They regarded the Chinese and Japanese maybe not as aryan, but as equal to them, and awarded “honorary aryan” status to some. And the Ahnenerbe expedition to Tibet is well-known:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938%E2%80%931939_German_expedition_to_Tibet

  4. Re: “William Parsons, the late U.S. Holocaust Museum’s Chief of Staff, personally told me that the ADL stealthily opposed the recognition of the Armenian Genocide.

    Showdown Set in ‘Genocide’ Debate by Rebecca Spence (Jewish Daily Forward, September 1, 2006) contains this damning boast:

    Some Jewish groups claim credit for ensuring that such a [Armenian Genocide] resolution never passes.

    Jewish advocacy groups, including the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs [Jinsa], the American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC], B’nai Brith and American Jewish Committee [AJC] “have been working with the Turks on this issue” for more than 15 years, said Yola Habif Johnston, director for foundations and community outreach at Jinsa.”

    This is positively shameful and inexcusable behavior by the Israelis and their Jewish allies in this country. The Israelis apparently have lost their history books, and have conveniently forgotten that the Ottoman Turks labored very hard indeed over their long and bloodstained history to exterminate as many Jews and other non-Muslims as possible.

    President Erdogan of Turkey is a neo-Ottoman who wants to restore the caliphate of old, one assumes with himself as its sultan or caliph. Whatever else they are, they are no friends of ours or of the West. Their membership in NATO is proof-positive those clowns in Brussels shouldn’t be trusted to run a shoe-shine stand, let alone a strategic alliance. The Turks are literally wolves in amongst the fold, as their recent de facto war against Armenia with Azerbaijan proves.

    No Jew (or anyone else for that matter) with a conscience should endorse or support the shameful erasure of history that is the official denial of the Armenian genocide. A great many Christians have risked their lives down through history to save Jews endangered for one reason or another. The term “holocaust” isn’t the property of the Jews; it belongs to others so victimized and persecuted as well. If killing a million innocent Jews is mass murder and genocide, then killing a million Christians or others must also be mass murder and genocide.

    Tel Aviv is playing a dangerous game these days, first allying itself with Saudi Arabia, one of its ancient enemies, and now the Turks. All non-Muslims should beware of the Islamic habit and custom, sanctioned by Mohammed himself no less, of making convenient ‘false’ treaties with the infidels, and then breaking them when it suits Islamic interests. Do the Jews, whether in Israel or elsewhere, really think that these ancient foes have turned over a new leaf and are now genuine allies and friends? If so, they are courting disaster. Maybe not now, maybe not next week – but that particular leopard doesn’t change his spots.

  5. I’m not Jewish but I certainly can distinguish between being gassed and thrown into an oven from separate drinking fountains. Jews should be outraged at the comparison.

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