ABC suspends Whoopi Goldberg for her comments on the Holocaust

Actress Whoopi Goldberg was suspended for two weeks from the show she hosts in the United States on Tuesday after saying the Nazi genocide of six million Jews was not “a question of race.”

Despite an apology from the host of “The View,” ABC News president Kim Godwin said she had decided it wasn’t enough.

“Effective immediately, I am suspending Whoopi Goldberg for two weeks for her misguided and hurtful comments,” Godwin said in a statement posted on the channel’s public relations Twitter account.

“Although Whoopi apologized, I asked her to take some time to reflect and realize the impact of her comments,” he said.

The Oscar-winning American actress said on “The View” that the Holocaust involved “two groups of white people.”

“On today’s show I said that the Holocaust ‘is not a question of race but of man’s inhumanity to man.’ I should have said it’s about both,” Goldberg wrote on Twitter late Monday.

“The Jewish people around the world have always had my support and that will never change. I’m sorry for the damage I’ve caused,” added the 66-year-old actress.

Following Goldberg’s comments, critics responded that race was a determining factor in the genocide, since the Nazis believed they were a superior race.

“No @WhoopiGoldberg, the #Holocaust was about the systematic annihilation of the Jewish people by the Nazis, whom they considered to be an inferior race,” tweeted Jonathan Greenblatt, director of the Anti-Defamation League.

“They dehumanized them and used this racist propaganda to justify the murder of six million Jews. Holocaust distortion is dangerous,” he added.

For its part, the United States Holocaust Museum wrote on Twitter that “racism was central to Nazi ideology.”

“Jews were not defined by religion, but by race. Nazi racist beliefs fueled genocide and mass murder,” the institution stated without referring to Goldberg’s comments.

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Goldberg, who has starred in films that have exposed anti-Black racism such as “The Color Purple,” spoke during a discussion about a Tennessee school’s ban on the 1986 graphic novel “Maus I: A Survivor’s Story,” about the life in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning book, which portrays Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, is considered a powerful and accurate depiction of the Nazi murder of millions of Jews during World War II. (I)