A popular British comedian has weighed into the debate over Whoopi Goldberg’s controversial Holocaust comments, with his video explanation being praised for its eloquent summary of why Goldberg's remarks were so troubling.
David Baddiel, who is Jewish, told Good Morning Britain that while he is a fan of Goldberg, “the problem with it is there are so many issues about what she’s saying and it does reveal an awful lot about confusions that people have over antisemitism.”
“One of the principal things that’s going on here is the resistance to the idea that antisemitism is racism,” Baddiel said. “What does Whoopi Goldberg think it is? I think a lot of people think it is religious intolerance. And the problem with that is I’m an atheist and the Gestapo would have shot me tomorrow.”
“It’s not just the Holocaust now. Neo-Nazis marching with torches saying ‘The Jews will not replace us’ in Charlottesville, they would not ask a Jew whether he kept kosher before they set light to his house. They’re not interested in faith and the Nazis weren’t interested in faith. They were interested in racial purity, that’s what the Nuremberg laws were about, they were racial purity laws.”
He continued: “There’s a specific thing that I think is going on here. The whiteness of Jews is a very complex thing. Jews are seen as white or non-white depending on the politics of the observer. So far right groups for years and for centuries have seen Jews as not part of the white races, absolutely part of Hitler’s project to say Jews are not part of the Aryan races. Meanwhile, on the far left, the association of Jews – which is a racist thing – with power and privilege, makes them kind of super white.”
Baddiel also called out Goldberg for describing the Holocaust as “two sides fighting.”
“She talked on Stephen Colbert’s show about two sides fighting. This was not two sides. This was an ethnic group being marked out to be destroyed by a military industrial machine,” he said.
(Israel National News' North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Israel National News articles, however, is Israeli time.)