Category: Antisemitism

I am sure that the majority of Americans are aware by now of the controversy stirred by Whoopi Goldberg’s comment about the Holocaust on the TV program The View.

During this discussion, Ms. Goldberg had the temerity to say, “The Holocaust was not about race. It was about man’s inhumanity to man.” Of course, the feathers began to fly.

In a late-night conversation with Stephen Colbert, Ms. Goldberg clarified what she meant, referring to her experiences as a black woman in America. She made it clear that her reference point for understanding racial discrimination was skin color, whether a person was black or white. This was not surprising. Most people rely on their own personal experiences, their own subjectivity, to lay the initial foundation for how they view the world around them.

Whoopi’s comments could have provided a useful opportunity for a broader, public conversation about the history and meaning of racism. We all could have discussed the fact that skin color is only one of numerous characteristics that have been used to make “racial” distinctions throughout history. Oh, but wait. I forgot. This is America. We don’t do serious thinking in public (or in precious few other spaces) here in this great nation of ours.

In another follow-up interview Ms. Goldberg corrected herself further by adding that she should have said “both” when she spoke out on The View. In other words, the Holocaust was about both Hitler’s extermination of the Jewish race as well as man’s inhumanity to man, implying that the former was an example of the latter.

Unfortunately, Whoopi’s attempts to reframe our conversation about the Holocaust – a very worthy project, in my opinion – has been completely squashed. She knows that she has been silenced. Her most recent statement states that she has now decided simply to never talk about the Holocaust again.

Three cheers for our Holocaust cancel culture!

Yet, this entire affair has been highly unfortunate for a number of reasons.

Quite predictably, Ms. Goldberg’s original statement on prime-time television prompted pro-Israel and pro-Zionist apologists to attack her like sharks after red meat. The leader of this pack has been Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League. Fortunately, after discussing the issue personally with Goldberg, Greenblatt came to her rescue, extended a special dispensation by insisting that the now chastised and enlightened TV host not be criticized too harshly for her former ignorance.

Yet, even Greenblatt’s intervention could not save Ms. Goldberg from a two-week suspension from her hosting duties on The View. Luckily for us, her network’s corporate virtue-signaling has saved us all from any more of Whoopi’s “inappropriate” comments about the Holocaust.

Boy, am I relieved!

The supreme irony found at the heart of this ridiculous controversy, however, is the simple fact that Whoopi was not wrong, at least not in the sense that her critics have derided. Let me explain.

I begin with a short bibliography that will allow my reader to make sense of the parenthetical notations included below. I strongly suggest that you read at least one of these important books if you hope to understand what is going on in this contrived controversy:

Avraham Burg, The Holocaust Is Over We Must Rise From Its Ashes.

Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry.

Shlomo Sand, How I Stopped Being a Jew.

Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust.

Beginning with the 1961 trial of Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, pro-Israel/pro-Zionist advocates have worked steadily to conjure a global amnesia about the full diversity of victims in the Holocaust. Frankly, the goal has been to make the world forget that anyone other than Jews were exterminated by the Nazis.

And they have largely succeeded, at least in public discourse. Whoopi Goldberg is only the latest victim of this monolithic Zionist-Israeli Holocaust-management network.

Dr. Norman Finkelstein is an American-Jewish historian whose parents were Holocaust survivors. He has written an important book entitled, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. Quoting the Israeli writer Boas Evron, he explains, “Holocaust awareness is actually an official, propagandistic indoctrination, a churning out of slogans and a false view of the world, the real aim of which is not at all an understanding of the past, but a manipulation of the present” (Finkelstein 2000: 41).

Avraham Burg, a former speaker in the Israeli parliament, called the Knesset, traces the beginning of this manipulation process to the Israeli trial of the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann. In his book, The Holocaust Is Over We Must Rise From Its Ashes, Burg laments Israel’s decision to make the Eichmann trial a strictly Jewish, Israeli affair rather than opening up the proceedings to an international judiciary.

 

He describes Eichmann’s trial as “an initiation ritual” in which Israel (and world Jewry) reasserted their unique status as the eternal victims of never-ending gentile antisemitism (Burg 128). “We must always feel like perpetual victims,” he writes. “When we tried [Eichmann] for genocide, we meant only genocide against ourselves (Burg 129) …We took the Shoah to be exclusively our own. Thus, we missed the option of turning it into a much more meaningful, universal event…We nationalized the Shoah, monopolized it and internalized it, and we do not let anyone get closer” (Burg 143).

According to Burg, the Holocaust can best be described as “a crime against creation” (126) – a description that is in the same ball park as Ms. Goldberg’s reference to “man’s inhumanity against man.”

Romanian born author Elie Wiezel (1928 – 2016) appointed himself high-priest of this now all-pervasive Holocaust mysticism, an exclusive realm where non-Jewish victims are erased from historical memory, while exclusive racial curators conjure the Holocaust an utterly unique, incomparable event that only properly trained Jews are capable of discussing appropriately.

It is worth remembering that when the American Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. was in the planning stages, it was Wiesel who “led the offensive to commemorate Jews alone.” Finkelstein explains, “Deferred to as the undisputed expert on the Holocaust period Wiesel tenaciously argued for the preeminence of Jewish victimhood” (2000: 75).

Fortunately, the Jewish historians listed above have all called out this Israeli, Zionist game for what it is: inaccurate, unhistorical twaddle.

It’s malicious imposition on the rest of us, illustrated now by Whoopi Goldberg’s experience, is something that Norman Finkelstein calls “intellectual terrorism” (2000: 47).

He’s right.

We must begin with the simple fact that, despite Israel’s eagerness to obscure this part of the story, Jews were not the only victims of the Holocaust. This fact cannot be forgotten, no matter how hard the Zionist lobby tries to make us forget.

The Nazi extermination campaign began with the nation-wide euthanizing of the mentally handicapped and physically deformed. These “unfit” German victims were the first to warm up Hitler’s ovens.

Then they eliminated the communists, socialists, and all other anti-Nazi dissidents, many of whom were Christians.

Then there were the Gypsies, the Roma. As a ratio of total population size, the Nazi extermination of at least half-million Gypsies was roughly equal to the Jewish genocide (Finkelstein 2000: 76; Sand 58). European Gypsies, who remain persecuted to this day, ought not be forgotten.

(Read Finkelstein for the details of how Jewish representatives fought to exclude any mention of the Gypsies from the US Holocaust Museum. Or read Sand for his story about attending a Holocaust conference where Jewish representatives demanded that a Gypsy attendee be excluded).

Then there were the homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses, together with two and a half million Poles. The Nazis exterminated five million Poles, half of them were Jews. The other half were Roman Catholics.

So, in this crucial sense then, Whoopi Goldberg is absolutely correct. The Holocaust was not fundamentally about the Jewish race. The outrage unleashed against her is cruel testimony to the effectiveness of fifty years of Zionist-Israeli propaganda with its shaming, cajoling, ridiculing, and guilty-tripping the rest of the western world.

It is, indeed, intellectual terrorism.

However, recalling the great diversity represented among the Nazi’s many victims, we are also reminded that Ms. Goldberg is not entirely correct. We cannot forget that this disparate collection of Nazi victims were all captured in the net of Hitler’s primary racial concern – his obsession with a (fictitious) purified Aryan race.

Only from this perspective can the Holocaust be seen as exclusively about race, although I doubt if Whoopi had this consideration in mind. I am certain that Jonathan Greenblatt and his pro-Israel co-conspirators do not.

The guiding principle directing Hitler’s bloodlust was the protection of Aryan racial purity. His designs to conquer Europe were an attempt to garner an enlarged “homeland” (Lebensraum, living space, it was called) spacious enough to accommodate the perfected Aryan population he intended to produce.

The fact that Hitler hated the Jews was contingent on his own Aryan, racial priorities. He was serving his vision of “the master race.”

The fact that European leaders in the political Zionist movement were also searching for a new homeland large enough to provide for an exclusively Jewish population should not be forgotten. The parallels between National Socialism and political Zionism are no coincidence. Both movements were drinking from the same stream of blood-and-soil, ethnic-nationalism swirling throughout Europe at the time.

So, Ms. Goldberg is both partly right and partly wrong, but not the way that either her detractors or belated defenders imagine.

As far as I am concerned, the important lesson to be learned from this recent tempest is the depressing effectiveness it reveals about Israel’s pro-Zionist propaganda machine. Once again, it has managed to squelch legitimate historical debate by intimidating the hearty few courageous enough to raise a hand and say, “Uh, excuse me, but the Jews were not the only ones who suffered. In this sense, the Holocaust was not about race.”