Donald Trump Jr has compared the controversy surrounding Whoopi Goldberg’s Holocaust comments to the treatment of Roseanne Barr after a racist 2018 tweet that prompted ABC to cancel her sitcom.
“Why is it that Rosanne (a Jewish woman) gets canceled for off color remarks but Whoopi’s gets a total pass for antisemitism and downplaying the Holocaust? I can’t help but notice that only people on the right face consequences for their mistakes,” Mr Trump Jr tweeted on Tuesday.
Ms Goldberg, who has said that she’s Jewish, said on The View on Monday that “the Holocaust isn’t about race”, a remark that was strongly criticised.
The panellists on the programme were discussing the decision of a school board in Tennessee to ban the graphic novel Maus, which depicts the atrocities of the Holocaust, but also includes a drawing of a naked woman.
The McMinn board removed the book from the eighth-grade curriculum, citing its “rough, objectionable language” and the naked image, CNN reported.
Ms Goldberg said that she was surprised that it was the naked drawing and not the Holocaust that appeared to have concerned the school board.
Co-host Joy Behar said the concerns about the naked drawing was probably “a canard to throw you off from the fact that they don’t like history that makes white people look bad”.
“Well, this is white people doing it to white people, so y’all gonna fight amongst yourselves,” Ms Goldberg responded, referring to the Holocaust.
The panel then moved on to discuss efforts to ban parts of history from being taught in schools.
“If you’re going to do this, then let’s be truthful about it because the Holocaust isn’t about race,” Ms Goldberg said.
Around 6 million Jews and 5 million others were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Ms Goldberg said the dark history was about “man’s inhumanity to man” and that it involved “two white groups of people”.
Following outrage at her comments, Ms Goldberg put out a statement on Twitter at 8.15pm on Monday.
“On today’s show, I said the Holocaust ‘is not about race but about man’s inhumanity to man.’ I should have said it is about both,” she said.
“As Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League shared, ‘The Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people – who they deemed to be an inferior race.’ I stand corrected,” she added. “The Jewish people around the world have always had my support and that will never waiver. I’m sorry for the hurt I have caused.”
Mr Greenblatt tweeted that the Nazis “dehumanized” Jews and “used this racist propaganda to justify slaughtering six million”.
“Holocaust distortion is dangerous,” he added.
Ms Goldberg, whose birth name was Caryn Johnson, has said that she adopted her surname partly because, while she doesn’t practice religion, she identifies as Jewish.
“I am a Jewish-American princess,” she told the Orlando Sentinel in 1994. “That’s probably what bothers people most. It’s not my problem people are uncomfortable with the fact that I’m Jewish.”
“Consequences only go one way folks,” Mr Trump Jr tweeted earlier on Tuesday. “You should know this by now.”
Mr Trump Jr compared the treatment of Ms Goldberg, who has not been fired from ABC, to the firing of Roseanne Barr, whose ABC sitcom was cancelled after she posted a racist tweet comparing an African American aide to former President Barack Obama to an ape.
Ms Barr blamed the racist post, which was later deleted, on “ambien tweeting”. In the post, she described the longtime Obama aide, Valerie Jarrett, as the child of the Muslim Brotherhood and the film The Planet of the Apes.
“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values and we have decided to cancel her show,” ABC said at the time.
“While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication,” a spokesperson for the pharmaceutical company that makes Ambien said.
“I’m not a racist, I never was [and] I never will be. One stupid joke in a lifetime of fighting [for] civil rights [for] all minorities, against networks, studios, at the expense of my nervous system/family/wealth will NEVER [be] taken from me,” Ms Barr tweeted on 30 May 2018, to fierce criticism on the social media platform.
