An Invitation to ABC and Whoopi Goldberg to Broadcast “The View” from the Museum of Tolerance

Since the Simon Wiesenthal Center released its Top 10/ Anti-Semitism List for 2021, I have tried to use the word accountability in every interview and discussion about history’s oldest hate. Posturing about “anti-Semitism” and “bigotry” has little meaning in an era of raging hate crimes unless anti-Semites and bigots are held accountable.

To be clear, Whoopi Goldberg is no anti-Semite. Yet her on-air insistence that the Nazi Holocaust wasn’t about racism ignited such a firestorm of indignation that ABC Network decided to suspend her for two weeks. Measured, appropriate. Accountability, yes, but incomplete.

Here’s what’s missing- the mystery of how and why Whoopi came to utter such a thing. Where did it come from?

There are many Americans who preach the mantra that the only victims of racism are people of color and that the only perpetrators of racism are whites. Whoopi Goldberg didn’t make up that notion, she parroted it.

So, when you come to define racism as the exclusive domain of people of color, then neither the Nazi Holocaust nor anti-Semitism could possibly be connected to racism.

The first time I heard this idea weaponized was at the ill-fated United Nations World Conference Against Racism that was held in Durban South Africa just before 9/11 2001.

I was the spokesman for the Jewish NGOs among the 3,500 self-anointed gatekeepers of Civil Society, including Amnesty International, who used Africa’s first-ever international conference on racism in a country that had just recently been liberated from an apartheid regime, not to further the cause of human rights but to ambush Israel and the Jewish People.

We witnessed the birthing of the monstrous Israel/Apartheid Lie and violent attacks from Iranian and Hezbollah delegates against Jewish delegates.

On the last night of the NGO conference, a massive tent was set up in a rugby stadium so that delegates could review a lengthy working document that would be submitted to the diplomats to guide their deliberations that were to begin the next day.

The organizers reviewed the hundreds of pages of proposals and resolutions, and delegates were invited to pose questions.

It didn’t take long for a woman sitting near me, wearing her World Council of Churches credentials, to stride to a microphone and declare: “It says here that the Conference wants to denounce the anti-Semitic attacks on synagogues in suburban Paris…We are here to discuss racism—what does racism have to do with anti-Semitism? Nothing! I move to strike this statement.”

And by an overwhelming voice vote the NGOs did just that.

Instinctively, I and the thirty or so remaining Jews in the tent stormed out in protest. Twenty years later I can still hear the whistles, jeers, and catcalls from those human rights “activists”.

Accountability: To set things right, we invite ABC and The View to broadcast one special show from the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance. We’ve taught over 7 million visitors including over 150,000 law enforcement personnel about racism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. We invite Whoopi and her co-hosts to read Hitler’s 4-page report typed and signed by him in 1919—twenty years before he launched WWII and unleashed a governmental genocide against the Jewish people.

ABC and The View should walk the walk at the Museum of Tolerance and then do what they do best, talk the talk.

Never mind that the Jews aren’t a race—we come in all colors and flavors—Hitler and the Nazis were all about race and racism. Their Aryan Race was the Master Race, all others including Slavs were inferior races—and Europe’s 11 million Jews were vermin who needed to be exterminated. Indeed, on January 20, 1942, it took just 90 minutes over drinks for 15 key German officials of the Nazi Third Reich—among them 8 PhDs—to unanimously agree that every Jew across Europe should be murdered in the most efficient manner. The Nazi war against the Jews was all about race, racism, and genocide, not some spat between different “whites.”

Accountability: The firestorm ignited by Whoopi Goldberg exposes the danger when historic truth is replaced by modern dogmas.

ABC and The View should walk the walk at the Museum of Tolerance and then do what they do best, talk the talk in a Town Hall meeting on how we all need to understand the past and apply the lessons that will help guide our children to a future based on hope, human dignity, and mutual respect.

We must all be held accountable to work together to achieve that goal.

You can reach me at 1-310-553-9036.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper is Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action Agenda for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.