Whoopi Goldberg has criticized Republican politicians' calls for a Christian-only Syrian refugee resettlement program, arguing that Christians can be just as dangerous as Islamic extremists because "Hitler was a Christian."
Goldberg's comments were made during a heated conversation about the Syrian refugee crisis on Tuesday's episode of ABC's "The View".
The 60-year-old actress started the conversation by stating that Republican presidential candidates Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush believe the United States should refuse to accept any Muslim refugees from Syria but allow in Christians.
"Is this really going to help root out ISIS?" Goldberg, who is an atheist, asked.
In response, fellow co-host Joy Behar chimed in that calls for the U.S. to only accept Christian refugees is a very un-Christian thing to do.
"The irony of saying that only Christians could come is not very Christian to say that, is it?" she asked.
Co-host Candace Cameron Bure, a professing Christian, also contended that GOP candidates' dialogue about the U.S. only taking in Christian refugees "didn't appeal" to her, as those who follow Jesus' teachings are supposed to be compassionate and welcoming to to refugees.
"I am a Christian, and Christians are of compassion, and that is biblical - to help people, to help the poor, the orphans, the widows," Bure said. "This country is historically known to bring in, open its arms to displaced people."
Behar then argued that Timothy McVeigh, the terrorist who killed 168 people and wounded over 600 by detonating a truck bomb in front of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, was a Christian.
"Timothy McVeigh was a Christian, just saying," Behar said.
The conversation quickly escalated when Goldberg stated that Adolph Hitler, the German dictator responsible for the killing over 5 million Jews, was also a Christian.
"There have been a lot of horrifying ... there have been a lot of monster Christians," Goldberg stated. "Hitler was a Christian."
"Well, he didn't like the Catholics, remember?" she continued when questioned by the other hosts. "So he thought of himself as a Christian person."
Goldberg's claims proved to be ill-informed, however, according to numerous authors and historians who argue that the "Nazis wanted to destroy German Christianity, viewing it as "an integral part of the National Socialist scheme of world conquest," Breitbart notes.
Additionally, in Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich, author William Shirer wrote, "[U]nder the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmler, who were backed by Hitler, the Nazi regime intended to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists."
Ray Comfort, popular evangelist and the author of Hitler, God, and The Bible, has also said that Hitler "hated the Bible" and had around 100,000 copies of his own version of the "bible" printed.
In Hitler's "bible," all Jewish words such as hallelujah were removed. He also replaced the Ten Commandments with 12 of his own, including "keep the blood pure and your honor holy" and "honor your Fuhrer and Master," Western Journalism quotes Comfort as writing.
"Adolf Hitler was the nastiest, most hate-filled, almost wickedest man in history and to say that he was a Christian is to be tremendously ignorant, or to be disingenuous."
