Naija Deal African Celebrities Blog: Erykah Badu's comments on Hitler and Bill Cosby are causing controversy

Erykah Badu is facing backlash after making controversial comments about Adolf Hitler and Bill Cosby.

The singer suggested in an interview with Vulture published on Wednesday that maybe Hitler wasn't all bad, and one of the reasons she gave was because he was a "wonderful painter." She even went on to empathize with Hitler for the kind of upbringing he had.

She also talked about many subjects, including her 2008 visit to Israel where she said she supported the Palestinian cause and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, despite his alleged anti-Semitism.

She told the interviewer, David Marchese: "I’m OK with anything I had to say about Louis Farrakhan. But I’m not an anti-Semitic person. I don’t even know what anti-Semitic was before I was called it. I’m a humanist. I see good in everybody. I saw something good in Hitler."

Shocked, Marchese responded: "Come again?"

"Yeah, I did. Hitler was a wonderful painter," Badu said.

"No, he wasn't!" Marchese snapped back. "And even if he was, what would his skill as a painter have to do with wany 'good' in him?"

Badu, 46, then went off on a convoluted explanation of her views, which suggested that since Hitler supposedly had a terrible childhood, she could empathize with an abused child.

"I guess it’s just the Pisces in me," she added.

Marchese said "going down the route of 'Hitler was a child once, too' is maybe turning the idea of empathy into an empty abstraction."

"Maybe so," Badu said. "It doesn’t test my limits — I can see this clearly. I don’t care if the whole group says something, I’m going to be honest. I know I don’t have the most popular opinion sometimes."

The reaction of Twitter was fiery, to say the least. People attacked her for her comments. Badu later replied with a series of tweets, in which she declared, "Say what u must. Dialogue is cool."

Badu also had some sympathetic words for Bill Cosby, who has been accused of drugging and/or raping women going back to the mid-1960s.

"I love Bill Cosby," she said. "I love what he’s done for the world. But if he’s sick, why would I be angry with him? The people who got hurt, I feel so bad for them. I want them to feel better, too. But sick people do evil things; hurt people hurt people. I know I could be crucified for saying that..."

See the reaction to her interview below.