Offensive New Age nonsense: Invoking the notion of karma, Shirley MacLaine outrages Jewish groups by claiming that victims of the Holocaust could have been paying the price for past life sins.

Excerpts leaked from a new book penned by the Hollywood veteran and Oscar-winner actress suggest that the six million Jews and millions of others systematically murdered in Hitler’s death camps in the 1940s were “balancing their karma” for crimes committed in past lives.

The 80 year-old actress also suggests that Professor Stephen Hawking may have given himself motor neurone disease.

The ridiculous claims have been published in MacLaine’s new memoir called What If . . . The following is an excerpt from the new book:

What if most Holocaust victims were balancing their karma from ages before, when they were Roman soldiers putting Christians to death, the Crusaders who murdered millions in the name of Christianity, soldiers with Hannibal, or those who stormed across the Near East with Alexander? The energy of killing is endless and will be experienced by the killer and the killee.

About Professor Stephen Hawking, the New Age icon writes:

Did he ‘create’ the disease that has crippled him in order to learn to be dependent on caregivers and the kindness of strangers so that he could free his entire mind to the pursuit of knowledge? “What if he inadvertently chose to set an example of himself to show the rest of us that cosmic travel and universal understanding are available, regardless of one’s physical condition or circumstance?

She added:

If Jesus chose to die in a state of martyrdom, then Stephen Hawking could just as readily have chosen to live in a dual state of being: visibly physical weakness and unseen knowledge and power. What if all reality is an illusion?

About Maclaine’s remarks, a spokesman for Disability Rights UK said:

She obviously has some very confused ideas that a lot of disabled people will be baffled by. It’s completely wrong to say people choose their disabilities, especially Professor Stephen Hawking, who has a genetic condition.

While a spokesperson for the Jewish campaigning group the Community Security Trust said:

The first impressions are that these comments will offend and bemuse many Jews – and many other people too.

MacLaine, raised as a Baptist, is known for making outrageous claims in support of her New Age nonsense. The actress has said that she believes she lived in Atlantis in a previous life, where she was the brother to a 35,000-year-old spirit called Ramtha.

MacLaine has also spoken widely of her supposed UFO sightings as a child in the 1950s.

MacLaine is an American film, television and theater actress, singer, dancer, activist and author. She has won one Academy Award, five Golden Globe Awards, including the Cecil B. DeMille Award, an Emmy Award and two BAFTA Awards.

MacLaine won an Oscar for starring in the film Terms of Endearment. Currently she plays Lady Grantham’s American mother in Downton Abbey, a popular British period drama television series.