CNN Goes Too Far, Pisses Off Israel…Then Walks it Back

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CNN Goes Too Far, Pisses Off Israel...Then Walks it Back

Israel has demanded an apology from CNN International Anchor Christiane Amanpour after she compared President Trump’s four years in office to Kristallnacht.

According to Breitbart News, Amanpour stated that Kristallnacht was an “attack on fact” not unlike the one that Trump was instigating. Joe Biden, she added, would restore a “return…to the truth.”

“This week 82 years ago, Kristallnacht happened. It was the Nazis’ warning shot across the bow of our human civilization that led to genocide against a whole identity, and in that tower of burning books, it led to an attack on fact, knowledge, history and truth. After four years of a modern-day assault on those same values by Donald Trump, the Biden-Harris team pledges a return to norms, including the truth,” Amanpour said.

Backlash

The clip of her broadcast was shared on Twitter by Hillel Neuer, the director of monitoring group UN Watch.

“Never before in the history of U.S. news networks did a journalist distort the Holocaust for political purposes as Amanpour just did on on CNN & PBS. No, @camanpour, the Nazi genocide was not ‘an attack on fact, knowledge, history & truth,’” Neuer wrote.

“They murdered 6 million Jews. Say it,” he added.

The CNN anchor has been called out by conservatives throughout her career as being a biased journalist. “No rational person considers Amanpour an objective reporter. She has claimed journalists are the ‘truth tellers.’ But there’s no truth in that reporting. It’s just a demented hit job trying to paint a president who has repeatedly aided Israel and the Jewish community and whose own daughter and grandchildren are Jewish as a Nazi,” Media Research Center vice president Dan Gainor told Fox News.

“This is disgusting and foul even for CNN. And considering the trash put out by that network, that’s really an amazing thing,” added Gainor.

Israel’s minister of diaspora affairs Omer Yankelevich accused the CNN anchor of making the comparison for the sake of “cheap headlines or a political agenda.” Yankelevich added that “Distortion and minimization of the Holocaust are deplorable lies that only encourage the evil voices of anti-Semitism. Employing the memory of the Holocaust for cheap shock value and to further a political agenda is a deeply troubling and offensive spin of historic and moral truths with dangerous implications.”

Israel’s consul-general to Atlanta, Anat Sultan-Dadon, wrote a letter to Richard Davis, CNN’s executive vice president of News Standards and Practices. “The use of the 82nd anniversary of Kristallnacht by Amanpour for the purpose of this comparison is an affront to the memory of the Holocaust, those who perished and those who suffered through these unimaginable atrocities,” Sultan-Dadon wrote.

Surprisingly, Amanpour was even condemned by the left-wing Anti-Defamation League.

The “Apology”

After receiving condemnation in both the United States and Israel, Amanpour issued an apology.

“And finally tonight, a comment on my program at the end of last week. I observed the 82nd anniversary of Kristallnacht, as I often do – it is the event that began the horrors of the Holocaust,” she said about the series of violent Nazi pogroms.

“I also noted President Trump’s attacks on history, facts, knowledge, and truth. I should not have juxtaposed the two thoughts,” Amanpour continued.

“Hitler and his evils stand alone, of course, in history. I regret any pain my statement may have caused. My point was to say how democracy can potentially slip away, and how we must always zealously guard our democratic values,” she added.

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