CNN host Christiane Amanpour is under fire for remarks that many people in Israel say belittle Holocaust victims. The veteran reporter has a long history of misrepresenting facts on CNN.
Amanpour compared the Trump administration to Kristallnacht, a horrifying event that took place in November 1938 when Nazis torched synagogues, vandalized Jewish homes, schools and businesses and killed close to 100 Jews.
“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 of fact, knowledge, history and truth,” she said. “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.”
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Omer Yankelevich, Israeli diaspora affairs minister, sent a letter to CNN president Jeffrey Zucker on Sunday urging that Amanpour issue an immediate and public apology for the unacceptable comparison she made.
“We find hereby the false equivalence made between the actions of a sitting U.S. president and the atrocities of the Kristallnacht pogroms, which were carried out by the Nazis eighty-two years ago belittling of the immense tragedy of the Holocaust,” Yankelevich wrote. “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.”
“The Times of Israel” noted that 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, over the segment. “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.
CNN has been criticized for its reporting from and about Israel for twenty years with hundreds of examples of false and misleading information.
–Dwight Widaman | Metro Voice