CNN’s chief international anchor, Christiane Amanpour, compared US President Donald Trump’s tenure in office to Nazi Germany after the recent anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogroms.
“This week 82 years ago, Kristallnacht happened,” Amanpour began as her show opened. “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.”
This, on a show which CNN describes as its “flagship global affairs interview program.”
Kristallnacht, in English known as the “Night of Broken Glass,” was a series of violent Nazi attacks that in the eyes of many historians constituted the start of the Holocaust. Over the course of two days in November 1938, thousands of Jewish properties and homes were ransacked and destroyed, 90 Jews were murdered, and 30,000 were deported to concentration camps, many never to return.
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Amanpour’s remarks are offensive on a number of levels: First, for seemingly attempting to invoke Nazi atrocities in order to further a contemporary political agenda. Second, for seeking to universalize Kristallnacht by never mentioning Jews as the targets. And third, by cheapening history by engaging in such an over-the-top analogy.
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Amanpour’s remarks were met with condemnation by media critics such as Glenn Greenwald — who, to say the least, is not known for his support of Zionism — and cable TV producer Steve Krakauer, as well as from leading Jewish figures such as Hillel Neuer and David Harris.
Krakauer reacted swiftly on Twitter, saying that, “Comparing Trump to Hitler and Kristallnacht, saying they ‘assault’ the ‘same values’ is obscene and outrageous.”
.@CAmanpour comparing Trump to Hitler and Kristallnacht, saying they “assault” the “same values” is obscene and outrageous. But Amanpour alone should not be condemned – it took writers, producers and executives at CNN to allow this inflammatory nonsense on the air. pic.twitter.com/uSbDo1V3Va
— Steve Krakauer (@SteveKrak) November 13, 2020
UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer wrote that such distortion of the Holocaust by a journalist on US television was unprecedented, adding, “the Nazi genocide was not ‘an attack on fact, knowledge, history & truth.’ They murdered 6 million Jews. Say it.”
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.“
They murdered 6 million Jews. Say it. pic.twitter.com/Cwkzj1lUBK
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) November 14, 2020
Representatives of Israel soon joined the chorus of protests, as Diaspora Affairs Minister Omer Yankelevich penned a letter sent to CNN president Jeffrey Zucker which called on Amanpour to issue an “immediate and public apology” for her “unacceptable comparison.”
“We find hereby the false equivalence made between the actions of a sitting US 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… 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,” she wrote.
Anat Sultan-Dadon, Israel’s consul-general to Atlanta, wrote a letter addressed to CNN’s executive vice president of News Standards and Practices, Richard Davis, to decry Amanpour’s comparison: “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.”
While this was clearly the most egregious instance, the outspoken Amanpour has a history of comparing President Trump to some of the most prominent antisemites in recent memory.
Just days before her Kristallnacht comments, she suggested that Trump’s refusal to concede the US election was reminiscent of former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s actions in 2009. What she fails to mention is that after the latter’s “victory,” the pro-democracy Iranian Green Movement erupted and the Revolutionary Guard Corps, at the behest of the regime, killed many protesters for simply demanding that their rights be respected.
A reflection on President Trump’s comments last night:
The last President I covered who refused to accept the vote count in an election was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, 2009.
— Christiane Amanpour (@camanpour) November 6, 2020
It’s worth noting, too, that Ahmadinejad also was one of the first Iranian leaders to publicly call to “wipe Israel off the map.”
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Amanpour’s history of questionable journalism stretches back some way. In 2014, Israel was drawn into a war with Hamas, the terrorist group that rules the Gaza Strip, after three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and killed by a Hamas cell. Thereafter, intense bursts of rocket fire emanating from the Palestinian enclave forced the IDF to strike back.
But Amanpour’s promotional tweet at the time for an interview conducted with a Palestinian-American teenager implied that his apparent beating by Israeli border police was the cause of the conflict; and not the kidnapping of innocent teens nor the barrage of rockets being fired from Gaza.
Featured Image: Wikimedia Commons and CNN Screenshot
