CNN’s chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour compared President Donald Trump’s four-year presidency to the Nazis’ Kristallnacht, a violent attack against the Jewish community in 1938.
“This week 82 years ago, Kristallnacht happened,” Amanpour said on Thursday during her show. “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 proof.”
“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, she continued. “And every day [President-elect] Joe Biden makes presidential announcements about good governance and the health and security of the American people, while the great, brooding figure of his defeated opponent rages, conducting purges of perceived enemies and preventing a transition.”
WATCH:
.@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
Kristallnacht is often referred to as the “Night of Broken Glass” and saw Nazis attack Jewish individuals and communities in Germany and Austria. At least 91 people are believed to have been killed – though the numbers may be even larger, according to some reports – and about 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses were attacked. Over 1,4000 synagogues were set on fire during the attacks, Fox News reported, citing Israel’s Had Vashem Holocaust memorial.
The violent event also led to as many as 30,000 Jewish men being arrested and sent to various concentration camps. As such, the bloody night is commonly declared as the beginning of the Holocaust. (RELATED: CNN Anchor Describes Bin Laden’s Death As A ‘Nothing Burger’ Compared To Soleimani Killing)
“The official figure for Jewish deaths, released by German officials in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, was 91, but recent scholarship suggests that there were hundreds of deaths,” the US Holocaust Memorial Museum notes.
Amanpour faced backlash for the comparison, with the non-profit foundation StopAntisemitism.org demanding she and CNN “stop using the horrors of the Holocaust to justify an agenda.”
“I’m ashamed to have to count you an Iranian compatriot,” Sohrab Ahmari, an opinion editor at The New York Times, tweeted. “This is a grotesque abuse of history, a horrific, ahistorical equivalence-drawing, a shameful cheapening of the Shoah.”
