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‘I Regret Any Pain’: Christiane Amanpour Apologizes For Comparing Trump Era To Kristallnacht

"Hitler and his evils stand alone, of course, in history."

   DailyWire.com
Christiane Amanpour
Paul Morigi/Getty Images

CNN host Christiane Amanpour apologized Monday after being widely rebuked for comments she made last week comparing the Trump presidency to the Nazi Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938.

Amanpour issued her apology during her show on CNN International, according to The Jerusalem Post. “And finally tonight, a comment on my program at the end of last week,” she said.  “I observed the 82nd anniversary of Kristallnacht, as I often do – it is the event that began the horrors of the Holocaust.”

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

“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.

As The Daily Wire reported of Amanpour’s incendiary comments:

“Welcome to the program everyone, I’m Christiane Amanpour in London,” she began. “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 of fact, knowledge, history, and truth,” she continued. “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.”

“And everyday, Joe Biden makes presidential announcements about good governance and the health and security of the American people,” she continued. “While the great brooding figure of his defeated opponent rages, conducting purges of perceived enemies and preventing a transition.”

WATCH:

Amanpour and CNN drew swift condemnation on social media as well as from the Anti-Defamation League, Trump administration officials, and Israel.

As The Daily Wire reported:

Israeli officials are demanding that CNN apologize for widely condemned remarks that host Christiane Amanpour made last week which they said amounted to “belittling” Holocaust victims.

“Diaspora Affairs Minister Omer Yankelevich 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,” The Times of Israel reported.

[…]

Yankelevich noted in her letter that Kristallnacht is widely recognized as a “central starting point of the Holocaust.”

“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,” 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 also 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. The consulate said it was “sincerely disappointed” by the way Amanpour chose to express herself and urged the anchorwoman and her employer to publish an apology.

Related: ‘Borders On Holocaust Denial’: CNN Blasted Over Shocking Segment Comparing Trump To Nazis Purging Jews

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