The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) demanded CNN parent company AT&T investigate British journalist Christiane Amanpour after the global anchor compared Trump supporters to Nazis of the Third Reich.
“Last week, ZOA called for CNN to fire CNN’s chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour after Amanpour slanderously analogized the pro-Jewish Trump administration to the Nazis’ Kristallnacht,” the group said in a statement Wednesday. “This was a new capstone to Amanpour’s long history of bias against Jews, Israel, and pro-Israel officials.”
The group chastised the network for Amanpour celebrating former Vice President Joe Biden’s declared victory as ending President Donald Trump’s assault on American values similar to the genocidal offensive of the Nazis nearly 100 years ago.
“After four years of a modern-day assault on those same values by Donald Trump, the Biden-Harris team pledges a return to norms,” said Amanpour.
CNN compares Trump to Nazis purging Jews pic.twitter.com/T5EcBjeDXi
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) November 13, 2020
Worse, ZOA said Wednesday, Amanpour’s on-air apology was anything but.
“Notably, Amanpour has not apologized for her horrendous analogy: She never said, ‘I’m sorry,’ or ‘I was wrong.’ … She never even acknowledged that she slanderously equated and analogized Kristallnacht’s horrors to pro-Jewish, pro-Israel, pro-American President Donald Trump,” the group wrote. “Instead, Amanpour tried to rationalize her obviously deliberate defamatory remarks.”
Here’s what Amanpour said:
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. I also noted President Trump’s attacks on history, facts, knowledge, and truth. I should not have juxtaposed the two thoughts. 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.
“Amanpout’s statement that she regretted ‘any pain [her] statement may have caused’ moreover essentially blamed the listener,” ZOA wrote. “Amanpour’s phrasing was basically another way of saying, ‘maybe certain listeners were oversensitive.”
The ZOA statement comes on the heels of new FBI crime data released Monday showing Jews were overwhelmingly the most targeted group in anti-religious hate crimes last year. According to the FBI, 60.2 percent of the 1,715 victims of anti-religious hate crimes in 2019 were targeted because they were Jewish.
Meanwhile as Federalist Publisher Ben Domenech pointed out Monday, comparisons of Trump supporters to the Nazi collaborators of the 20th century will continue long after the president leaves office.
What was delivered https://t.co/Jt7aqRTvqz
— David Frum (@davidfrum) November 14, 2020
“They’re not going to stop. They’re going to keep going. They’re going to double-down,” Domenech said on Fox News after a former George W. Bush speechwriter compared peaceful Trump supporters in the nation’s capital to a Nazi march.
