CNN International anchor Christiane Amanpour is coming under fire after she compared US President Trump’s four years in office to Kristallnacht.
“This week 82 years ago, Kristallnacht happened,” Amanpour said at the start of her show this past Thursday.
“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,” she added.
“After four years of a modern-day assault on those same values by Donald Trump, the Biden-Harris team pledges a return to normal,” continued Amanpour.
Responding to the remarks, media critic Steve Krakauer tweeted, “Comparing Trump to Hitler and Kristallnacht, saying they ‘assault’ the ‘same values’ is obscene and outrageous.”
“While Christiane Amanpour enjoys her elite London life and casually throws around Nazi analogies to Donald Trump and his administration, more Jews, Hispanics, Black Americans, LGBT Americans voted for Trump in 2020 than 2016 and for a GOP candidate for president for decades,” he added.
Ben Habib, a British former European Parliament member, also criticized Amanpour and wrote, “This is [Christiane Amanpour] on CNN comparing Trump’s tenure to Nazi Germany. How the hell is this sort of prejudice tolerated on mainstream media? Third rate rubbish.”
The Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council tweeted, “Despicable. Amanpour compares verbal fact-checking of a POTUS to a Nazi pogrom in which dozens of Jews were murdered.”
DePauw University professor and media critic Jeffrey McCall told Fox News that “comparing the Trump administration – or any other American political sector – to the Nazis is a kind of strident demonization that should have no place” in the public sphere.
“The nation is polarized, no doubt, and political emotions are raw, but that shouldn't give television anchors license to engage in this kind of shrill rhetoric. The establishment media needs to recognize that it, too, has played a role in creating the divisive culture in which American finds itself,” he added.
“Prominent television personalities have a big soapbox from which to operate and they should use their positions carefully,” McCall continued. “While the Trump administration has surely been controversial, media commentators who engage in this sort of angry bombast show an ignorance of history and a willingness to continue to inflame Americans for selfish purposes.”
Dani Dayan, former Consul General of Israel in New York, wrote, “The silly comparison made by Amanpour between Kristallnacht and Trump should have led to her immediate dismissal from CNN. There is no immunity from Holocaust denial.”
Amanpour has yet to respond to the criticism.