CNN host Christiane Amanpour has apologized to Rabbi Leo Dee after saying on her program that his wife, Lucy, and daughters Rina and Maia were “killed in a shootout”.
“On April 10, I referred to the murders of an Israeli family: Lucy, Maia and Rina Dee, the wife and daughters of Rabbi Leo Dee. I misspoke and said they were killed in a ‘shootout’ instead of a shooting. I have written to Rabbi Leo Dee to apologize and make sure that he knows that we apologize for any further pain that may have caused him,” said Amanpour.
Amanpour’s comments had caused an uproar, with the Israeli Consulate in Atlanta saying it planned to send a letter of complaint to CNN.
Lucy Dee and her daughters Rina and Maia were murdered last month when terrorists opened fire at their car in the Jordan Valley, shooting them over 20 times.
Amanpour is no stranger to controversial statements regarding Israel.
In 2013, during an interview with then-Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, she insisted on referring to Judea and Samaria as the “occupied West Bank”, claiming that the term was “an international term”.
Bennett stressed in his response, “One cannot occupy his own home.”
A similar incident occurred last year when Bennett, this time as Prime Minister, gave an interview to Amanpour, during which she asserted that “the West Bank has been occupied since 1967”.
In 2020, Amanpour caused an uproar when she called the Trump presidency an “assault” on human civilization comparable to that carried out by Nazi Germany during the Kristallnacht pogroms in 1938.
The Israeli government demanded an apology from CNN over the comparison. Amanpour ultimately apologized for the comparison, saying, “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.”
Most recently, Amanpour implied on her program there is a comparison between the actions of Israel and those of the Syrian regime.