A CNN guest apologized on-air Monday for suggesting President Trump has been better at stoking radicalization than the Islamic State with his bellicose political rhetoric.
“I think I spoke in the heat of the moment,” GQ magazine correspondent Julia Ioffe said during an appearance on CNN. “This has been an emotional and personally painful time for me. I think I exaggerated, and I apologize for that.”
“But the point I was trying hamfistedly to make is that it’s not a coincidence that, according to the [Anti-Defamation League], the number of anti-Semitic attacks have jumped by nearly 60 percent in the first year that Donald Trump was in office,” she added. “And it is no coincidence because even though the main danger is homegrown, right-wing extremism, many studies have pointed out that this administration has methodically shifted resources away from monitoring those people, away from trying to control those people, and keep them from committing violence. But I do apologize for that heated rhetoric.”
Earlier in a segment broadcast on Jake Tapper’s “The Lead” show, Ioffe claimed that Trump “had radicalized so many more people than ISIS ever did.”
The GQ writer reiterated her regret on Twitter, tweeting how Saturday’s anti-Semitic attack at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh dredged up memories from her past. Ioffe, who is of Jewish descent, immigrated to the U.S. in 1990 when she was 7 years old and a Soviet Union refugee. She later returned to Russia to work as Foreign Policy and the New Yorker’s Moscow correspondent from 2009 to 2012.
Ioffe has been outspoken after the shooting, in which 11 people were killed and another six were injured when a gunman opened fire in the place of worship. Officials say the gunman talked about mass-killing Jews. She wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Sunday, titled, “How much responsibility does Trump bear for the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh?”
[Opinion: Making Pittsburgh shooting about Trump diminishes problem of anti-Semitism]
In the piece she recalls the anti-Semitic backlash she received online following the publication of a profile she compiled about first lady Melania Trump.
“The alt-right deluged me with anti-Semitic insults and imagery, culminating in clear death threats — such as an image of a Jew being shot execution-style or people ordering coffins in my name,” Ioffe wrote. “When Trump was asked to condemn these attacks by his supporters, he said, ‘I don’t have a message’ for them.”
The suspected Pittsburgh shooter, Robert Bowers, 46, has been charged with hate crimes.
