CNN host Anderson Cooper compared rioters who were involved in the Capitol raid to third-world genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, during CNN’s coverage of the Senate impeachment trial on former President Donald Trump Tuesday night.
Genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda left hundreds of thousands of people dead. In just 100 days in 1994, an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered in Rwanda by ethnic Hutu extremists. The Jan. 6 Capitol raid killed five people.
“We’ve seen it in Bosnia, we’ve seen it in Rwanda, where radios was telling people – you know, Hutus were telling the radio listeners that the Tutsi are cockroaches, you know, getting them ginned up for genocide,” Cooper said last month on CNN.
“And you see it in these videos where people who claim they are patriots are in the face of a police officer calling him you know… gouging out of the eye of one, squeezing one in…suffocating one in the doorway,” he continued.
Back on Jan. 12, Cooper used the same comparison by saying Trump supporters talk about Civil War “as if it’s some sort of a cleansing.”
“I was in Rwanda in the genocide briefly, I was in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan… I hear people talking about civil war in America as if they know what they’re talking about. As if they know what that looks like…I am so upset when I hear these people at rallies — Trump rallies talking about Civil War as if it’s some sort of a cleansing.”
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