Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, educate yourself. The democratic socialist darling who wantonly tosses out phrases like “concentration camp,’’ “fascist’’ and even insultingly appropriates the Holocaust-specific cry “never again’’ to slam US policy on immigration, should run, not walk, not meander, to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in downtown Manhattan.
Any Uber can drop you right at the door.
Outside the museum, a small, windowless, wooden train car would greet AOC, who has shown willful blindness about Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution — the wholesale mass murder not only of millions of Jews during World War II, but of “undesirables,’’ including Roma, the disabled and homosexuals.
As explained in stark detail inside the new exhibition “Auschwitz: Not Long Ago, Not Far Away,’’ cars such as this one each were packed with some 150 Jews, too many even to sit down, plus a bucket for water and another for human waste. The hideous trains of suffering chugged along slowly for the journey to the massive death camp complex in Poland. Many died en route.
They were the lucky ones.
Ocasio-Cortez, the Amazon-hating US representative who purports to speak for the diverse residents of the Bronx and Queens, dishonored the memory of those slain by the Nazi death machine on politicsnowadays’ Instagram page Monday night. She declared that detention centers housing immigrants are “exactly’’ concentration camps.
“If that doesn’t bother you . . . I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘never again’ means something,” she blithely stated.
She needs to apologize.
I’m not holding my breath.
On Tuesday, she drew fire from Republican lawmakers, from Jews and was even slammed by the vice president of the National Border Patrol Council, a labor union that represents border agents.
“It’s disgusting to compare concentration camps to what the men and women are doing here protecting our country,” Art Del Cueto said on Fox News.
But if it’s possible for AOC to cause my head to explode fully, she did it. It came in response to a tweet from Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) who wrote “6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.”
After some back and forth, AOC blasted ferociously: “Also @Liz_Cheney, the fact that you employed the horrifying word ‘exterminated’ here (co-opting the language of the oppressor) tells us that it’s *you* that needs to brush up on your reading. Hope you enjoy defending concentration camps. I won’t back down fighting against them.”
Ouch.
If using the word “exterminated’’ is “co-opting the language of the oppressor,’’ then what happened to the millions of missing people? Did they simply disappear? Or are you suggesting the Holocaust never happened?
On Wednesday, AOC continued to defend herself and malign her critics, tweeting a comparison with another war crime during a Christian Science Monitor breakfast. “The US ran concentration camps before, when we rounded up Japanese people during WWII. It is such a shameful history that we largely ignore it. . . . We have an obligation to end them.”
The Auschwitz exhibition contains many ordinary objects that tell powerful stories of the banality of evil — a shoe and sock ripped from an unknown child’s foot, wooden clogs capable of crippling prisoners, a gas mask worn by a guard to preserve his or her life as prisoners were gassed to death.
I have no quarrel with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defending the rights of immigrants flooding the southern border — a problem that existed before the dawn of Donald Trump’s presidency.
But I’d like to believe that using the horrors of mass slaughter to advance an unrelated agenda is simply an example of AOC being AOC — saying the most outrageous falsehoods she can fathom to garner attention.
At least I hope she doesn’t completely buy the rubbish exiting her mouth. Does she?
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