Ocasio-Cortez Lies About Concentration Camp Remarks, Blames GOP For Her Words
"Reminder: the member who directly + explicitly compared concentration camps on our border to the Holocaust was *Liz Cheney*," Ocasio-Cortez falsely claimed. "The horrors of the Holocaust went beyond the use of concentration camps, yet camps were part of the process. They have also been used before and after."
Reminder: the member who directly + explicitly compared concentration camps on our border to the Holocaust was *Liz Cheney.*
The horrors of the Holocaust went beyond the use of concentration camps, yet camps were part of the process.
They have also been used before and after.
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During an Instagram live video that Ocasio-Cortez recorded last Monday, the 29-year-old former bartender said: "The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border and that is exactly what they are. They are concentration camps. And, um, if that doesn't bother you, I don't, I don't know, I like, we can have, okay whatever."
"I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that we should not that ‘Never Again’ means something and that the fact that concentration camps are now an institutionalized practice in the home of the free is extraordinarily disturbing and we need to do something about it," Ocasio-Cortez added.
Ocasio-Cortez specifically invoked the term "Never Again," which is a direct reference to the Holocaust.
In a subsequent tweet, Ocasio-Cortez included a link to Liz Cheney's tweet which included the video of Ocasio-Cortez making the reference to the Holocaust. Ocasio-Cortez wrote: "If you doubt it, here’s the original tweet. This is a deliberate, intentional, wild jump made by Republicans (frankly, often) for the explicit purpose of eliciting + manipulating pain for political purposes. Meanwhile, kids are still dying."
If you doubt it, here’s the original tweet. This is a deliberate, intentional, wild jump made by Republicans (frankly, often) for the explicit purpose of eliciting + manipulating pain for political purposes.
Meanwhile, kids are still dying.twitter.com/liz_cheney/sta…
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Cheney's tweet stated: "Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this."
Here's the video that Cheney quote retweeted:
Ocasio-Cortez falsely claims Trump is operating concentration camps, compares the situation to the Holocaust: “The U.S. is running concentration camps on our southern border and that is exactly what they are. … ‘Never Again’ means something ... we need to do something about it”
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Ocasio-Cortez spent the majority of last week not taking responsibility for her comments and instead tried to rewrite history in an attempt to score political points.
Ocasio-Cortez falsely claimed that the United States operated concentration camps during World War II — at the same time that Nazi Germany was murdering millions of Jews — by falsely claiming that Japanese internment camps were "concentration camps."
"The US ran concentration camps before, when we rounded up Japanese people during WWII," Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. "It is such a shameful history that we largely ignore it. These camps occur throughout history. Many refuse to learn from that shame, but here we are today. We have an obligation to end them."
Yet in her Instagram live video from last Monday Ocasio-Cortez specifically made a distinction between concentration camps and Japanese internment camps, saying: "This week, children, immigrant children were moved to the same internment camps where the Japanese were held in, in the early, in the earlier 20th century and this is, um, this is not even about a crisis for, this is not just about the immigrant communities being held in concentration camps being a crisis."
Ocasio-Cortez sought to deflect attention off of her Holocaust trivialization by saying that she was angry that Cheney accurately described the horrifying nature of the Nazi's plans to "exterminate" over 6 million Jews.
Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is angry that Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) correctly described the horrors of the Holocaust by noting that the evil Nazis systematically targeted 6,000,000+ Jews for extermination
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Ocasio-Cortez was widely condemned last week from multiple Jewish groups that were appalled over her remarks and she was slammed by multiple Holocaust survivors.
Two Holocaust survivors who spoke with Turning Point USA said Ocasio-Cortez was "insulting every victim of the Holocaust."
Hi @AOC -
You say America runs concentration camps.
I spoke with people who have true authority on this issue: David & Sami. They both survived real Nazi concentration camps.
They have a message for anyone who thinks America runs concentration camps.
AOC - Please listen, for once
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Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz noted that Ocasio-Cortez's remarks mean that she is a Holocaust denier, which is a severe form of anti-Semitism.
Dershowitz described Ocasio-Cortez as "a bigoted ignoramus who makes comparisons between what’s going on on the southern border and the Holocaust."
"Let nobody misunderstand what she was saying. When she used the words 'concentration camps,' what she meant to invoke was the Holocaust," Dershowitz continued. "She didn’t make distinctions between death camps and detention centers, between Dachau and Auschwitz. Even in the concentration camps that may not have been death camps, so many people died because they were forced laborers and everything like that. And of course 'Never Again' is the direct invocation of the Holocaust."
Dershowitz added, "By making that comparison, she becomes a Holocaust denier, because what’s she’s saying is: 'Gee, if all that Hitler did is what Trump is doing on the southern border,' then there were no death camps, there were no killing squads, there was no genocide, there was no murder of a million-and-a-half babies, there were no selections where people were picked based on their health and whether they were twins and subjected to the most gruesome form of punishment.'"
Then on Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez rejected an offer to visit Nazi concentration camps from a Holocaust remembrance group with a 93-year-old Holocaust survivor that would have served as her guide. Ocasio-Cortez claimed without evidence that it was a "far-right" plot that was being used for "political gain."
Then on Monday, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) slammed the idea that people like Ocasio-Cortez were using the Holocaust for political gain. The USHMM wrote:
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary. That position has repeatedly and unambiguously been made clear in the Museum’s official statement on the matter – a statement that is reiterated and reaffirmed now. The link to the Museum’s statement is here.The Museum further reiterates that a statement ascribed to a Museum staff historian regarding recent attempts to analogize the situation on the United States southern border to concentration camps in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s does not reflect the position of the Museum.The Museum deeply regrets any offense to Holocaust survivors and others that may have been engendered by any statement ascribed to a Museum historian in a personal capacity.
Last week, Matthew J. O’Brien, who is a lawyer that has over 20 years experience focusing on immigration and recently served as the Chief of the National Security Division (NSD) within the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate (FDNS) at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), explained in an interview with The Daily Wire the differences between concentration camps, internment camps, and immigrant detention facilities.
"I think the point that Representative Ocasio-Cortez is missing is that a concentration camp typically refers to a detention facility where a totalitarian regime’s political enemies are kept and the purpose is to nullify them as political enemies," O’Brien said. "Internment camp is a general term that in international law and in typical usage refers to a place where people are held temporarily in a conflict because they are either from an enemy power, from a non-allied power, and there is some sort of national security concern or other internal security concern associated with them. Whereas, an immigration detention facility is where people are held pursuant to a democratically passed law because they have no authorization to be in the country and they are temporarily held there while the government is evaluating their claim to any kind of immigration relief and those facilities are regulated."
"The distinction between a concentration camp, which is usually regulated by the totalitarian government’s security forces, an Internment facility, which is usually regulated by the military or by a paramilitary security force, and immigration detention, is that immigration detention is monitored by the courts and anyone who is in immigration detention has access to the courts to contest any issues they may have with the detention," O’Brien continued. "So to contrast between a totalitarian government using the force of the state to terrorize its political enemies, the temporary internment of people who represent a national security threat ... versus a legal process that is designed to protect the safety and security both of the United States and of the people coming into the country because one of the reasons why we detain people in immigration detention is to figure out who they are so we can vet them but also so that we can determine what their purpose is here."
