Say what you will about Trump, at least he hasn’t talked his way into a Twitter beef with any Holocaust memorials. Yet.
.@AOC Concentration camps assured a slave labor supply to help in the Nazi war effort, even as the brutality of life inside the camps helped assure the ultimate goal of "extermination through labor."
Learn about concentration camps https://t.co/oBPQsjf6FC#Holocaust #History pic.twitter.com/nmc9As2nlO
— Yad Vashem (@yadvashem) June 19, 2019
I can’t believe we’re on Day Two of debating what Ocasio-Cortez meant by “concentration camps.” This is someone who’s suggested publicly that immigration enforcement is improper because Latinos are descended from native Americans and therefore kinda sorta American already. She’s radically in favor of open borders, as socialists (well, younger socialists) tend to be. She could have called the camps on the border “refugee camps” or, if she wanted to emphasize their nefariousness, “internment camps” a la FDR’s treatment of Japanese-Americans. She chose “concentration camp” due to its association with Nazism, pointedly using the phrase “Never Again” in her Instagram video about this, because she meant to imply that detaining illegals en masse is a moral atrocity of Hitlerian enormity. She wants us to either release everyone pending their asylum/deportation hearings, with many never to be seen again, or ideally to accept and amnestize them all. Anything short of that is “concentration camps.”
What else is there to say about this? She drew a garbage Nazi analogy to slander the concept of border enforcement, was called on it by everyone who isn’t the tank for her ideologically, and has spent the last 24 hours alternately claiming that she didn’t mean what she obviously meant or that she did mean it and it was a fair point to make. It was a bad-faith analogy in defense of a radical position and the people who are playing dumb about what she was up to are acting in even worse faith. She’s still yammering about it today:
Not one dime should go to DHS for building these camps as they detain children & families.
Congressional appropriations season is now. That means it’s 💰 time – we‘re voting to fund federal government programs.
We should not fund the caging of kids & families. Pretty simple.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 19, 2019
Nary a word was heard about the evils of these “concentration camps” the last time they were used, which was under Barack Obama. His DHS faced a border crisis of its own in 2014 (of a much smaller scale than what Trump is facing now) and even Obama blanched at the thought of simply turning everyone loose inside the U.S. with nothing more than a promise that they’d show up for their formal legal adjudication of status. Homeland Security scrambled to house everyone, with O using some of the same facilities Trump has — minus the dark memories about WWII-era human-rights violations. The only difference between the left’s reaction then and now is partisan calculation.
So I repeat: What else is there to say about this?
Well, maybe a little:
“AOC should ask Holocaust survivors and ex-GIs who liberated Dachau what that charnel House was like,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the SWC’s associate dean and director of global social action for the leading international Jewish Human Rights NGO, told JNS. “She is insulting victims of genocide.”…
[Historian Gil Troy] continued, “Anyone who compares the complicated set of tensions both Democrats and Republicans have been forced to make around immigration—as leaders of a complicated democracy—with the evils of Nazi concentration camps is both deeply ignorant and instinctively anti-American, shockingly unaware of the moral difference between democracy and dictatorship, and probably unable to distinguish between the two.”
National president of the Zionist Organization of America Mort Klein said “the real story is that the U.S. government ran out of space and has to temporarily house minor teenagers who crossed illegally into the U.S. at an army base—something that former President [Barack] Obama also did. Comparing this to the horrors of the Holocaust death camps is a sin. AOC must be censured by her colleagues for this mindless and moronic analogy. She doesn’t belong in Congress making decisions on behalf of her fellow American citizens.”
This is useful too:
— Dov Hikind (@HikindDov) June 18, 2019
She still can’t get her story straight, though. Here she is again denying, disingenuously, that she was trying to draw an analogy between U.S. refugee camps and “World War II,” i.e. Nazism…
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “There is a very clear academic consensus on what constitutes a concentration camp and that is the mass detention of a community of people without a trial or due process. … The (Trump) administration is doing exactly that" https://t.co/wQuOGFbk5f pic.twitter.com/uRn6iEOhad
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) June 19, 2019
…and here she is seemingly endorsing Jerry Nadler’s hot take that, no really, U.S. refugee camps are sort of Nazi-ish:
Thank you, @RepJerryNadler. https://t.co/07A0H2uW9f
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 19, 2019
I think she should just own what she meant. Go full Angela Rye. At least that degree of crankishness would be entertaining instead of the past 36 hours of misery.
CNN's Angela Rye says America is headed toward implementing the same "death camps" that Nazi Germany used during the Holocaust pic.twitter.com/kkWEa0eZgo
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) June 19, 2019
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