Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is defending herself after comparing detention centers along the United States-Mexico border to “concentration camps.”
And everyone else is just freaking out.
Ocasio-Cortez first made the remarks on Monday during a live stream on Instagram.
“The U.S. is running concentration camps on our southern border and that is exactly what they are,” Ocasio-Cortez said, adding: “I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say… that ‘never again’ means something.”
The next morning, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted out an Esquire article where an expert on the history of concentration camps compared the centers on the country’s southern border to them, adding that her definition of it was “mass detention of civilians without trial.”
And for the shrieking Republicans who don’t know the difference: concentration camps are not the same as death camps.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 18, 2019
Concentration camps are considered by experts as “the mass detention of civilians without trial.”
And that’s exactly what this administration is doing.
The remarks caught the attention of some fellow House of Representatives colleagues.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wy.) tweeted at the New York lawmaker, telling her to “learn some actual history.”
“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,” she wrote.
Meanwhile, Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) also weighed in.
“.@AOC needs to stop trying to draw these crayon parallels between POTUS & Hitler! Try working WITH your colleagues on BOTH sides of the aisle to secure our border & fix this rather than desperately trying to promote mass hysteria w this disgusting & woefully false comparison,” he wrote.
And for the shrieking Republicans who don’t know the difference: concentration camps are not the same as death camps.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 18, 2019
Concentration camps are considered by experts as “the mass detention of civilians without trial.”
And that’s exactly what this administration is doing.
The New York lawmaker then responded to Cheney’s criticism.
“Hey Rep. Cheney, since you’re so eager to ‘educate me,’ I’m curious: What do YOU call building mass camps of people being detained without a trial? How would you dress up DHS’s mass separation of thousands [of] children at the border from their parents?” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.
Hey Rep. Cheney, since you’re so eager to “educate me,” I’m curious:
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 18, 2019
What do YOU call building mass camps of people being detained without a trial?
How would you dress up DHS’s mass separation of thousands children at the border from their parents? https://t.co/OOfrrfa1Ew
Cheney responded that she would be “happy to help educate” Ocasio-Cortez, tweeting a link to the book Night by Elie Wiesel, a memoir documenting his survival of the Holocaust.
Meanwhile, people tried to fact check both AOC and conservative criticism of her words. If you were ever waiting for Boer War Twitter, well, your time has come.
https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/1141008129846579201
Yes yes I’m sure AOC knows all about the Boer War. It was clearly a reference to that. Yup. https://t.co/ATyksfkCxQ
— David Reaboi, Late Republic Nonsense (@davereaboi) June 18, 2019
If you spend a few minutes learning some actual history, you will find out that concentration camps are different from death camps and have a history that both predates and extends far past the Nazis. https://t.co/Bccy3SaXW0
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 18, 2019
https://twitter.com/BRyvkin/status/1141013442448580610
Then there’s whatever this tweet was.
https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/1141012406811930630
Which caused the Auschwitz Muesum to weigh in.
The history of Auschwitz is far more complicated than this as it combined two functions: a concentration camp and from March 1942 an extermination center. See our online lesson: https://t.co/45MCqODtva
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) June 18, 2019
As with anything online, people spent more time parsing the specific language of Ocasio-Cortez’s comments than the actual substance and sentiment she was expressing.
But that’s par for the course.
READ MORE:
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- People are not falling for these ICE ‘propaganda’ photos
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