Share
Commentary

AOC's Attack on Aid to Israel Looks Even Worse in Light of What She Said 4 Years Ago

Share

Four years into her tenure as the most visible leftist in the House, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is even worse than when she started.

The progressive Democrat from New York has never been known as the brightest bulb in Congress, but her previous ignorant squawkings generally had the benefit of being irrelevant.

With a full shooting war raging in the Middle East, though, matters of life and death are arising, and Ocasio-Cortez is on the wrong side — and observers are letting her know it.

During a virtual town hall Monday, Ocasio-Cortez dealt with a participant who suggested the United States “just defund Israel and send funding and aid to Gaza.”

“We’re funding a genocide, and I’m not OK with that,” the man said.

Not surprisingly, AOC agreed.

Check out the video here:

“We are really risking writing a blank check for atrocities,” she said. “And I do not think that is a responsible policy.”

Ocasio-Cortez said U.S. laws already put restrictions on military aid to prevent it from being used in violations of human rights.

“What we are witnessing is the gross violation of human rights in Gaza,” the congresswoman said. “And that is being done with U.S. military assistance.”

Actually, what Americans “are witnessing,” from the comfort of our laptops and televisions, for the most part, is war — the ugly violence of war that entails death on a large scale.

It’s truly regrettable that those deaths involve civilians, but no one with a shred of intellectual honesty can blame Israel for that.

The terrorist group Hamas pulled off a doozy of a “gross human rights violation” on Oct. 7 when it launched a surprise attack against Israeli civilians that resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,200 people, many of them young adults whose lives were destroyed in a bloody pogrom near the end of an all-night rave. (None of those victims could have known at 1 a.m. that they were enjoying their last night on earth. It’s sobering to think about.)

Since AOC is rarely accused of intellectual honesty to any degree, she never mentions that.

Related:
TX Announces Name for Migrant Deportation Facilities, And the 'Squad' Will Hate It

Instead, she pulls up statistics that are supposed to make her point but actually damn it.

The congresswoman claimed during the town hall that “over 14,000 to 15,000 Palestinians have been killed in just about seven weeks.”

But the number of Hamas fighters killed, she said, was between 1,000 and 2,000.

Do you think most Americans support Israel against Hamas?

A decent, morally cognizant human being might ask herself, “Who’s fault is that?” And maybe put the blame on the barbarians who deliberately provoked a shooting with a vastly superior military power by massacring civilians and are now using their own people as human shields to stave off righteous retaliation.

There’s no uglier form of cowardice. It’s barbaric behavior that wouldn’t be acceptable coming from any other people in the world. But for the left, when it comes to Palestinians, cowardice and cruelty are apparently to be expected.

But it was Ocasio-Cortez’s comments about funding that really drew scorn from observers. The United States, under the Biden administration especially, has been a generous funder of aid to Palestinian groups in the West Bank and Gaza. According to a 2022 news release from the U.S. Agency for International Development, in fact, aid to Palestinians increased from $50 million in 2020 and 2021 to $219 million in 2022.

And that’s over and above money the Palestinians get from the largely U.S.-funded United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which is devoted exclusively to Palestinian “refugees.

It’s common knowledge that Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists are diverting “humanitarian” aid to military purposes and have been doing it for years. (Think they built that tunnel complex with toy shovels?)

And that doesn’t even take into account the money the Biden administration has made available to the mullahs in Iran, Hamas’ unapologetic sponsors, through a waiver that supposedly only allows it to be used for “humanitarian” purposes.

As everyone but Joe Biden and his State Department seems to know, money is fungible. What isn’t used for “humanitarian” purposes just might be put to work by crazed Islamist murderers in finding more ways to commit crazed murders in the name of Islam.

AOC had nothing to say on that score, but social media users did.

Coming from a member of the United States Congress — even from a maliciously ignorant Democratic member of Congress — her comments are bad. Coming at a time when the country is aflame with incendiary rallies demonstrating support for the murderous Palestinian cause, they are even worse.

Unfortunately, in AOC’s case, they are not all that surprising. She started out headed downhill.

Americans who remember when she burst onto the political scene after an upset win over veteran Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley in the 2018 primary might recall her “Firing Line” interview with PBS host Margaret Sullivan.

When Sullivan’s questions turned to the Middle East, Ocasio-Cortez had no problem spouting the progressive party line — blasting Israel’s “occupation,” for instance, and bewailing how Palestinians were “experiencing difficulty in access to their housing and homes.”

But when Sullivan, ever so gently (this is PBS, after all), asked the new Democratic star to explain herself, she got this in response:

“Yeah, I mean, I think, I’d also just — I am not the expert on geopolitics on this issue.”

Not only was that a cause of national ridicule, it was the kind of humiliating moment that should have taught Ocasio-Cortez to maybe brush up on her reading, get a little general knowledge and shake loose the leftist blinders that keep her from seeing reality.

Four years on, it’s pretty clear that the blinders are still in place.

Her ignorance hasn’t changed, but her arrogance has increased.

Like the rest of her party in the first quarter of the 21st century, AOC has only gotten worse.


A Note from Our Deputy Managing Editor:

What if you woke up one morning and half of the people you count on had just vanished overnight?

That happened to me recently. I got up, came to work here at The Western Journal, and when I got to my office, literally half of our readers had vanished. They were just gone. We had been nuked by Facebook, and it had happened almost instantly.

But it was even worse. Facebook hit us at the same time 90 percent of advertisers had essentially boycotted us. "Brutal" is a word I’ve used a lot lately.

The fight for the truth is brutal. The fight for America’s soul is brutal. What the government is doing to Jan. 6 detainees is brutal. What surgeons are doing to confused children is brutal.

It’s a fight we must win. But we can’t win without you.

A membership to The Western Journal will go much farther than you think. It costs less than a cup of Starbucks coffee, and for that small price you get access to ALL of our content news, commentary, and premium articles you’ll experience a radically reduced number of ads, and most importantly you will be vitally supporting the fight against leftism.

Can I count on you to join today? We need your help. Benjamin Franklin summed up the situation we're all facing when he said, “We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

We plan to hang in and fight. Please help us. Please become a member today.

Sincerely,

Josh Manning

Deputy Managing Editor

The Western Journal

Truth and Accuracy

Submit a Correction →



We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.

Tags:
, , , , , , , , ,
Share
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn't need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
Philadelphia
Nationality
American




Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.

Conversation