AOC Doubles Down on Widely Panned 'Concentration Camps' Remarks: 'I Don't Regret It at All'
Democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is refusing to back down from controversial comments earlier this year in which she compared migrant detention centers at the southern border to Nazi-run “concentration camps.”
“The U.S. is running concentration camps on our southern border, and that is exactly what they are,” Ocasio-Cortez said in June, according to The Hill. “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.”
Ocasio-Cortez was widely criticized for those remarks.
Even far-left New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said the freshman congresswoman was “wrong,” as Fox News noted.
“I respect her greatly and I feel very close to her in terms of philosophy, but of course, she was wrong,” he said. “You cannot compare — what the Nazis did in concentration camps, unfortunately, is without any historical — I mean, it’s a horrible moment in history. There is no way to compare.”
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum similarly appeared to denounce her remarks.
“The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary,” the museum said in a statement, the New York Post reported.
“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.”
You might think that in the face of all this criticism, Ocasio-Cortez would walk back on her remarks and claim she misspoke, if not outright apologize.
You’d be wrong. She’s continued to defend herself, and weeks later, doesn’t appear to have learned her lesson.
“I don’t regret it at all,” she told WABC in an interview published last week, as the Washington Examiner noted. “A group, in fact of, I think 200, at least 200, historians, rabbis, academics have come together in support of this term.”
“I’ve seen it,” she said of conditions at the border.
“I’ve sat on concrete floors with woman whose hair was falling out and they’re developing sores in their mouth,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Parents are dying with their children watching them and all without a trial, all with just an accusation, and all with the intent to dehumanize.”
According to the freshman Democrat, it’s “ahistorical” to claims she’s being anti-Semitic for comparing detention centers at the border to concentration camps where millions of innocent people were slaughtered.
“We in the United States have a history of concentration camps with Japanese internment and South Africa,” she said. “They were part of a larger process in the Holocaust, but they were not unique nor were they the actual death camps in the Holocaust either.”
She then claimed credit for having “started a conversation” with her “concentration camps” remarks, essentially showing — for those who still don’t get it — that she’s completely unapologetic.
“If calling things what they are is controversial, then so be it,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez has a right to voice her opinions, no matter how misguided they might be. But it’s baffling to me that she can’t realize her words might hurt the survivors of Nazi concentration camps and their families.
I suppose at this point, when it comes to AOC, I shouldn’t be surprised at what she says anymore.
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