Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) doubled down on her egregious comparison of the Trump administration’s use of detention facilities on the southern border to concentration camps and the Holocaust.
Ocasio-Cortez made the stunning remarks during an Instagram live video late on Monday night, alleging: “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.”
Ocasio-Cortez doubled down on her false statement, tweeting: “This administration has established concentration camps on the southern border of the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying. This is not hyperbole. It is the conclusion of expert analysis.”
“And for the shrieking Republicans who don’t know the difference: concentration camps are not the same as death camps,” Ocasio-Cortez claimed. “Concentration camps are considered by experts as ‘the mass detention of civilians without trial.’ And that’s exactly what this administration is doing.”
Though Ocasio-Cortez insists that she did not use the term “concentration camps” to mean the same thing as the concentration camps from the Holocaust, she clearly referenced the horrific event in her original comments.
During her rant, Ocasio-Cortez specifically mentioned “Never Again,” which is a direct reference to the Holocaust.
“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 then appeared to make a distinction between the “internment camps” that Japanese Americans were forced into during World War II and the “concentration camps” of the immigrants.
“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’s attempt to suggest that she was not implying that detention camps on the southern border were the same thing as concentration camps during WWII is a lie. It’s a lie because in her video she made distinctions between concentration camps and the internment camps used during the war and she invoked “Never Again,” which specifically refers to the Holocaust.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum reports:
The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning “sacrifice by fire.” The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were “racially superior” and that the Jews, deemed “inferior,” were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.
Ocasio-Cortez’s comparison of hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens attempting to enter the U.S. and temporarily ending up in detention facilities to the systematic extermination of six million Jews during the Holocaust is factually false and, as noted by The Federalist, is “profoundly stupid, intellectually lazy, and diminish[es] the suffering of millions.”