Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) claimed it was Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) — not herself — who appropriated vernacular associated with the Holocaust in her criticism of the self-avowed Democratic socialist’s comparison of U.S. border facilities to concentration camps.
“Reminder: the member who directly + explicitly compared concentration camps on our border to the Holocaust was *Liz Cheney.* The horrors of the Holocaust went beyond the use of concentration camps, yet camps were part of the process,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter.
“They have also been used before and after,” she added.
Ocasio-Cortez has garnered a flurry of criticism since referring to President Donald Trump as a “fascist” whose administration is running “concentration camps” on the U.S.-Mexico Southern border last week.
“That is exactly what they are. They are concentration camps,” she claimed during a live-stream on Instagram. “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.”
Her eyebrow-raising tirade, in which she said uttered “Never Again,” a phrase synonymous with Holocaust remembrance, were met with scorn from Republicans, namely Cheney, who urged her colleague to learn “actual history” before commenting on the hot button topic.
“Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history,” Cheney tweeted in response to her comments. “6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.”
Ocasio-Cortez has since scrambled to defend the comparison in a serious of tweets and interviews over the last several days.
In a recent interview with TMZ, the New York Democrat said she found it “unsurprising” that Cheney had come to the “defense of separating children from their parents at the border.” She then once again defended her use of the term “concentration camps” to describe the facilities, stating the “academic definition” of the camps “are targeting a community and putting them in detention camps without a trial.”
On Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez, showing no signs of reversing course, ratcheting up her criticism of the migrant detention centers by likening them to torture camps. “Remember when the Bush administration bullied media into using their devised term “enhanced interrogation” instead of the accurate term “torture?” Well, waterboarding was torture,” she tweeted. “And these are concentration camps. Journalism should be about the truth. And this is the truth.”
The United States Holocaust Museum on Monday issued a statement condemning Ocasio-Cortez’s comparison between the detention centers and “concentration camps,” affirming it “unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events.”
“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,” the statement concluded.