Stephen Miller, senior adviser and speechwriter for President Donald Trump, called out Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) Sunday for comparing facilities at the southern border with “concentration camps.”
Miller appeared on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace to defend the president in the ongoing controversy over Trump’s tweets against Ocasio-Cortez and her four far-left Democratic colleagues on the “Squad.” Miller rejected the idea that Trump’s criticism was racist, and added that the four had made racially inflammatory comments. He specifically quoted Ocasio-Cortez’s repeated claim that the U.S. was running “concentration camps” at the border:
(Watch: 4:53-5:44)
And perhaps the most shocking of all were the comments made by Representative Ocasio-Cortez saying that our border agents are running concentration camps, and therefore they are Nazis, and therefore everyone in that audience, and you and me and everyone who supports our Border Patrol, are by extension Nazi sympathizers. We support Nazis if we support border agents.
Now, one more point on that I have to say, which is that I’m a Jew. As a Jew, as an American Jew, I am profoundly outraged by the comments from Ocasio-Cortez. It is a historical smear. It is a sinful comment. It minimizes the death of 6 million of my Jewish brothers and sisters. It minimizes their suffering and it paints every patriotic law enforcement officer as a war criminal and those are the comments, Chris, that we need to be focusing on.
Ocasio-Cortez referred to the border facilities where migrants are held after crossing the border illegally as “concentration camps” in an Instagram live-stream last month, adding the phrase, “Never again.”
After a slew of criticism, Ocasio-Cortez doubled down, accusing the U.S. of running “concentration camps” in the past. She was criticized by the U.S. Holocaust Museum and also by Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial. She also rejected an invitation to visit Auschwitz and other concentration camps to learn the facts for herself. She declared, proudly, “I will never apologize.”
Miller grew up in a Jewish family in Santa Monica, California. Democrats and the media have attempted to use his Jewishness against him. Last year, when a local rabbi in Santa Monica denounced Miller on the Jewish New Year, the story was “covered by news outlets around the world,” including by the Washington Post and others.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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