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‘We Are Deeply Disturbed:’ New York Jewish Group Denounces Ocasio-Cortez’s Border Concentration Camps Comment

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is under fire from a Jewish community in her own state after she compared the southern border detention facilities to “concentration camps.”

The controversial freshman made the comment on late Monday during a live video, in which she trashed President Trump, labeling him “fascist,” and condemned his administration’s plans to hold undocumented immigrant children at a facility in Oklahoma.

The facility was once used as a Japanese-American internment camp, but turned into a military base. It’s worth noting, the Obama administration once used the same facilities and others for the same purpose, before stopping after receiving backlash.

“The U.S. is running concentration camps on our southern border and that is exactly what they are,” said Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.

She continued to reference the term “never again,” which as Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer also pointed out, “‘Never again’ is the phrase that Jews all over the world use to make sure that the extermination between 1939 and 1945 never happens again.”

In a letter to Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York condemned her comments.

“We are deeply disturbed by the language used in your recent Instagram live video which seeks to equate the detention centers on America’s southern border with Nazi-era Concentration Camps. The terms ‘Concentration Camp’ and ‘Never Again’ are synonymous with and evocative of the atrocities committed by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, in which 6 million European Jews were systematically denied civil and human rights due to their race and ultimately murdered in a state-sponsored genocide.” They wrote.

The Jewish council offered Rep. Ocasio-Cortez a visit to a Holocaust museum and visit to a concentration camp to grasp a “better understanding” of the “horrors of the Holocaust.”

The council also urged the freshman Rep. to stop “using terminology evocative of the Holocaust to voice concerns about contemporary political issues” — and this wasn’t Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s first comparison of current politics to Nazi Germany.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez attempted to defend herself against the “shrieking Republicans,” as she suggested in a post on Twitter that experts define “concentration camps” as “‘the mass detention of civilians without trial.’”

Her remarks, however, didn’t sit well with many, as Republican lawmakers slammed her for “the lack of respect for those serving at the border” and “not lifting a finger to solve the problem” at the southern border.

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