The government clearly wishes to treat migrants with decency, but the sheer number of them has led to certain shortages that the government is trying to rectify. Cots with mattresses are provided most migrants, but some have had to sleep on cement floors until new supplies of cots arrive; sometimes the cots are available, but there are not enough mattresses for the cots. This is not a deliberate attempt to make their lives difficult, but a temporary problem that a bill sponsored by Texas Senator John Cornyn may rectify, by providing more money for facilities to house migrants. As we have seen, many of the migrants sleep in clean large airy buildings, have access to showers, are given medical examinations and where appropriate given care by nurses and doctors, are supplied with medicines, given blankets, appropriate clothes and footwear, are further supplied with nutritious food, hygienic supplies, toiletries, diapers and baby-changing stations. Can Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tell us in what ways the treatment of these migrants is akin to the treatment of Jews in concentration camps, enduring life as slave laborers, being beaten, sometimes to death, fed starvation-level diets, tormented and often killed in medical experiments, and murdered, too, for sport? Or does she still think they are roughly the same? No migrants in Texas are being physically abused. They are not being treated as prisoners in a penal system; they being held for their own benefit, so that they will be present to claim — through the interpreters the government supplies — refugee status before an immigration judge.
What would Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez have the American immigration authorities do? Simply let in every single person who arrives at the border, forgetting about hearings and the immigration judges, deeming everyone suitable for entry? Is unvetted and uncontrollable immigration what she wants? Or will Ocasio-Cortez concede that it makes sense to have a judge hear the immigrants present their cases, and then to winnow the truly deserving from the rest?
Ocasio-Cortez paints quite a disturbing picture of these migrant shelters or detention centers:
“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,” she wrote. “This is not hyperbole. It is the conclusion of expert analysis.” What experts are those? No ICE officer has “brutalized” immigrants with “dehumanizing conditions.” Even where, because of overcrowding, some migrants have had to temporarily sleep on a concrete floor until the arrival of more cots and mattresses, this reflects not an attempt at “brutalizing” anyone, but merely a lack of supplies because of the recent huge increase in numbers of those trying to cross into America, migrants who walked all the way to the American border from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. No official is killing these migrants. Of the hundreds of thousands of migrants, a handful of those trying to make it to Texas have lost their way in the desert, and die of thirst, or illness; ICE officers are the ones who are trying to locate and rescue such people. There has been no “brutalizing” nor “dehumanizing conditions.”
Before becoming a Democratic Congresswoman, Ocasio-Cortez worked as a bartender. That’s still no excuse for her astonishing ignorance of what went on in the Nazi death and concentration camps. If she wants to make analogies to “concentration camps,” she had better learn what atrocities went on in both the “death camps,” where the mass-murdering was immediate, and on an industrial scale, and the “concentration camps,” where death was the result of beatings, starvations, slave labor, and systematic torture, rather than from the mass gassing of inmates. That’s the past she needs to learn about. If she has any decency, she will be properly ashamed that she ever made such a grotesque comparison of the detention centers with Nazi concentration camps.
If AOC needs to learn more about Nazi atrocities, she also needs to learn more about what’s going on today near the Texas-Mexico border, where those detention centers and refugee shelters have been set up. Let her see all the goods (food, clothing, bedding, medicine, toiletries, diapers) and services (doctors, nurses, interpreters) that are provided to the migrants. Then let her realize for herself how horrifying was her likening what our government is doing with these migrants with what the Nazis did to the Jews. Perhaps she will even feel some remorse about cheapening the experience of the Holocaust to make a political point. She might even decide to apologize to the families of those who died in these camps, but given her aggressive never-apologize temperament, her wide-eyed self assurance, I suspect such an apology is beyond her.
Perhaps Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will decide to study in depth what went on in the Nazi camps. And she might even take the occasion to visit those camps. Had she studied the Holocaust, had she visited the camps, she might never have compared those immigrant shelters where the migrants await their hearings before a judge, to those camps where fiendishly cruel murders were carried out in a dozen different ways.
As for Ocasio-Cortez’s appropriation of “Never Again” — the phrase used by Jews and non-Jews in referring to the Holocaust, and meaning that “Never Again” will we allow such things to happen — and then applying that phrase to the migrants in the detention centers, likening their treatment to that of inmates of Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and Auschwitz, she is again likening the greatest crime in human history to the discomfort some migrants may experience at having to remain for a few months in a detention center, perhaps one with an insufficiency of showers, or laundry facilities, or mattresses for cots. To show she has learned something, a chastened AOC should demand of herself, to make amends, that “Never Again will I make such an ill-informed analogy between a Nazi camp and a refugee shelter, never again will I invoke the Holocaust in this way, so false, so stupid, and so cruel.” Right you are, Alexandria — for all our sakes, don’t do it ever again.
jewdog says
She makes the sort of unhinged, ignorant pronouncements that one sees on those video snippets on MEMRI.org from those unhinged, ignorant third world Muslim countries. Thanks to the immigration law of 1965 which has allowed more non-European immigration, the demographic mix in the US is gradually changing, often for the worse.
Whenever I hear her or Omar or Tlaib, I’m reminded that the the golden age in the US won’t last forever.
Dawn says
I love this article, so on point!
gravenimage says
+1
Wellington says
Here’s the worst of it: Vast numbers of her fellow Democrats agree with her idiotic rants and I know of no Democratic Congressman or Senator who has denounced her for describing these camps as concentration camps.
Yes, the problem is much larger than AOC. The problem is that one of the two major political parties in this country has gone over the deep end. And the Republican Party is nothing to brag about but at least it has not become an enemy of America.
AOC is just the tip of a very menacing Democratic iceberg. Much trouble ahead and right now America’s best bet to ward off this trouble is Donald Trump. I voted for him in 2016 and I will vote for him again in 2020.
gravenimage says
All true.
William A Carr says
AOC is enjoying her moment in the spotlight she already has her own acronym! The best thing to do with her and her confreres is to ignore them
Wellington says
Perhaps. But perhaps as well ignoring lies only leads liars to even bolder lies. For instance, too bad Hitler wasn’t far more challenged very early on when he spouted lies about Jews, the Weimar Republic, race purity, etc. Close call at times when liars should be ignored or challenged.
gravenimage says
I understand you point about not giving these thugs more attention, but I think we have to counter their vicious bullsh*t.
J_not_a says
I also think “never again” ought to apply to Holodomor. At least seven million or more of my Ukrainian ancestors were slowly and deliberately starved to death by Stalin. And in view of granaries full of wheat that they themselves had grown and harvested.
GreekEmpress says
J_not_a,
Yes. Holodomor should never be forgotten. We have several Ukrainian families in our church and their ancestors suffered terribly during those years.
“Never again” definitely applies. I wish your family well and that they will be blessed wherever you are now.
gravenimage says
Yes–another hideous atrocity, J_not_a and GreekEmpress–still too little known.
J_not_a says
Thank you Graven, Holodomor is all too often forgotten.
gravenimage says
Agreed–and the New York Time’s Walter Duranty whitewashed the Soviet atrocities there. Just shameful.
Dennis says
This women does not deserve the platform from which she spews her ignorant hatred and false claims, but the media believes she is an anti-Trump and for the advertising revenue will give what she says a place to broadcast it. I have to question the reasonableness of the electorate that put her in office. I am sure there other, smarter, candidates out there who should replace her next time around.
Paweł Jarmicki says
So uneducated… Much leftist… Wow…
Angemon says
Reminds me of that statement she made about the world ending in 12 years. After facing ridicule, she backpedaled and claimed it was a joke.
WPM says
She is a joke, the democrats are in lock step trying to out do each other in virtual signaling. Not one offering an idea(in the democratic party) on how to address the illegal wave of immigrants trying to come into this country ,trying to vet out the criminals ,drug dealers, rapist from the true refugees. All the democrats see is future democratic voters. The democrats want to change the laws for giving people in jail the right to vote, convicted terrorist, murders , rapist ,I am sure if a democrat wins the next presidential race giving illegal aliens the right to vote will be in the cards.
James Lincoln says
Perhaps Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should think seriously about going back to work as a bartender…
gravenimage says
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on American “Concentration Camps” for Migrants (Part 2)
………………….
Just repulsive calumny.
J_not_a says
AOC is a braying ignorant donkey. Seriously, has she even gone to see for herself first-hand the facilities she compares to ” concentration” camps? I have no evidence that is the case which is pathetic.
gravenimage says
Probably not.
Here she is, ostentatiously weeping by a fence. It is unclear what she finds disturbing–but who needs anything substantive when you’ve got a good photo op?
https://www.redstate.com/bonchie/2019/06/25/aoc-shares-shots-border-tone-deaf-display/
somehistory says
https://thewashingtonstandard.com/aocs-empty-parking-lot-photo-op-new-photos-expose-the-lie
When she was “selected” by the “justice democrats”…who don’t know “justice”…before she was “elected” to the House…she went down to Texas to “see” these children being caged.
The photos taken at that time, from the correct angle, show the ***real*** story. There were no children and the ***crying*** she pretended was all just that…pretense.
She’s a fool, a tool, a loudmouth and a liar.
Richard Courtemanche says
Why she and her colleagues are allowed so much of the main stage in a country like the US, is mind boggling!
Jimdandi says
AOC is a willfully ignorant, pompous loon.
Jim Austin says
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the last person to talk about concentration camps as such camps are standard features of nations ruled by her ideological cohorts.
OLD GUY says
She is what the liberal media and their advertizers wants. A loud mouth with little idea of what she is saying and only caring about her public image and air time. She thinks she is a rock star. If she is what the people who elected her want, this country is in BIG TROUBLE. Many world leaders foes and allies alike want to destroy America and our way of life. She is their perfect choice, clueless and easy to pull around by the nose ring.