PrintPolish lawmaker schools Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about the Holocaust
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's bid to cheapen the Holocaust by comparing U.S. detention centers for illegal border crossers with National Socialist death camps has been met with some horror abroad, starting with Poles who know the difference.
Polish lawmaker Dominik Tarczynski wrote to the socialist Ocasio-Cortez describing his distress at her comparison, calling the presence of Nazi concentration camps in his country "deep wounds," and explained why these camps were not alike. He invited her to come to Poland and tour the actual sites of the death camps — Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzic, Sobibor and Madjenek — as an educational "olive branch."
The letter comes as Ocasio-Cortez doubled down on her claim that the two kinds of camps are the same thing, something she claimed she "didn't say lightly." According to Newsweek:
On Monday, Ocasio-Cortez accused the government of "running concentration camps on our southern border," adding: "that is exactly what they are." She expanded on Twitter, criticizing the separation of families at the border, and the conditions migrants face in "brutalizing" and "dehumanizing" detention centers.
The congresswoman defended her comments again on Twitter Wednesday, writing: "We are calling these camps what they are because they fit squarely in an academic consensus and definition.
"History will be kind to those who stood up to this injustice. So say what you will. Kids are dying and I'm not here to make people feel comfortable about that."
It's odd, of course, that people would willingly jump international borders and surrender to Border Patrol agents with the full knowledge that such a ghastly fate was next for them. National Socialist death camps didn't work that way. But as the Polish legislator wrote, perhaps she needed education.
His letter is here, and it's unusually eloquent:
With this letter, I am formally inviting @AOC to come to Poland,where Adolf Hitler set up the worst chain of concentration camps the world has ever seen, so that she may see that scoring political points with enflamed rhetoric is unacceptable in our contemporary Western societies pic.twitter.com/ivOTfmiCfo
— TARCZYŃSKI Dominik (@D_Tarczynski) June 20, 2019
It's important, because the pair of them seem to be creating a "narrative" with this outrageous comparison.
Omar, like Ocasio-Cortez, is rather well known for her anti-Semitic statements. Now that both of them are claiming that migrant processing centers are identical to National Socialist death camps, it rather signals that the pair of them are seeking a political twofer: to diminish the significance of the Holocaust, which is a major aim of all anti-Semites, and to elevate the detention centers as indistinguishable. It's almost as if the statements are intended to promote anti-Semitism perhaps even more than to achieve the socialist political aim of erasing all borders and with it, the United States itself.
The Polish lawmaker, from thousands of miles away, could obviously see that that was what was happening, and did us all a public service by asking Ocasio-Cortez to come to Poland to see for herself that these National Socialist death camps were nothing like the U.S. border detention centers. Ocasio-Cortez is unlikely to take him up on it, but that's educational in its own way, too: it underlines to us the anti-Semitic nature of her comments. Anti-Semites have an agenda to promote, and education, or understanding the difference between Nazis and border guards, is not part of it.
