Conditions and policies at the U.S. southern border have led many activists to compare what is going on with ICE detention centers with concentration camps built in Germany in the early 1930s. It does not take much understanding of history to realize that the parallels are there. In discussions of the Holocaust, which included the murder of 6 million European Jews, the term “concentration camp” is often used synonymously with the term “extermination camp.” If you believe that a concentration camp and an extermination or death camp are one and the same, then comparing anything to a concentration camp can be taken as a reference to the slaughter of millions of Jews. Comparing detention centers in Texas to extermination camps in Poland, of course, would be inaccurate, and disrespectful to the memory of the people who were murdered in the Holocaust.
It is on this basis, the synonymous use of the two terms, that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is now being attacked for a video she posted in which she says that the United States, under Trump and his DHS forces, is running concentration camps. Very quickly, Rep. Liz Cheney, best known for being proof that demons can have children, responded.
Fox News, always very protective of Jewish people, except when wooing its anti-Semitic viewership, also got involved.
Attacking progressive women of color for being anti-Israel (and therefore, supposedly, anti-Semitic) is one of the ways that right-wing entities try to create divisions among liberal and progressive people in our country. Examples of how reckless a tactic this kind of hate-baiting is can be seen in the rise in death threats against Rep. Ilhan Omar, after Donald Trump began repeating that Omar was anti-Jewish and wanted to overthrow the United States government by protecting Muslim terrorists. Trump was crawling through a schism he thought he perceived in the Democratic Party over Omar’s statements concerning the very conservative Israeli government lobby in Washington. Omar’s use of the term “foreign power” was triggering to many, but her statements seemed very clearly related to specific politicians’ interests in Israel, and not a declaration against Jewish people in their entirety.
Many people forget that the Japanese American internment camps that disgraced our country during World War II were concentration camps. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez knows that they were.
Liz Cheney and the Republican Party continue to call people anti-Semites while courting literal neo-Nazis. But Cheney’s attempts at throwing a giant rock from inside her glass house did not go over well with the public, and the ratio against her tweet was pretty epic.
That’s a fact.
Yes.
Touch of history for you. And some more.
This.
I have to agree.
There are so many more. But I’ll leave it with this.
Liz Cheney, you are a failure of a person.