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Over the weekend, AOC claimed Palestinian children are being put in cages in the West Bank.
Executive Editor of The Washington Examiner, Seth Mandel, says AOC is pushing a major lie.
When he confronted her office with the facts, she failed to respond. “Not sure there’s a politician alive today pushing a wider range of blood libels,” Mandel wrote to Twitter. Take a look:
"Ocasio-Cortez's office did not respond when asked on Monday to provide examples of children being imprisoned in cages in the West Bank."
Not sure there's a politician alive today pushing a wider range of blood libels. https://t.co/IXVlnMu6Eo
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) February 15, 2022
AOC’s comments came during an appearance in Austin, Texas where she traveled to rally support for left-wing Democratic candidates Greg Casar and Jessica Cisneros.
When she was heckled by a pro-Palestinian protester, AOC responded by saying the U.S. media is “censoring” Palestinian concerns.
Going even further, she compared the treatment of children allegedly in cages in the West Bank to migrants crossing the US southern border and being put in detention.
“With media, with all this stuff, Palestine is basically a banned word. It’s censored. We don’t talk about it. No one knows about it,” she said.
“Thank you for bringing it up, honestly, because we shouldn’t have to tiptoe around these things. We should be able to talk about it. And we shouldn’t allow people’s humanity to be censored.”
“I don’t believe that a child should be in a cage on our border and I don’t believe a child should be in a cage in the West Bank,” she added.
Ocasio-Cortez did not provide any evidence or examples of children being locked in cages in the West Bank to back up her claim.
More on this story via Daily Mail:
She pushed back on charges of anti-semitism leveled against some of Israel’s biggest critics in the House, such as Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
‘Believing in the basic human dignity and the ability for a person to not be jailed or beaten for who they are, it does not mean that you are bigoted against any other community,’ she said, according to Jewish Insider. ‘And we gotta call that for what it is.’
She compared the treatment of Palestinians by Israelis in the West Bank to treatment of migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border.
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Israel has, however, constructed a controversial wall in the West Bank that has cut into Palestinian territory and displaced Palestinians from the fertile land they used to grow crops on. Israel has said the wall is necessary for security, though encourages Israelis to settle on both sides of the wall.
In May the congresswoman made a similar comparison. Ocasio-Cortez said that Americans ‘are scared to stand up to the incarceration of children in Palestine because maybe it’ll force us to confront the incarceration of children here on our border,’ she said on the House floor on May 14.
