FOX News
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said Wednesday that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. was “wrong” to describe migrant detention centers as “concentration camps.”
“They are entirely different realities,” de Blasio, a 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful, told MSNBC’s “Meet The Press Daily.”
“And so she was wrong, and you would be critical of her, you would tell her not to use that language?” asked host Chuck Todd.
“I respect her greatly and I feel very close to her in terms of philosophy, but of course she was wrong,” de Blasio said of Ocasio-Cortez. “You cannot compare — what the Nazis did in concentration camps, unfortunately, is without any historical — I mean, it’s a horrible moment in history. There is no way to compare.”
De Blasio also criticized statements by former Vice President Joe Biden in which Biden recalled how he had worked with segregationists to “get things done” while a member of the U.S. Senate.
“We can’t have a Democrat talking about that broken past as if there was virtue in it,” de Blasio said.
Ocasio-Cortez has refused to apologize for her comparison and blasted congressional Republicans for what she saw as a reluctance to address migrant conditions at the border. “I will never apologize for calling these camps what they are,” she tweeted earlier Wednesday. She has also claimed that she was not comparing the detention centers to Nazi death camps, but rather to earlier camps, which she said focused on “mass detention of civilians without trial.”
The term “concentration camp” is obviously one deeply associated with the Holocaust, but to apply it to another scenario is not unfounded in and of the usage of the term itself. The definition of a concentration camp is “a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution.” So while migrants taken into US custody and placed into these camps is not close to the latter half of “awaiting mass execution”, the former elements… Read more »
Thanks AOC
If a person is able to leave anytime they want, then they’re not “deliberately imprisoned,” now, are they? Well, these people are indeed able to do so – to go back to the countries they came from. Whereas the Boers in the British concentration camps in South Africa (the first that were so called), and the Jews in the Nazi concentration camps, were not. (And that’s not even getting into the fact that the Boers and the Jews weren’t climbing fences and swimming across rivers to get _into_ the countries that had such camps.) So if today’s migrants don’t want… Read more »
No, the migrants from Central American countries who are currently in US Custody (and detained in, shall we say “detention centers” so as to de-escalate the marked rigidity of how people view the term concentration camp) cannot merely *leave* on their own accord. They are being *held*. I am not suggesting having a naive open border, but the attitude of so many people regarding immigration, and specifically in the instance of asylum seekers, which is NOT the same thing as illegal immigration, is abysmal. We as Jews faced our own marked angst in attempting to find refuge and safety from… Read more »
If they ask to leave, and it can be guaranteed that they’re going back to their home country, then yes, they will be allowed to leave. Of course, if they ask to leave and there’s no such guarantee, they’ll have to be held until their case is processed. As for the rest of your comment, are you seriously comparing conditions in Latin America to Europe before the Holocaust? And don’t drag in the Rebbe, he who always insisted that everything be done in accordance with the law of the land.
She did mean to compare it to Nazi concentration camps because she went on with the slogan “never again” which refers to the holocaust
Bill is of course right in his criticism of AOC, but, however much I might dislike Biden, you can’t criticise him for saying he had to work with segregationists in Congress to get things done. Throughout American history, people had to work with people in the other side, even if they thought they’re evil, inorder to get things done. A more valid criticism of Biden would be that he himself was a segregationist.