A 93-year-old Holocaust survivor said that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) should be removed from Congress after her comments comparing facilities holding immigrants near the southern border with concentration camps, a term most commonly linked to the Nazi’s attempted extermination of Jews during World War II.
“She should be removed from Congress. She’s spreading anti-Semitism, hatred and stupidity,” Edward Mosberg told the New York Post. “The people on the border aren’t forced to be there—they go there on their own will. If someone doesn’t know the difference, either they’re playing stupid or they just don’t care.”
Mosberg is the president of From the Depths, a Jewish group that invited Ocasio-Cortez on a tour of the Auschwitz concentration camp, which she declined.
Mosberg’s group stated in an open letter that Ocasio-Cortez’s heavily criticized comparison “was not done out of spite or ill faith, rather a misguided comment, due to a lack of proper education on the Holocaust, a significant issue of our generation.”
“The opportunity you will have of visiting the German Nazi Concentration Camps along with Mr. Mosberg, a 93-year-old survivor of history’s most brutal genocidal regime, will enable you to become a witness of a witness, something that our generation will sadly be the last to do, as result of the fact that the survivors are passing away at an ever-increasing rate,” the letter stated.
The group described itself as “the only foundation dealing with Holocaust memory, memorial and education run entirely by millennials.”
Ocasio-Cortez said on June 23 that she wouldn’t be going in response to the June 19 letter, accusing the “far-right” of trying to use the Holocaust to score political points.
Mosberg told the Post that Ocasio-Cortez calling U.S. border facilities concentration camps “is evil.”
The last time you went on this trip it was reported that you also met w/ fringe Austrian neo-Nazi groups to talk shop.
So I’m going to have to decline your invite. But thank you for revealing to all how transparently the far-right manipulates these moments for political gain. https://t.co/TQkaPEESoD
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 23, 2019
‘Nobel Prize in stupidity’: Holocaust survivor wants AOC out of Congress https://t.co/c9OPVjPbW8 pic.twitter.com/QcYbbDMocN
— New York Post (@nypost) June 29, 2019
“It hurts a lot of people. At the concentration camp, we were not free. We were forced there by the Germans who executed and murdered people—there’s no way you can compare,” he said.
Mosberg, a New Jersey resident, said that if the lawmaker ended up changing her mind, he would show her the place where many of his family members were killed.
“I can show her where they killed my mother, my grandparents, and cousins so she understands this,” he said. “I will bring her to the place where they give my wife’s mother [benzine] injections to the heart and put her on the fire.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s comments stirred international condemnation and at least one other invitation to view concentration camps run by the Nazis.
A Polish member of parliament reached out to her in mid-June, inviting her to view for herself where the Nazis killed millions of Jews.
“While under German Nazi occupation, a number of concentration camps were set up in my country, Poland. It has caused a deep wound that persists on our proud Polish and European history that we must deal with every single day, and that we reaffirm to one another can never be forgotten, and never allowed to happen again,” wrote Dominik Tarczynski in a letter he posted online on June 20.
“This is why when someone cheapens the history, or uses it for political point-scoring, we become agitated and upset.”
