Four years into her tenure as the most visible leftist in the House, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is even worse than when she started.
The progressive Democrat from New York has never been known as the brightest bulb in Congress, but her previous ignorant squawkings generally had the benefit of being irrelevant.
With a full shooting war raging in the Middle East, though, matters of life and death are arising, and Ocasio-Cortez is on the wrong side — and observers are letting her know it.
During a virtual town hall Monday, Ocasio-Cortez dealt with a participant who suggested the United States “just defund Israel and send funding and aid to Gaza.”
“We’re funding a genocide, and I’m not OK with that,” the man said.
Not surprisingly, AOC agreed.
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Check out the video here:
“We are really risking writing a blank check for atrocities,” she said. “And I do not think that is a responsible policy.”
Ocasio-Cortez said U.S. laws already put restrictions on military aid to prevent it from being used in violations of human rights.
“What we are witnessing is the gross violation of human rights in Gaza,” the congresswoman said. “And that is being done with U.S. military assistance.”
Actually, what Americans “are witnessing,” from the comfort of our laptops and televisions, for the most part, is war — the ugly violence of war that entails death on a large scale.
It’s truly regrettable that those deaths involve civilians, but no one with a shred of intellectual honesty can blame Israel for that.
The terrorist group Hamas pulled off a doozy of a “gross human rights violation” on Oct. 7 when it launched a surprise attack against Israeli civilians that resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,200 people, many of them young adults whose lives were destroyed in a bloody pogrom near the end of an all-night rave. (None of those victims could have known at 1 a.m. that they were enjoying their last night on earth. It’s sobering to think about.)
Since AOC is rarely accused of intellectual honesty to any degree, she never mentions that.
Instead, she pulls up statistics that are supposed to make her point but actually damn it.
The congresswoman claimed during the town hall that “over 14,000 to 15,000 Palestinians have been killed in just about seven weeks.”
But the number of Hamas fighters killed, she said, was between 1,000 and 2,000.
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A decent, morally cognizant human being might ask herself, “Who’s fault is that?” And maybe put the blame on the barbarians who deliberately provoked a shooting with a vastly superior military power by massacring civilians and are now using their own people as human shields to stave off righteous retaliation.
There’s no uglier form of cowardice. It’s barbaric behavior that wouldn’t be acceptable coming from any other people in the world. But for the left, when it comes to Palestinians, cowardice and cruelty are apparently to be expected.
But it was Ocasio-Cortez’s comments about funding that really drew scorn from observers. The United States, under the Biden administration especially, has been a generous funder of aid to Palestinian groups in the West Bank and Gaza. According to a 2022 news release from the U.S. Agency for International Development, in fact, aid to Palestinians increased from $50 million in 2020 and 2021 to $219 million in 2022.
And that’s over and above money the Palestinians get from the largely U.S.-funded United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which is devoted exclusively to Palestinian “refugees.”
It’s common knowledge that Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists are diverting “humanitarian” aid to military purposes and have been doing it for years. (Think they built that tunnel complex with toy shovels?)
And that doesn’t even take into account the money the Biden administration has made available to the mullahs in Iran, Hamas’ unapologetic sponsors, through a waiver that supposedly only allows it to be used for “humanitarian” purposes.
As everyone but Joe Biden and his State Department seems to know, money is fungible. What isn’t used for “humanitarian” purposes just might be put to work by crazed Islamist murderers in finding more ways to commit crazed murders in the name of Islam.
AOC had nothing to say on that score, but social media users did.
Well every dollar we give to Gaza as ‘aid’ is another dollar Hamas can put toward building more rockets.
— MajorElint (@ElintMajor) November 28, 2023
Us aid to hamas and Iran, yes.
— Darren Anthony (@numenor122b) November 28, 2023
AOC probably thinks the hostage trade wasn’t fair enough to Hamas.
— Matt (@Mchuck16) November 28, 2023
The aid Hamas stole and used for its own benefit?
— Mike (@mpk62) November 28, 2023
Well if she said it, it must be true.
— Sean Joseph (@sjoseph_sports) November 28, 2023
Coming from a member of the United States Congress — even from a maliciously ignorant Democratic member of Congress — her comments are bad. Coming at a time when the country is aflame with incendiary rallies demonstrating support for the murderous Palestinian cause, they are even worse.
Unfortunately, in AOC’s case, they are not all that surprising. She started out headed downhill.
Americans who remember when she burst onto the political scene after an upset win over veteran Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley in the 2018 primary might recall her “Firing Line” interview with PBS host Margaret Sullivan.
When Sullivan’s questions turned to the Middle East, Ocasio-Cortez had no problem spouting the progressive party line — blasting Israel’s “occupation,” for instance, and bewailing how Palestinians were “experiencing difficulty in access to their housing and homes.”
But when Sullivan, ever so gently (this is PBS, after all), asked the new Democratic star to explain herself, she got this in response:
“Yeah, I mean, I think, I’d also just — I am not the expert on geopolitics on this issue.”
Not only was that a cause of national ridicule, it was the kind of humiliating moment that should have taught Ocasio-Cortez to maybe brush up on her reading, get a little general knowledge and shake loose the leftist blinders that keep her from seeing reality.
Four years on, it’s pretty clear that the blinders are still in place.
Her ignorance hasn’t changed, but her arrogance has increased.
Like the rest of her party in the first quarter of the 21st century, AOC has only gotten worse.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
