Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel Schools AOC on Concentration Camp Facts

Penny Starr

The World Holocaust Remembrance Center — Yad Vashem — in Israel is schooling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on the truth about the Nazi concentration camps where millions of people were incarcerated and murdered during World War II.

The intervention follows the freshman Congresswoman’s social media campaign accusing President Donald Trump of running similar facilities for migrants at the U.S. border with Mexico.

“That is exactly what they are. They are concentration camps,” Ocasio-Cortez said during a Q&A live-streamed on Instagram on Monday. “The fact that concentrations camps are now an institutionalized practice in the Home of the Free is extraordinarily disturbing and we need to do something about it.”

“@AOC Concentration camps assured a slave labor supply to help in the Nazi war effort, even as the brutality of life inside the camps helped assure the ultimate goal of ‘extermination through labor,” the center tweeted on Wednesday and included a link to its website.

“Learn about concentration camps http://ow.ly/LtnX50uHJL2 .”

When Ocasio-Cortez was criticized for comparing the housing facilities for migrants that afford residents health care, education, food, and recreation, she doubled down as Breitbart News reported.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) continues to insist the Trump administration is operating “concentrations camps” along the U.S.-Mexico border where migrant children are housed, claiming Wednesday that the country has a long history of doing so.

“The US ran concentration camps before, when we rounded up Japanese people during WWII,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter. It is such a shameful history that we largely ignore it.” The self-avowed Democratic-socialist continued: “These camps occur throughout history. Many refuse to learn from that shame, but here we are today. We have an obligation to end them.”

Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described Democratic-socialist said she wanted to connect with others “who are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘never again’ means something.”

The expression “never again” is strongly associated with Holocaust remembrance.

On the center’s website Avner Shalev, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate, explains the mission of the center and its emphasis and teaching younger people like Ocasio-Cortez, about the realities of the Holocaust.

Three generations have come into being since the end of World War II. The generation that lived through the Holocaust is dwindling. The presence of witnesses – the remnant who survived – has always ensured a certain moral strength; their increasing absence creates a moral, cultural and educational vacuum. How will Holocaust commemoration remain relevant to members of the fourth and fifth generations, both Jewish and non-Jewish? What place will it occupy when the survivor generation is no longer with us? Will remembrance be meaningful in the context of contemporary events? How should we prepare ourselves at this historic juncture?

We live in an age of instant communication and progressive technology. The world is rapidly advancing through the third millennium under the pressure of an open-market economy, hyper-consumerism, a world communications revolution and a flood of boundary-reducing tourism. 

However, the benefits to be garnered from the free flow of diverse information are counterbalanced by an unavoidable side effect: the creation of short memories. Many youths today regard history not in the sense of where they have come from, but rather as a bygone series of events that are “past,” while they themselves are living “post.” This viewpoint is dangerous in that it is disjunctive rather than connective.

In the spirit of the Jewish tradition of “Vehigadeta Lebincha” (“And you shall tell your children”), Yad Vashem places great emphasis on educating the younger generations about the Holocaust. 

Breitbart News reported on Wednesday that Ocasio-Cortez declared that she would never apologize for comparing detention facilities at the U.S. border with “concentration camps” in Nazi-occupied Europe.

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