What’s there not to like about the new star of the Democratic party, who represents the Socialist wing of the DNC (did you know they had one?) and has somehow become the darling of the anti-Trump camp, before she’s been elected to anything, ever?
Two things (if you’re a Democrat): that her victory deprived the Democrats of a gifted, experienced politician, their Congressional caucus chair, Joe Crowley, who was well on his way to replace Nancy Pelosi as Minority Leader and, eventually, Speaker; and the fact that she’s been condemning Israel for its cruel “occupation of Palestine,” following the teachings on this matter handed down by her mentor, Senator Bernie Sanders (not a Democrat).
Not if you’re a Manhattan Jewish Democrat, it turns out. Because on Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez was cheered by the crowd at an event hosted by the Immigrant Arts Coalition at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. According to JTA, everybody in the place was careful not to mention Israel or Jews. The candidate stuck to the topic of the discussion panel, women in the arts, in the spirit of Basil Fawlty’s immortal slogan, “Don’t mention the war.”
The 28-year-old candidate regaled her admirers with tales of her work as an activist (working for Sanders), and her campaign. There’s nothing more to her political career, she never served on a community board, a school board, never ran for office before. How do we even know she’ll make a good Congresswoman? She’s certainly nothing to write home about on Middle East politics.
On May 14, the newest star of the leftwing of the Democratic party tweeted, in reaction to an Al Jazeera story on the growing Arab casualties at the Gaza border fence: “This is a massacre. I hope my peers have the moral courage to call it such. No state or entity is absolved of mass shootings of protesters. There is no justification. Palestinian people deserve basic human dignity, as anyone else. Democrats can’t be silent about this anymore.”
When PBS host Margaret Hoover asked her about it, Ocasio-Cortez declared: “For me, the lens through which I saw this incident, as an activist, as an organizer: If 60 people were killed in Ferguson, Missouri, if 60 people were killed in the South Bronx– unarmed– 60 people were killed in Puerto Rico, I just look at that incident more through– through just, as an incident and to me it would just be completely unacceptable if that happened on our shores.”
Naturally, comparing the Ferguson, Missouri protests against police violence to the Gaza Strip story would require that the African-American residents of Furguson first shoot rockets at their white neighbors, then fly incendiary balloons at their backyards, all as part of their demand to take over those nice suburban homes and push their current owners into the Mississippi River.
When Hoover challenged her on just this point, Ocasio-Cortez confessed: “I am not the expert on geo-politics on this issue.”
An expert? She’s an ignorant boob on this issue, but that didn’t stop her from picking sides and pointing at the “obvious” guilty party.
“I look at my politics as, what is the right thing to do and how do we get closer to that,” she said at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. “We have to be the ones that have that voice of moral clarity because if we let it slide, we let this country slide.”
Absolutely.