Palestinians Furious That Ocasio-Cortez Stole Their ‘Concentration Camp’ Libel

“She apparently believes local or national political considerations trump, so to speak, our concerns.”

Credit: El Borde via Wikimedia Commons

Rafah, June 27 – Middle East Arabs who have used a term evocative of Nazi persecution and genocide of Jews to demonize Israel voiced outrage today that a New York freshman Congresswoman has appropriated the phrase to refer to facilities where the United States holds people who crossed the border illegally from Mexico.

Palestinian officials and activists criticized Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) this week following the latter’s use of “concentration camp” to describe the tent cities and other places where Border Patrol units imprison those who enter the US without proper documentation or permission. While Ms. Ocasio-Cortez sought to provoke anger within the US at the treatment of the inmates, many of them children, her choice of words instead shifted focus to the semantic question of whether the facilities live down to the Holocaust associations the term evokes, while in Palestinian areas her rhetoric sparked fury that someone else had the gall to invoke the Holocaust outside the context of painting Israel as evil.

“That’s OUR rhetorical device,” protested Saeb Erekat, a close adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. “How dare she employ it in a manner that not only does not demonize Jews, but distracts the world from the Palestinian issue, which everyone knows must dominate the news everywhere always?”

Palestinians in the street echoed their leaders’ pique at the affront. “My friends and I have spent the last two days at the shopping mall talking about her effrontery,” recalled Wafa Tashhir. “Here we sit in an actual concentration camp, while this upstart has the nerve to more than imply that the term applies to other situations, other people. It was only after my third latte of the morning yesterday that I finally realized what’s happening: Ocasio-Cortez isn’t innocently adopting a propaganda tactic that we Palestinians perfected; she’s outright stealing our intellectual property, dispossessing us as the Zionists have always done.”

Others expressed disappointment at the insensitivity of a legislator many thought could serve as a valuable ally in countering the influence of pro-Israel lawmakers in Congress. “We were looking forward to leveraging AOC’s progressive credentials and popularity for our own ends,” lamented Ramallah official Nabil Aburndeineh. “Unfortunately, she apparently believes local or national political considerations trump, so to speak, our concerns. That’s obviously a ridiculous notion to anyone who’s been paying attention for the last seven decades, but Ocasio-Cortez is young, so maybe she hasn’t had a chance to gain exposure to the truth. We and our stateside allies can remedy that, but this development does harm the trust we could have placed in her.”

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