One New York Times recently screamed, ‘Jews are baffled AOC refuses to engage with the Jewish community’. We aren’t baffled, we’ve been trying to tell you this for years:
We need to talk about AOC. A young, progressive, left-wing (for the US) politician who has recently been attracting a cult-like following, especially among young progressives, despite her glaring and obvious racism. This appears extremely symptomatic of the general Jew-hatred on the left (caused by the ridiculous association between Jews as a people and the government of Israel) which is extremely visible unless, it seems, you are yourself a non-Jew on the left. It’s not good enough to go ‘it’s a shame about antisemitism, but…’. As she often hypocritically says, it’s not good enough to be not racist, you have to be actively anti-racist. Supporting AOC is neither.
So what exactly has she and her squad done? The list goes on, but here is a short rundown. Firstly, she and her “squad” (AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley) have repeatedly voted against anti-semitism being classed as a form of racism, in order to deny vital protection to Jews who experience the majority of hate crimes (according to FBI statistics). She openly supports actively discriminatory organisations which seek to delegitimize, demonise, or hold Israel to double standards. Incidentally, many of these organisations (such as BDS), actively harm innocent Palestinians too. She has repeatedly made insensitive comparisons between the Nazis and the United States, and repeatedly praised groups that support anti-Jewish terrorist organisations.
In addition, she has refused to meet with any Jews except an extremist far-right sect (which believe the Holocaust is divine and women are slaves) which are generally condemned by the rest of the Jewish community.
Aside from these tokenised extremist groups, she has only ever attended three Jewish events, most recently pulling out of a memorial to Yitzakh Rabin, who had won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in bringing together Palestine and Israel in attempts for peace, before being assassinated by a far-right Israeli, as she deemed the event “too Zionist”. On the subject of Zionism and the Israel-Palestine conflict, she completely misunderstands its basic principles, putting forward an extremely one-sided narrative despite the fact that she is someone with absolutely no first-hand experience, who should not have formulated an opinion. This misguided and uneducated approach to the conflict has been echoed by many members of the left, perhaps exemplified best by the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which harms both Jews and Palestinians.
Finally, she tokenises her Jewish-by-proxy Sephardic ancestors from (as she puts it) “generations and generations ago” to absolve her of her racism, in a fashion akin to ‘my friend is black, therefore I can’t be racist’. This was especially damaging to the Sephardic community, being one of the more discriminated against sects of Judaism, in Israel and diaspora states. They are especially continually persecuted in Latin America.
This represents a wider issue as a whole, where ‘fake-woke’ progressives such as AOC or Ilhan Omar get away with antisemitism, due to a general belief amongst the left either that Jews deserve to be discriminated against, don’t really get discriminated against, or that Jews are somehow traitors to progressivism - despite the fact that we started many of the major progressive movements. You may notice the shared commonality between Jews ‘deserving’ hatred, the denial of antisemitism, and the traitor rhetoric - they’re all canards that were used extensively by the Nazis.
Written by Noah Mitchell
Artwork by Sophia Patterson
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