A fellow member of Congress from New York called Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s comments comparing ICE detention centers to Nazi concentration camps “disgusting.”
Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin, appearing on the Todd Starnes Radio Show Wednesday, called Democrat AOC’s comments inappropriate.
“I’ll tell you what I’m seeing is that radical element of the party becoming more and more emboldened. They’re being empowered,” Zeldin told Starnes. “They’re being elevated and embraced. They’re doubling down and tripling down and they’re increasing their influence and that’s a huge problem for our country.”
It’s scary stuff, he said, not to mention “all of the other people who are sticking up for her and trying to excuse it away.”
AOC launched a firestorm on Monday when she said the United States was running concentration camps during one of her frequent live stories on Instagram.
“The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border. And that is exactly what they are. Concentration camps,” AOC said. “The fact that concentration camps are now institutionalized practice in the home of the free is extraordinarily disturbing.”
Ocasio-Cortez has not apologized for her comments, instead saying concentration camps are the “mass detention of civilians without trial.” Critics were quick to point out that six million Jews were killed in concentration camps during the Holocaust.
The Yad Vashem Museum in Israel, which bills itself as the world center for Holocaust documentation and education, weighed in on Twitter, specifically addressing their comments to 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 ‘exterminating through labor,’ ” the museum Tweeted to AOC.
Even Chuck Todd of NBC’s “Meet the Press” criticized AOC, saying “Be careful comparing them to Nazi concentration camps; (they’re) not in the slightest.”
Zeldin said there are members within the Democratic Party who are anti-Semitic.
” I mean she was clearly referencing the Holocaust and her remarks about the concentration camps in the video that started all of this. And it is a disgusting rewrite of history it’s a false comparison,” he said.
Zeldin also had praise for ICE agents, saying they prioritize people who just aren’t in our country illegally, but who committed murder and rape and are involved in gang activity, drug and human/sex trafficking.