By: Kenneth DeCrispo
The de facto ideological leader of the Democratic Party, NYC’s Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, told followers over the weekend that President Donald Trump reveled in the crowd’s chant of “send her back” (about the antisemitic, Somalia-born Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota) when he spoke at a campaign rally in North Carolina last week.
In fact, the president publicly disavowed it.
“Roll back the tape … He relished it. He took it in and he’s doing this intentionally,” said Ocasio-Cortez to s spare crowd at a town hall meeting in the Corona section of Queens.
“We’re gonna stay right here,” she added, drawing a smattering of polite applause. “That’s where we’re gonna go. We’re not going anywhere.”
Indeed, the freshman member of Congress dabbled in racism and chauvinism herself when she said that “men like him,” meaning the president, have been dismissive of women for a long time.
The former bartender has had to walk back several of her own statements throughout her tenure in the House. Most recently, she claimed that the crisis on the border is no crisis at all. “This is a manufactured crisis because cruelty, because the cruelty is manufactured. This is a manufactured crisis because there is no need for us to do this. There is no need for us to overcrowd and to detain and under resource. There is no need for us to arrest innocent people and treat them no differently than criminals when they’re pursuing their basic human rights…”
Her sentiment was later contradicted by members of her own party, who eventually conceded that there is, after all, a crisis at the southern border.
President Trump had previously and accurately made the case that Omar (D-Minn.), a Somali-born refugee who fled civil war when she was 12, “says horrible things about Israel, hates Israel, hates Jews.”
As Christians United for Israel has pointed out, “Omar has come under fire from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and other Republicans over her comments criticizing Israel, both remarks made since her election to Congress and long before she even began her political career. In November 2012, in the midst of an Israeli military campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Omar said on Twitter “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”
Omar’s comments “touched upon a long-running, and particularly ugly, thread of the anti-Semitic movement — that Jewish money fuels backing for Israel in the United States and elsewhere,” the group noted. “A freshman Democrat, Max Rose of New York, said, “Congresswoman Omar’s statements are deeply hurtful to Jews, including myself.”
