The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum released a statement Monday rejecting comparisons between migrant detention centers in the United States and the events that took place in the early 20th century.
“The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary,” the Museum stated. “That position has repeatedly and unambiguously been made clear in the Museum’s official statement on the matter – a statement that is reiterated and reaffirmed now.”
The Museum continued: “[A] statement ascribed to a Museum staff historian regarding recent attempts to analogize the situation on the United States southern border to concentration camps in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s does not reflect the position of the Museum.”
The comparisons of migrant detention centers on the United States’s southern border to the concentration camps Nazis ran in the 1930s and throughout World War II began by U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) during an Instagram Live video.
“The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border, and that is exactly what they are. They are concentration camps,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say, we should not, that ‘Never Again’ means something,” the New York congresswoman continued, referring to a popular slogan used following the Holocaust. “The fact that concentration camps are now an institutionalized practice in the home of the free is extraordinarily disturbing, and we need to do something about it.”
While many criticized Ocasio-Cortez’s claim as extreme, she doubled down on her comments and was supported by others including U.S. Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn) and Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.).
“There are camps, and people are being concentrated. This is very simple. I don’t even know why this is controversial thing for her to say,” Omar told The Rebel.
NEW VIDEO: Ilhan Omar doubles down on @AOC’s concentration camp slur. pic.twitter.com/sBaUkAKLQI
— Rebel News (@RebelNewsOnline) June 21, 2019
Nadler, the House Judiciary Committee chairman, also came to Ocasio-Cortez’s defense.
“One of the lessons from the Holocaust is ‘Never Again’ – not only to mass murder, but also to the dehumanization of people, violations of basic rights, and assaults on our common morality,” Nadler wrote on Twitter.
One of the lessons from the Holocaust is ‘Never Again’ – not only to mass murder, but also to the dehumanization of people, violations of basic rights, and assaults on our common morality. We fail to learn that lesson when we don’t callout such inhumanity right in front of us. https://t.co/EEBBkVL7FG
— Rep. Nadler (@RepJerryNadler) June 18, 2019
