New York’s freshman congressman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, announced Sunday night she is aligning with Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who is widely considered one of the most prominent anti-Semites in Western politics.
The development will likely present another headache for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who is already contending with a series of anti-Semitic scandals among her freshman class of lawmakers.
Sunday evening, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted:
The move drew immediate pushback over Corbyn’s history of inflammatory anti-Jewish commentary.
Progressive writing Elad Nehorai told Rep. Ocasio-Cortez: “I’m a huge huge fan of yours. I hope you’ll take a look at the amount of Jews trying to call attention to Corbyn’s long, documented history of anti-Semitism. The left’s blind spot in this regard can still be fixed. But we need leaders like yourself to listen.”
To which Ocasio-Cortez blithely replied: “Thank you for bringing this to me. We cannot + will not move forward without deep fellowship and leadership with the Jewish community. I’ll have my team reach out.”
Corbyn has frequently appeared with leaders of anti-Israel terrorist groups, including at a 2014 ceremony in Tunisia honoring the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich terror attack, during which 11 Israeli athletes were taken hostage and later murdered. Fears of Corbyn’s anti-Semitic worldview spurred Britain’s leading Jewish newspapers in July to jointly editorialize that Corbyn replacing Theresa May as prime minister would pose an “existential threat to Jewish life in this country.” The Simon Wiesenthal Center named Corbyn the fourth biggest threats to Jews worldwide. An British government investigation reported that under Corbyn, the Labour Party tolerated people with “vile attitudes toward Jewish people.”
Meanwhile, a recent Daily Caller news report detailed how Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s colleague, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) is a member of a Facebook group run by one of her fund-raisers, Maher Abdel-qader, which frequently posts anti-Semitic content. The Facebook page traffics in anti-Jewish propaganda, such as a recent video that described Jews as “Satanic” and suggested 6 million Jews didn’t actually die in the Holocaust. Tlaib is also friends with Abbas Hamideh, whom the Daily Caller reports is “a Palestinian activist who has openly supported Hezbollah and compared Israelis to Nazis.“ The two appear to be close friends, with Hamideh even attending Tlaib’s swearing-in ceremony.
Another freshman Democratic congressman, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) recently likened Israel to Iran, which is only the latest time she attacked the Jewish state. Before entering Congress, she trafficked in a popular anti-Semitic trope, claiming Israel “hypnotized the world,” comments she later said she didn’t understand why Jews found offensive. More recently Rep. Omar used Holocaust Remembrance Day to downplay the Holocaust.