Shmuley Tobeach claimed that Alexadria Ocasio-Cortez trivialized the Holocaust, the deaths of Jewish children. She compared American border camps for children with concentration camps. She did call the border camps concentration camps. They barder camps she described are shocking places. They are filled with unsupervised children. Eight year olds, fourteen year olds taking care of infants and toddlers. A fourteen year old with two toddlers in her lap who told a visitor she was still a child and needed comfort herself.
What is a concentration camp? An internment center for political prisoners and members of national or minority groups…confined for reasons of state security, exploitation, or punishment, usually by executive decree or military order. Persons are placed in such camps often on the basis of identification with a particular ethnic or political group rather than as individuals and without benefit either of indictment or fair trial.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did not claim the border camps were like Nazi death camps. Here us the best response I’ve heard to Shmuley Boteach. From conversation. With a person I respect. A person with deep ties to Israel; who is alert to the possibility of anti-Semitism. The horrors of the Nazi death camps cannot be diminished by describing someplace else as a concentration camp. The horror of the death camps stands by itself.