Academics Rally Behind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Over Concentration Camp Comments

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

'She Is Completely Historically Accurate'

Freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continued to spar with Republicans over her claim that U.S. migrant detention centers are "concentration camps" over the weekend.

Ocasio-Cortez blasted Iowa representative Steve King Sunday after he asked her to visit the site of Nazi death camp Auschwitz with a Holocaust memorial group. Declining his invite, she pointed out King had met with a far-right Austrian group during his own trip to the camp, as The Washington Post noted last October.

Ocasio-Cortez described migrant detention facilities at the southern U.S. border as "concentration camps" during an Instagram live stream June 17. Following up on Twitter, she said the centers "brutalized" migrants with "dehumanizing conditions."

Ocasio-Cortez quickly came under fire from critics, including Republicans like Liz Cheney, for employing a term most commonly used to refer to the Nazi camps where millions of Jews lost their lives.

But Ocasio-Cortez continued to defend her use of the term, writing Wednesday: "These camps...fit squarely in an academic consensus and definition." Noting the fact that several migrant children have died in U.S. custody in recent months, she added: "Kids are dying and I'm not here to make people feel comfortable about that."

The term "concentration camp" predates World War II by decades, and has been used to describe numerous detainment facilities. It was first used to describe "reconcentration camps" set up by Spanish general Valeriano Weyler in Cuba in 1897.

It is often used to describe the internment of more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent—many of whom were U.S. citizens— on American soil during World War II.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/academics-rally-behind-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-over-concentration-camp-comments-she-is-completely-historically-accurate/ar-AADls3q?li=BBnb7Kz

[kimbutgar]

1. When Merriam Webster says those detention camps are concentration camps I agree with them

Concentration camp was our top lookup on June 18th, 2019, following the use of the word by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and subsequent contretemps over whether such was appropriate or not.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the liberal freshman Democrat from New York who has made fighting for immigrants’ rights a signature issue, on Tuesday described the Trump administration’s border detention facilities as “concentration camps,” provoking backlash from Republicans who said she was minimizing the Holocaust.
— Sheryl Gay Stolberg, The New York Times, 18 Jun. 2019

What does concentration camp mean?
A short definition of concentration camp is “a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard —used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners.”

There is more at the link


https://www.merriam-webster.com/news-trend-watch/lookups-spike-for-concentration-camp-20190618