Comparing current U.S. detention centers for illegal border-crossers to German concentration camps, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had thought it would be an easy thing to politically profit from the Holocaust.

"The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border and that is exactly what they are," Ocasio-Cortez said. "They are concentration camps. And, um, if that doesn't bother you, I don't, I don't know, I like, we can have, okay whatever."

She made these remarks and then doubled down.  A Polish lawmaker sent her a letter asking her to tour the concentration camps to see the difference, something she dismissed as a right-wing stunt.

After that, she was one of the very few House members to vote down any money to improve the migrant detention center conditions.  She wanted to keep them as they were. 

Now she has another thing coming.

A now elderly Holocaust survivor has called her out on her equivalency-mongering, throwing out some tough words — and yet another invitation to visit one of the real concentration camps.  According to the New York Post:

"She should be removed from Congress. She's spreading anti-Semitism, hatred and stupidity," [Ed] Mosberg told The Post. "The people on the border aren't forced to be there — they go there on their own will. If someone doesn't know the difference, either they're playing stupid or they just don't care."

On June 18, the Bronx/Queens politician posted a video on Instagram in which she said: "The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border, and that is exactly what they are — they are concentration camps."

Mosberg, who lost his entire family during the Holocaust and himself survived both the Plaszów and Mauthausen camps, said: "Her statement is evil. It hurts a lot of people. At the concentration camp, we were not free. We were forced there by the Germans who executed and murdered people — there's no way you can compare."

On June 21, the Holocaust-education group From the Depths, of which Mosberg is the president, extended an invitation to AOC via Facebook, encouraging her to tour "German Nazi concentration camps" with Mosberg. He said he hoped to take her to the museum and memorial site at Auschwitz, where his mother was murdered.

Like the Polish lawmaker's invitation, she turned this one down, too.  According to the Epoch Times, there has been at least one tour sponsored by the group to educate lawmakers, so taking the tour would be a no-brainer.  The paper reports that Rep. Pete King asked her to go, based on his own experience with it.  She told him no, via Twitter, claiming he talked "shop" with Austria's Nazis, so to heck with visiting the concentration camps; King's acts invalidated the value of any visit, which is quite an insult to the mission, so Ocasio-Cortez has no intention of going.  Now she refuses to apologize for her cheapening of the Holocaust in an obvious bid to score political points.

The multiple refusals to view the camps for the 29-year-old lawmaker pretty well signal a preference for ignorance over wisdom.  They also signal that she intends to continue trying to cheapen the Holocaust, comparing it to any Trump administration policy she opposes.  It's starting to get noticeable now, and she's on thin ice.  One wonders if the basis here is an abnormal desire to preserve the anti-Semitic tropes of the Left and remain ignorantly confident and comfortably smug doing it.  Or if she really is an anti-Semite wedded to Holocaust denial.  Or if she views this as just a "Jewish thing" and considers that voting bloc, even in New York, insignificant.  Or if she's convinced Jewish voters will always vote for her, no matter what.  Or if her sizable ego is getting in the way of her learning anything new.

Any of those scenarios doesn't speak well of her.  She's now on record as turning down two invitations to learn the truth about the Holocaust.  She's extending the list of people she's alienated and, with that, making new enemies.  How that could be politically worth the cost of cheap virtue-signaling off the Holocaust is rather puzzling.

Image credit: Dmitri Rodriguez via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.