Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) has admitted she is no expert on the Middle East. But her false “genocide” claims against Israel — in Germany, of all places — stokes antisemitism at home.
I myself spent two days in Munich this month for a series of private discussions with Jewish, Christian, and Muslim peace-seekers.
The focus was on future plans to expand the Abraham Accords, the landmark peace agreement between Israel and several Arab and Muslim states.
But I could not shake my earliest memories of the city, 47 years ago, in 1979.
It was the Jewish holiday of Purim, which marks the failure — documented in the Bible — of the first genocidal scheme targeting Jews, in ancient Persia.
On that day, I recited the Book of Esther (known to Jews as the Megillah), together with famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. With us was Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center at the Jewish Memorial at Dachau, Hitler’s first concentration camp
We had come to lobby West Germany to scrap its statute of limitations on murder, which could have enabled every German mass murderer to return home, free from any future prosecution. (Ultimately, the Bundestag did rescind the law).
Today, Munich still carries the legacy of the Holocaust — and the memory of another mass murder, in 1972, of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. It was a terror attack made worse by the callous indifference of the International Olympic Committee.
Less than a week before my arrival this month, the magnificent Ohel Jakob Synagogue in Munich had received a rifle cartridge with a live bullet in it, along with threats of violence against the Jewish community.
I made it my business to attend morning services inside that beautiful synagogue, joining some 30 local men in communal prayer.
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Those sublime moments of peace dissipated as I left and saw a German police officer, finger on the trigger of her automatic weapon, standing twenty feet from the entrance. She was there to protect the congregation.
The next day, AOC — the New York congresswoman who may aspire to lead the Democratic Party, and the country — came to the Munich Conference to gain international exposure, and give hope to left-wing Europeans shellshocked by President Donald Trump’s dramatic geopolitical moves.
Make no mistake: AOC will long be remembered in Munich. She will be remembered for her historical illiteracy and antisemitism, wrapped in a fraying shroud of Hamas-fed statistics.
Not far from where Hitler launched his rise to power on lurid antisemitic tropes, AOC chose to accuse the Jewish state of genocide.
For the record, the United States and Germany both rejected that new “big lie” campaign — but not AOC. The global elite at the Munich Conference were left to scratch their heads — who constitutes her base, and who exactly was she pandering to?
AOC’s decision to spread the “genocide” slander against Israel at the very birthplace of Nazism will have an impact back in the US, including right here in California. Here, the “genocide” blood libel has spread into the mainstream of our media, culture, universities, and even our K-12 classrooms.
We have seen mobs march against synagogues, and even schools, repeating the same rhetoric AOC deployed in Munich in service of her political ambitions.
Anti-Israel campaigners will surely redouble their efforts, inspired by AOC. Likewise, pundits and influencers will measure whether her claim helps or hurts her political ambitions.
Last Saturday, incredibly, a quarter of million protesters surged into Munich — not demonstrating against Israel, but against the Iranian regime.
Similar, massive protests would soon fill the streets of London, Toronto, Tokyo, New York, and Los Angeles.
Too bad AOC could not be bothered to speak out at Munich against an Iranian regime guilty of crimes against humanity against tens of thousands of its own citizens.
Too bad AOC didn’t use a nanosecond of her 15 minutes of Munich fame to signal her concern for the the suffering of the Uigurs, the Christians, or the Falon Gong in China; for Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong; or for the untold millions elsewhere who yearn for the very thing she arrogantly and cluelessly takes for granted: freedom.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate dean and director of Global Social Action of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and past chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.
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