U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was visibly frustrated with anti-Israel protesters who demanded that she call the situation in Gaza a “genocide.”
The leftist Democrat was seen with her fiancé leaving a Brooklyn movie theater when the pro-Palestine demonstrators accosted her about her stand on Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists in Gaza. Ocasio-Cortez, who represents New York’s 14th Congressional District, has been vocal in her criticism of Israel since the conflict began but she was not having the intrusion by the protesters as seen in video footage.
The congresswoman known as a member of the “Squad” in the House was seen trying to get past the protesters who had phones in hand to film the encounter.
“You refuse to call it a genocide,” one man said as Ocasio-Cortez initially seemed to try to walk past him, before turning to confront him.
“I need you to understand this is not okay,” she said to him, visibly getting angry.
“It’s not okay that there’s a genocide, you’re not actively against it,” the man responded, prompting Ocasio-Cortez to fire back, “You’re lying!” as she and Riley climbed onto an escalator.
“I’m lying?” the man said. “You went on TV and avoided talking about it.”
The demonstrators followed the couple and, at one point, AOC confronted a woman who said, “We’re not lying … you haven’t been calling it a genocide. Don’t tell me I’m lying.”
“Over 30,000 people are dead, AOC, you can’t just say it for once? Just say the word, that’s it, that’s all we want you to say,” the woman yelled as the group moved down another escalator.
Even Roberts tried to reason with the group, saying, “Stop. Okay? Stop.”
“We’re not going anywhere. We’re just talking to an elected public official, that’s all we’re doing, that’s it,” the woman replied.
“You’re going to cut this and you’re going to clip this so that it’s completely out of context,” Ocasio-Cortez said to the protesters. “I already said that it was. And y’all are just going to pretend that it wasn’t, over and over again. It’s f—ed up. And you’re not helping these people. And you’re not helping them.”
Weeks after the Hamas attack on Israel in October, Ocasio-Cortez had called it as well as Israel’s response “war crimes.”‘War crimes do not constitute and are not an appropriate response for other war crimes,’ she told MSNBC on Sunday. ‘Hamas’ hostage-taking, their hostage-taking of children, of the disabled, elderly civilians, are a war crime,’ she said at the time.
During an interview on “Meet the Press” earlier this year, Ocasio-Cortez addressed the term “genocide” concerning the events in Israel and Gaza.
“Whether you are an individual that believes this is a genocide — which by the way, in our polling we are seeing large amounts of Americans concerned specifically with that word. So I don’t think that it is something to completely toss someone out of our public discourse for using,” she said in January after the International Court of Justice had ordered Israel to avoid acts of genocide in Gaza.
