AOC Shuts Down Protestors Who Accuse Her of Supporting Palestinian Genocide: ‘You’re Not Helping These People’ | Video
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her partner Riley Roberts were followed and shouted at by a group of pro-Palestine protestors at a movie theater in Brooklyn, New York, on Friday night. The pair were filmed walking away from a handful of people who demanded that Ocasio-Cortez call the crisis in Gaza a genocide.
Ocasio-Cortez kept her cool throughout most of the minute and a half, but at the end turned on the group and said they would edit the content “out of context” before she added, “It’s f—ed up. And you’re not helping these people. And you’re not helping them.”
The two were filmed attempting to get away from the group at the beginning of the video. Ocasio-Cortez is seen shaking her head but staying silent as one person said, “You refuse to call it a genocide.” She then turned to face the man and said, “I need you to understand this is not okay.”
“It’s not okay that there’s a genocide, you’re not actively against it,” the man replied. “You’re lying!” Ocasio-Cortez called as she and Riley went down an escalator.
“I’m lying?” the man asked. “You went on TV and avoided talking about it.” The group then followed Ocasio-Cortez down the escalator.
A woman then said, “If you can’t call it a genocide then how—” before Ocasio-Cortez rounded on her. The pair quietly spoke back and forth before the woman said loudly, “We’re not lying … you haven’t been calling it a genocide. Don’t tell me I’m lying.”
As the group moved down a second escalator, the woman yelled, “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 group then continued outside the theater, where Roberts pleaded, “Stop. Okay? Stop.” The woman replied, “We’re not going anywhere. We’re just talking to an elected public official, that’s all we’re doing, that’s it.”
Ocasio-Cortez gestured broadly at the camera and said, “You’re going to cut this and you’re going to clip this so that it’s completely out of context. 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.”
After the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza in January, Ocasio-Cortez did not expressly call the catastrophe in Gaza a genocide but said that no one should “toss someone out of our public discourse” for using the term.
“The fact that [the ICJ] said there’s a responsibility to prevent it, the fact that this word is even in play, the fact that this word is even in our discourse, I think demonstrates the mass inhumanity that Gazans are facing,” she added.
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.”
The post AOC Shuts Down Protestors Who Accuse Her of Supporting Palestinian Genocide: ‘You’re Not Helping These People’ | Video appeared first on TheWrap.
