New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo bashed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Wednesday over her controversial “concentration camp” comments last week, saying they were “wholly inappropriate.”
“The Holocaust, you’re talking about a tragedy of biblical proportion and one of the greatest scourges in history. Six million Jews died during the Holocaust; there is no comparison to the Holocaust, period,” Cuomo said Wednesday at his Manhattan office before leaving for Israel on a solidarity trip.
Cuomo added, “To draw an equivalency suggests one does not understand what happened in the Holocaust.”
Ocasio-Cortez told her Instagram followers last week that the U.S. government is “running concentration camps on our southern border.”
“That is exactly what they are. They are concentration camps,” Ocasio-Cortez said during a live-stream.
She has stood by her remarks but has faced backlash from members of both parties.
On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., refused to say if she agrees with Ocasio-Cortez’s comparison.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum said in a statement that it “unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary.”
The Democratic governor did say the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border is “horrendous” and a human rights violation.
