UPDATE
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) encouraged AOC to take up From the Depth's offer.
.@AOC I went to Auschwitz & Birkenau with Eddie Mausberg & Jonny Daniels with In the Depths. I went with a deep understanding of the Shoah and had a profound personal experience. Please accept their offer. https://t.co/9tjqgdP6N5
— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) June 23, 2019
Not surprisingly, however, she decided to decline. Her reasoning was rather sickening:
The last time you went on this trip it was reported that you also met w/ fringe Austrian neo-Nazi groups to talk shop.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 23, 2019
So I’m going to have to decline your invite. But thank you for revealing to all how transparently the far-right manipulates these moments for political gain. https://t.co/TQkaPEESoD
What's "right-wing" about wanting to understand history and never forgetting the atrocities that took place?
ORIGINAL POST
From the Depths, a Holocaust remembrance group started by descendants of Holocaust survivors, sent a letter to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), inviting her to tour multiple Nazi concentration camps with one of the camps' survivors. From the Depths president Edward Mosberg is a 93-year-old Holocaust survivor who would take Ocasio-Cortez to visit Mauthausen, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek concentration camps, as well as other historical sites.
The invite comes after Ocasio-Cortez compared detention facilities along the southern border to Nazi concentration camps. She even doubled down on the claim by posting a video of her outside of an ICE facility.
From the Depths' founder, Jonny Daniels, doesn't believe AOC purposely made the comparison out of ill faith but rather out of ignorance.
"Congresswoman, the comparison you made recently to the migrant detainment camps on the southern United States border to the German Nazi Concentration Camps, brought a great deal of backlash, we firmly believe that this was not your intention, this was not done out of spite or ill faith, rather a misguided comment, due to a lack of proper education on the Holocaust, a significant issue of our generation," Daniels wrote in his letter to AOC.
"The opportunity you will have of visiting the German Nazi Concentration Camps along with Mr. Mosberg, a 93 year old survivor of history’s most brutal genocidal regime, will enable you to become a witness of a witness, something that our generation will sadly be the last to do, as result of the fact that the survivors are passing away at an ever increasing rate," the letter read.
Last month, Polish President Andrzej Duda awarded Mosberg with the Order of Merit medal, the highest honor the Republic of Polish provides, for his work to educate future generations about the Holocaust, The Jerusalem Post reported.
“I accept this award on behalf of myself, my wife, my children and grandchildren, and most importantly, in honor of my mother, father, siblings and six million Jews, brutally murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust,” Mosberg said during his acceptance speech. “It is important that those who come after us are our witnesses and be sure that the tragedy of the Holocaust will never be forgotten.”
AOC has yet to say if she'd accept the offer.
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