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Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez compared President Donald Trump’s Iran strategy to white supremacy at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event in New York on Monday.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about when Trump tweeted that he was going to target cultural sites in Iran,” Ocasio-Cortez said. This represents an “extension of white supremacy in that the goal of all of this is to erase history and to erase our understanding.”
The freshman congresswoman added that Trump’s conduct speaks to the wider problem of how American leaders think and talk about foreign wars.
“I don’t believe our whole nation’s priority is to slaughter people in other parts of the world,” she continued.
“I think it is the priority of a powerful and concentrated class in the United States that happens to have a grip of control over our government.”
Ocasio-Cortez added that all Americans have “complicity” in allowing such wars to go ahead.
“We always have to center American lives over human lives, we don’t think about the quarter-million innocent Iraqi civilians that died in the Iraq War. We don’t talk about that,” she added“We don’t talk about the actual people who experience violence. And it is almost portrayed in media and in culture as people who didn’t have a society anyway, as though they are people that were just kind of out in the desert somewhere.”
“But these are people who are living ordinary lives, who went to the grocery store just like us, and bombs are quite literally being dropped on them,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And that is not the reality of war that we see.”
Ocasio-Cortez has previously argued on Twitter that targeting cultural sites and ‘threatening to kill’ innocent families, women and children “does not make you a ‘tough guy.’ It does not make you ‘strategic.” It makes you a monster.”
WIBC host Tony Katz responds to Rep. Ocasio-Cortez in today’s Popcorn Moment.
