Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sends out anti-Israel message on Christmas eve, critics push back

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., faced criticism on Christmas over a social media post in which she compared Jesus and the Palestinian people, implicitly criticizing Israel while saying nothing about Hamas, the terrorist organization that started the two-and-a-half month war in Gaza

The New York Democrat also got some key facts wrong.

"In the story of Christmas, Christ was born in modern-day Palestine under the threat of a government engaged in a massacre of innocents," Ocasio-Cortez wrote. She was comparing the Jews who lived in the region more than 2,000 years ago under the Romans to the Palestinians, according to Fox News.

"[Jesus] was part of a targeted population being indiscriminately killed to protect an unjust leader’s power," AOC added.

"Thousands of years later, right-wing forces are violently occupying Bethlehem as similar stories unfold for today’s Palestinians, so much so that the Christian community in Bethlehem has canceled this year’s Christmas Eve celebrations out of both [fear for their] safety and respect," she added.

Israel, which she refers to as “right-wing forces,” is not occupying Bethlehem. Control was turned over from Israel to the Palestinian Authority in December 1995, according to Britannica, in preparation for the two-state solution, following the signing of the Oslo Accords.

Also, the Christian population of Bethlehem has gone from nearly 90% to less than 15%, according to The Times of Israel. Most of that occurring after the PA took over and expanded the borders to give the city a large Muslim majority.

Jacob Kornbluh, a senior political reporter at The Forward, responded to AOC’s comments with a post on X, formerly Twitter, that called out AOC for making "no mention of Hamas terror" or "the victims of Oct. 7 attack."

Someone else on X noted that AOC failed to talk about the Israelis who are "still being held captive by Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip and the women who were raped during the terrorists’ brutal attack," according to the New York Post, adding that her “Jew hate is really showing here.”

The website Honest Reporting points out that it has become an annual ritual by many news organizations, including the AP, Reuters and AFP that “Israel ruined Christmas” and has once again “disrupted festive celebrations” in Bethlehem.

“As Israel battles Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip who launched the horrifying terror attack on October 7, the emphasis by the world’s leading news agencies is on how Israel’s prolonging the war has disrupted festive celebrations — and not the fact that Hamas is ultimately responsible having launched the unprovoked attack on innocent civilians in the first place and that it continues to indiscriminately fire rockets at Israeli towns and cities,” according to the outlet.

“It is lazy and, sadly, predictable journalism: the recycling of the same angle as previous years with the distortion of facts to fit that skewed narrative.”