Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) suffered a very unfortunate public setback during a Monday interview on CNN when she was called upon to suggest what the Israeli government was “supposed to do about Hamas.”
Speaking with Abby Phillip, AOC was questioned regarding letters the Congresswoman signed alongside other radical leftist Democrats demanding Israel enter a ceasefire after being mercilessly attacked on Oct. 7th.
As reported by The Daily Caller, Phillip asked Cortez, “What is Israel supposed to do about Hamas after they murdered, brutalized, abducted over a thousand of their citizens? Are they supposed to just do nothing?”
Cortez posited that within her proposed ceasefire, both Israel and Hamas would stand down, although recognizing that Hamas fired thousands of rockets into Israel at the outset of the conflict.
“What is important is for us to identify our goal in terms of what safety means, in terms of what defense means,” Ocasio-Cortez claimed.
The CNN host pushed Cortez, reiterating Israel’s stance as the party that was attacked without warning. “I think the position from Israel’s perspective is that there was already an attack, and Hamas already committed that attack,” Phillip asked.
“After that happened, do you really believe that they should not respond to that?”
The exchange quickly broke down into near apologetics from Cortez who regurgitated Hamas talking points of Israel’s actions being of “collective punishment” rather than a nation pursuing a defensive war against an enemy government that openly attacked it.
She suggested that Israel’s “blockade on water, food, electricity,” which the Jewish nation is under no obligation to provide to an aggressor government, is inappropriate. She also cited the use of white phosphorus, an area-effect anti-personnel weapon, as being inappropriate for “self-defense.”
“We should identify what our goal is, which is the cooling of tensions in the region,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“Israel’s goal is to rid the region of Hamas. They’ve been very clear about that,” Phillip observed.
The CNN host continued, “For Israel to deal with Hamas, which is a force that is actually detrimental to Palestinians, how else are they supposed to address a violent, militant, some say terrorist group, other than to go in there and take them on directly?”
While Cortez continued to claim that “Hamas needs to be dealt with,” she continued to not answer Phillip’s core question: “But ‘how?’ I think is what I’m trying to understand,” she asked.
However, AOC was clearly out of answers and couldn’t verbalize a viable approach. The very best she could come up with was to reiterate her writ-as-rote pre-assigned talking points, and instead punted to the Biden Presidency to lead on the situation rather than providing her own opinion. This is in spite of Biden already publicly “warning” Israel against a ground campaign, as if Washington, D.C. had the right to dictate policy to Jerusalem.
Ocasio-Cortez said, “And I think, what we’re trying to figure out right now is that this present situation of collective punishment and indiscriminate attack, is one approach and we are seeing the issues and the complications with that approach now. Can we target them in terms of intelligence? Is there precision? What are the options available, are entirely up to the administration and for Israel to examine and explore.”
