AOC slams DeSantis for saying 'all Gazans are antisemitic': 'How incredibly destructive and dangerous that rhetoric is'
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pushed back against Ron DeSantis over his claim that "all Gazans are antisemitic."
- DeSantis said the US cannot take in Gazans because they don't "believe in Israel's right to exist."
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blasted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over his claim that "all Gazans are antisemitic," calling his rhetoric "incredibly destructive and dangerous".
In an interview with CNN on Monday, the third-term New York Democratic lawmaker said that: "we just had a six-year-old boy stabbed 26 times this morning because of rhetoric like that."
Ocasio-Cortez continued: "It is dangerous, it is unacceptable, it is reckless, and no leader in the United States of America should be amplifying a message like that."
During a meet-and-greet in Iowa on Saturday, DeSantis said that the United States should not take in any Palestinian refugees if they flee the Gaza Strip because they are "all antisemitic," according to the Association Press.
"I don't know what Biden's going to do, but we cannot accept people from Gaza into this country as refugees," he said, per AP.
DeSantis added: "I am not going to do that. If you look at how they behave, not all of them are Hamas, but they are all antisemitic. None of them believe in Israel's right to exist."
DeSantis' remarks were a sharp contrast to the public stance of US authorities, including some of his fellow Republicans, who distinguish between the goals of the Palestinian people and those of Hamas, AP reported.
This is not the first time Ocasio-Cortez has taken aim at some of her Republican colleagues for their stance on the Israel-Hamas war since Hamas' terror attacks on Israel on October 7.
In a post on X last Thursday, she accused Sen. Lindsey Graham of deploying "textbook rhetoric of ethnic cleansing" after he urged Israel to do "whatever you have to do to defend yourself" against Hamas.
Ocasio-Cortez also called for an "immediate" ceasefire and "urgent" de-escalation to save lives in a statement published on October 9, two days after the attacks.