At the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in downtown Brooklyn on Monday afternoon, a group of protesters confronted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, demanding that the left-leaning House member call the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza a genocide.
A video of the encounter begins with the protesters and Ocasio-Cortez inside the theater lobby. “You refuse to call it a genocide,” one of the protesters said.
“I need you to understand that this is not okay,” Ocasio-Cortez replied.
“It’s not okay that there’s a genocide happening and you’re not actively against it,” a protester said. Ocasio-Cortez replied that the person was “lying.”
“If you can’t say it, just say it. Literally. We’re just talking to you like normal people. Just say it’s a genocide. Just say it. Over 30,000 people are dead, AOC. You can’t just say it for once?” another protester said.
The video then cuts to Ocasio-Cortez walking away outside. A protester asks if the congresswoman is worried that the video will go viral. “You’re going to clip this so that it’s completely out of context,” Ocasio-Cortez replied.
AOC then suggests that she had previously called the Israeli bombing and military actions in Gaza — which have reportedly killed over 30,000 Palestinians — a genocide. “I already said that it was, and y’all are just gonna pretend that it wasn’t over and over again,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “It’s fucked up, man. And you’re not helping these people, and you’re not helping them. You’re not helping them.”
On Meet the Press in January, Ocasio-Cortez did not explicitly label the Israeli bombing a genocide, referring to an interim ruling by the United Nations’ International Court of Justice that Israel must do all in its power to prevent a genocide. “But in the interim ruling, the fact that they said there’s a responsibility to prevent it, the fact that this word is even in play, the fact that this word is even in our discourse, I think, demonstrates the mass inhumanity that Gazans are facing,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
