A viral video that surfaced Monday shows Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., lashing out at pro-Palestinian protesters who confronted her and her fiancé outside a movie theater in Brooklyn, N.Y. York.
“I need you to understand that this is not acceptable,” Ocasio-Cortez angrily told activists as they asked her to call the Israeli offensive in Gaza a “genocide.” The Democratic congresswoman appeared uncomfortable when activists approached her in public, but that's exactly what she called protesters to do just a few years ago.
“The whole point of protests is to make people uncomfortable,” Ocasio-Cortez said in December 2020 in a thread defending “defunding the police” from activists who had clashed with politicians in the space audience.
“What the activists' critics fail to understand is that they tried to play the political game of 'polite language' and that only made them easier to ignore. Only when “They made people uncomfortable that there was a desire to do SOMETHING, even if these were not all of their demands,” she argued at the time.
Pro-Palestinian protesters attack AOC outside movie theater and demand she call war between Israel and Hamas a “genocide”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was accosted outside a movie theater by pro-Palestinian activists. (FNTV)
“Activists embrace this discomfort with the status quo and advocate for concrete policy changes. Popular support often starts small and grows. For the people who complain, demands for protest make others uncomfortable… that’s the point,” she posted.
These messages have come back to haunt Ocasio-Cortez repeatedly in the years since, as she has complained when protesters targeted her at various events.
In the video that surfaced Monday, protesters with phones in hand are seen approaching the congresswoman outside the Alamo Drafthouse.
“It is not acceptable that there is a genocide and that you are not actively opposed to it,” one of the demonstrators told him.
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fiancé were confronted outside a movie theater. (FNTV)
“You lie!” Ocasio-Cortez fired back.
The video shows the protesters following her down the escalator, continually berating her for not calling the war a “genocide.”
“If you can't say it, just say it. Literally. We're talking to you like normal people. Just say it's genocide. Just say it. Over 30,000 people are dead, AOC. You don't Can’t you just say it. This for once?” shouts another protester, citing figures from the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza. “Just say the word, that's all. That's all we want you to say.”
The confrontation escalates as activists chase Ocasio-Cortez and her fiancé, Riley Roberts, outside the building. At one point, Roberts begs protesters to stop as they continue to follow the couple down the sidewalk.
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., speaks to the media outside the Thomas P. O'Neil Jr. House office building February 28, 2024, in Washington, DC. Ocasio-Cortez once defended protesters accosting people in public. , arguing that “the whole point of protesting is to make people uncomfortable.” (Jemal Countess/Getty Images for the Congressional Integrity Project)
One of the protesters asks if Ocasio-Cortez is worried her comments will “go viral.”
A visibly angry Ocasio-Cortez tells protesters they will cut the video so her comments are “completely out of context.”
She then appears to admit that Israel's actions constitute genocide.
“I already said it was. And you're just going to pretend it wasn't. Over and over again. It's fucked up man. And you're not helping these people. You're not helping not them,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Ocasio-Cortez has repeatedly condemned Israel's retaliation after the Oct. 7 massacre, in which Hamas militants killed 1,200 civilians, injured hundreds more and took about 250 hostages.
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She called for a ceasefire and suggested the United States “condition aid, otherwise cutting aid to the Netanyahu government. »
Just weeks after the October 7 attack, Ocasio-Cortez accused Israel of committing war crimeswhile specifying that she was not defending Hamas.
Bradford Betz of Fox News Digital contributed to this report.