AOC vs Jack Kemp — Tibetans vs Soviet Jews

A weaponized immigrant mashup.

I came across a short speech that AOC gave on the House Floor this week in support of Tibetan freedom from China, and it reminded me of the speeches American politicians gave back in the 1970s and 1980s in support of Jewish liberation from the Soviet Union.

So I decided to do a quick mashup for comparison: AOC vs Jack Kemp.

Kemp was a New York Congressman, supply-sider, and an anticommunist who played a not-so-small role in the weaponization of Jews for America’s long war against the Soviet Union. Here he is giving a speech at the “Freedom Rally for Soviet Jews” in December 1987, where supposedly 200,000 people gathered to denounce communist barbarism — an event that had a live band and was headlined by Vice President (and former head of the CIA) George Bush himself.

Watching the two side-by-side, I gotta say that Jack Kemp does a much better job. Even though AOC clearly feels the need to play to her weaponized immigrant base, she just does not seem to have her heart in it. And I guess that’s a good thing — maybe she’s reluctant to take part in the US tradition of cynically and selectively using human rights concerns as a tool of empire. But I don’t want to be too optimistic here.

I mean, she did comically vote (along with Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio) for a law that would deploy earthly American sanctions to meddle in the heavenly reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. No joke!

“I was also proud to vote in support of the Tibet Policy and Support Act of 2019, which would establish as U.S. policy that the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama is a religious matter that should be decided solely by Tibetan Buddhists; specify that Chinese officials who interfere in the Dalai Lama’s succession process will be subject to Global Magnitsky sanctions; mandate that China cannot establish any new consulates in the U.S. until a U.S. consulate is established in Tibet; and authorize State Department programs for Tibetan cultural and environmental conservation,” she wrote in a statement released on the birthday of the Dalai Lama, a rent-a-saint who’ll work with and bless anyone — be they pathetic sex cults or oligarchic death lobbies — for a bit of cash.

The United States is a nation of weaponized immigrants. And so for AOC — like for many other politicians — domestic politics flow naturally into international politics. Is there really a line? The important questions is: What are AOC’s international politics?

—Yasha Levine

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Want to know more more? Read my series about forced Jewish migration to Israel: 

• Part One: A saved Soviet Jew goes to Israel

• Part Two: Soviet Jews and a Zionist Population Transfer Dream Deferred

• Part Three: Zionists, Palestinian kidnappers, and the forced migration of Soviet Jews to Israel.

There are also a few bonus installments:

• Soviet Jews who fled Israel back to the USSR

• How Israeli agents in America helped seed the myth of Soviet Jewish genocide

• “Soviet policy threatens the Jewish group with extinction”