By Ray Cardello for December 27, 2023, Season 24 / Post 2

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez released her Christmas message, and she would have been better served to sit this one out. Cortez always tries to sound intelligent, but once you get past the gesticulations when she is orating on the house floor or dig into the words she has chosen on her online posts, her thinking is inaccurate or more emotional than factual.

Cortez went to X for this year’s message, and it reads:

“In the story of Christmas, Christ was born in modern-day Palestine under the threat of a government engaged in the mass genocide of innocents,” she wrote. “Thousands of years later, right-wing forces are violently occupying Bethlehem as similar stories unfold for today’s Palestinians, so much so that the Christian community in Bethlehem has canceled this year’s Christmas Eve celebrations both out of safety and respect.”

The entire story of Christmas and Christ himself is about standing with the poor and powerless, the marginalized and the maligned, the refugees and the immigrants, the outcast and misunderstood, without exception,” she wrote. “This high Christian holiday is about the precious sanctity of a family that, if the story were to unfold today, would be Jewish Palestinians.”

I cannot condemn Cortez for her lack of knowledge about the birth of Jesus or the difference between a Jewish and Palestinian person because religion was probably not a very common topic for discussion at Boston University or the bars where Cortez worked pouring beers. But as a U.S. Representative, you have an obligation to vet your comments and social media posts for accuracy. Obviously, Cortez has her staff prepare her statements and then applies her talents to reading them. It might help if she understood the words she is reading.

Mike Huckabee, the former Governor of Arkansas and ordained minister, did an excellent job of dissecting Cortez’s comments and exposing the misinformation involved.

• Jesus was a Jew
• The term Palestinian people meant Jewish people until 1962 when Arafat took the term and created a nation.
• She claims Bethlehem is preventing Christians from celebrating Christmas. Still, she fails to recognize that just forty years ago, Bethlehem was 80% Christians, and today, the region has flipped and is 80% Muslim and 20% other religions.

Cortez has shown in her two paragraphs that she lacks an understanding of the history of the Middle East, Jesus, the Jewish people, the State of Israel, or just about anything else that is a part of this story. The problem with that misuse of information is that Miss Cortez has 8.4 Million followers on Instagram, and many are easily influenced and believe everything elected officials say is, by default, the truth. Congresswoman Cortez may represent 170,000 people in New York, but she impacts millions. That influence makes content creators or users of X, Instagram, and TikTok dangerous. People with a significant online social presence are more potent than our politicians, and in the case of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they are one and the same.