Once Again Ocasio-Cortez Removes All Doubt; This Time With Her Lack Of Understanding Of Her Own Faith.

by
Julio Gonzalez, M.D., J.D.
 
 
It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt.
Mark Twain
 
 
Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continued her meteoric rise to being the most uneducated person in Congress by displaying her ignorance regarding the birth of Christ and the circumstances leading to his family's displacement to Bethlehem.  
 
 
On Christmas Day, Cortez wrote in a tweet: 
 
Joy to the World!
 
Merry Christmas everyone - here’s to a holiday filled with happiness, family, and love for all people. (Including refugee babies in mangers + their parents.)
 
A cute little tweet, except it is substantively wrong. 
 
Unless Ocasio-Cortez knows of some modern-day refugees whose babies are in mangers, it is safe to conclude that her reference to "babies in mangers + their parents" refers to Baby Jesus and the Holy Family.  There's only one problem with the reference: when Baby Jesus was asleep in the manger in Bethlehem, neither his family nor he were refugees.  
 
According to biblical scripture, Mary and Joseph traveled from Nazareth, where they lived, to Bethlehem in Judea to comply with a mandatory census.  Being that Joseph's family was from Bethlehem, he needed to present himself there with his family, in order to be counted.  The purpose of the census was to determine the taxes he would need to pay the Romans, which had recently annexed Syria and the area known today as Israel.  Consequently, the Holy Family had to travel to Bethlehem, not because they were refugees, but because they needed to comply with an unjust mandate from their own government.  
 
The fact is that none of this is relevant to modern-day immigration policy, but it is emblematic of the lies the left delivers to the uneducated and to the malleable youth in an effort to fool them into accepting its meritless arguments.  
 
In this case, the hope is that if some parallel can be drawn between the plight of the modern non-refugee migrants such as the ones trying to illegally enter our country from Central America and the plight of the Holy Family, then sympathy can be developed for their cause and perhaps they may be accepted as viable additions to American society.  
 
The problem is that the facts of Jesus's birth don't fit the scenario the left is trying to fabricate.  Jesus was not an immigrant. His family members were non-foreign travelers seeking shelter in a city inside their own country to comply with oppressive tax laws.  Indeed, if Ocasio-Cortez made any point in referring to the Holy Family, it is that we should be leery of her taxation plans lest we end up in some Arizona desert reporting our presence to the IRS.
 
Some have said that we should cut the undereducated and overly naive congresswoman-elect some slack because she was only wrong in the timing of the Holy Family's plight, as they, including Jesus, were actually refugees in Egypt just after his birth.  
 
But this too is wrong.
 
Christian scripture has the Holy Family fleeing Bethlehem to Egypt after Joseph received a message from an angel, via a dream, that Herod was aware of the birth of the King of the Jews and was planning on slaughtering all Jewish firstborns.  As a result of this dream, Joseph hurriedly took his family to Egypt.  
 
But both Egypt and Syria (to which Bethlehem belonged) were part of the Roman Empire.  So, although it is true that the Holy Family sought safety in a distant land, in point of fact, the place where they came to rest was still part of their same country.  So even if one considers the Holy Family’s status at the time of its Flight to Egypt, they were not international refugees, but rather displaced residents.  
 
Adding to the inconsistency of the analogy, Ocasio-Cortez fails to recognize that the Holy Family was fleeing the jaws of an oppressive regime.  The Holy Family did not travel to Egypt because they were looking for a better way of life, or because they were trying to seek economic improvement like the Central American migrants are.  Rather, they fled because the Governor of Syria was bent on decapitating their first-born son; a situation that if it existed today, the United States would offer asylum.  In fact, if Ocasio-Cortez really wished for the United States to play a sympathetic role for the refugees in situations like the one of which she speaks, she would simply have to do nothing because, as they say, we already got that.
 
Once again, I personally don't think the policies of ancient Egypt, Syria, and of the Roman Empire matter one iota to modern immigration policy.  The importance of this story lies in the fact that it exemplifies the falsehoods promulgated to our nation's youth by the left for the purpose of spreading its dogma.  As a matter of fact, although Ocasio-Cortez, in this case, acted as a promoter of lies, she is both young and naive, and it is very possible that she is one of very young who have been bamboozled by the left into believing their agenda despite the facts.  
 
If so, let us hope that someday Ocasio-Cortez can figure it all out.  In the meantime, she can start by looking things up before she tweets, otherwise, she should just stay quiet or risk continuing to remove all doubt.  
 
 
Dr. Julio Gonzalez is an orthopaedic surgeon and lawyer living in Venice, Florida. He is the author of The Federalist Pages and served in the Florida House of Representatives. He can be reached through www.thefederalistpages.com to arrange a lecture or book signing.
 
 

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