“She is trying to grift Arab vote but clearly doesn’t have a single Arab on her staff.”
By Vered Weiss, World Israel News
Progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in an apparent attempt to court the Arab vote, published a flyer with Arabic words written backward.
AOC proudly posted the flyer on her X account, boasting, “Get Out the Vote operation is organizing in [five] languages at once!”
However, it was apparent Arabic speakers and readers did not proofread the flyers.
Independent journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin was one of the first on X to comment on the egregious errors in the Arabic text.
“This flyer that team AOC made to get out the vote in Arabic is spelled backwards and the letters are not connected. Pure gibberish,” he wrote.
Professor Taoufik Ben-Amor, the Gordan Gray Jr. Senior Lecturer in Arabic Studies at Columbia University, emailed Newsweek describing the errors, and said, “The letters are disconnected and printed from left to right.”
“I can read Arabic so this is giving me severe psychic damage but I like to think that people who can’t can at least see how wrong this looks? Like it is very very obviously not how Arabic looks even if you don’t understand the language,” read one response.
“No f***ing way,” one pro-Palestinian poster wrote, “She is trying to grift Arab vote but clearly doesn’t have a single Arab on her staff. Or even Central/South Asian cuz even they could’ve pointed out the glaringly obvious error here.”
AOC deleted the flyer as soon as the mistakes were pointed out.
The error was apparently caused by a graphic designer who arranged the text on the image without making sure the letters were in the right direction.
AOC is one of Israel’s harshest critics in Congress and often presents herself as an advocate for the Palestinian cause.
Last December, AOC said Jesus was Palestinian and added that the war in Gaza was similar to his execution at the hands of the Romans.
“Christ was born in modern-day Palestine under the threat of a government engaged in a massacre of innocents,” she wrote in part in her Instagram story. “He was part of a targeted population being indiscriminately killed to protect an unjust leader’s power. Mary and Joseph, displaced by violence and forced to flee, became refugees in Egypt with a newborn waiting to one day return home.”
The congresswoman, long known for her anti-Israel views, then blasted the Jewish state as “right-wing forces” that “are violently occupying Bethlehem as similar stories unfold for today’s Palestinians.”