Arabic Text on AOC Campaign Flyer Is Disconnected, Printed Backwards

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put out a number of campaign flyers ahead of Election Day encouraging New Yorkers to go out and vote. The Democratic representative touted the flyers on X, formerly Twitter, writing that this year, her office’s “Get Out the Vote operation is organizing in [five] languages at once!”
But there was one glaring issue: the text on the Arabic flyers was full of mistakes.
The independent journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin first pointed out the mistakes, writing on X, “This flyer that team AOC made to get out the vote in Arabic is spelled backwards and the letters are not connected. Pure gibberish.”
Professor Taoufik Ben-Amor, the Gordan Gray Jr. Senior Lecturer in Arabic Studies at Columbia University, also confirmed to Newsweek that the flyer contained mistakes.
“The letters are disconnected and printed from left to right,” he said in an email.
Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet was deleted after the errors were pointed out.
Newsweek reached out to Ocasio-Cortez’s office for comment on the matter.
The New York congresswoman has been a fixture on the campaign trail to rally support for Vice President Kamala Harris from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
Appearing at a rally in Wisconsin with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders on Monday, Ocasio-Cortez skewered former President Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden, where the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe described Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”
“They knew exactly what they were doing,” said Ocasio-Cortez, who is of Puerto Rican descent. “Let’s dispense with this idea that this is a joke.”
“When we hear an individual, whether it’s Donald Trump or one of his cronies on a stage, talking about our fellow Americans as a pile of garbage, know that he’s talking about us, he’s talking about you,” she added.
Ocasio-Cortez has also acknowledged the dissatisfaction she and progressive voters have with Harris’ alliance with former Republican Representative Liz Cheney.
Harris’ decision to campaign with Cheney has drawn sharp rebuke from progressives — particularly Arab-American voters — who are critical of Cheney’s hawkish stance vis-a-vis the Middle East.
“I think there’s plenty of people that aren’t happy about that, and I think that is part of the nature of putting together a coalition,” Ocasio-Cortez said on CNN this week.
“I don’t love it, but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t on the same team, and we aren’t on the same page when it comes to who is unequivocally the better candidate in order to win the presidential election,” she said.