Brazil’s President Likens IDF War in Gaza to the Nazi Holocaust

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is the full name of the left-wing president of Brazil known commonly as Lula da Silva or simply Lula. He doesn’t much care for the United States. And he very much dislikes Israel. He does have a soft spot, unsurprisingly, for left-wing dictators, such as Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, Miguel Diaz Canel in Cuba, and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. He is famously corrupt, was involved in several major scandals, and in 2017 was given a 12-year prison sentence, but was freed after two years because one of the the judges in his case was an ally of Lula da Silva’s political enemies.

Now he’s made a statement on the war in Gaza that, in a decent world, would disqualify him not just for continuing as president of Brazil, but from any office, no matter how lowly, anywhere in the world. He has compared Israel to the Nazis and the IDF’s effort to destroy the terror group Hamas that carried out mass atrocities on October 7 to the Holocaust. More on these grotesque comparisons can be found here: “Brazil’s Lula compares Israel to Nazis, Gaza war to Holocaust,” by Gadi Zaig, Jerusalem Post, February 18, 2024:

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has compared Israel’s war against Hamas to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis’ extermination of Jews in the Holocaust on Sunday, Brazilian media reported.

“What is happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people does not exist at any other historical moment,” said the president.

What is happening in the Gaza Strip today is indeed without precedent, but not in the way that Lula appears to think. For in the hellishly difficult conditions of urban warfare, carried out in one of the most densely populated places on earth, one side — Hamas — has embedded its weapons, rocket launchers, command-and-control centers, and combatants in and among civilian structures, such as schools, apartment buildings, mosques, and hospitals, in order to use its own civilians as human shields. No other group, in the history of modern war, deliberately turns its own civilians into human shields and hopes that many of them will be killed so that their deaths can be exploited for the purposes of propaganda.

And what is also unprecedented is the extraordinary effort the IDF makes to minimize the civilian casualties in its enemy population. It does this by an elaborate system of warning civilians to leave certain areas (e.g. northern Gaza) it is about to target, and then to warn they away from individual buildings soon to be hit. The IDF has dropped 14 million leaflets, made two million prerecorded calls, and 72,000 personal calls, and in some cases used the “knock-on-the-roof” technique, to warn civilians away from certain buildings. Did the Nazis warn a single Jew to “escape”a roundup in the ghettos?

“In fact, it [the way that the IDF is killing Palestinians] existed when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.” The October 7 attack by Hamas, which killed over 1,200 people, has been reported as the “deadliest day for the Jews since the Holocaust,” as described by US President Joe Biden days after the attack and also by numerous Israeli officials and Jewish social media users.

The president stated that the deaths in Gaza are a “massacre” and a “genocide,” reports quoted him as saying.

There have been no “massacres” nor a “genocide” in Gaza. These words apply, rather, to what Hamas did at the Re’im dance party, and in the kibbutzim, with its unspeakable atrocities inflicted on Israeli men, women, and children. It was Hamas that beheaded babies, burned children to death, gang-raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered girls, sliced the breasts off women, gouged out the eyes and cut off the genitalia of men, and murdered children in front of their children and children in front of their parents. That is the “massacre,” that is the “genocide” committed not by the IDF, but by Hamas. The IDF intends always and everywhere to strike Hamas, not civilians. It recognizes however, that as in every other armed conflict, there will be unavoidable civilian deaths. The question is: does the IDF try to minimize those civilian deaths? Yes, it most certainly does, using every means available — leafleting, messaging, telephoning — to warn civilians to get out of harm’s way, even though those warnings will also be received by enemy combatants. As British Colonel Richard Kemp has said of this practice of warning civilians (and, unavoidably, enemy combatants too) “no other army in the world has ever done this.” Lula da Silva apparently is unaware of this practice by the IDF that has saved so many lives.