What Can Lula Be Thinking?

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva 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.What can he be thinking? How deluded can he be? How many of us have been told about gas chambers in Gaza that the IDF has set up with the Zyklon-B ready to be inhaled by Palestinians? How many have seen evidence of cattle cars into which thousands of Gazans have been stuffed, only to die by suffocation before the journey’s end? How many mobile killing vans, the Einsatzgruppen, did the IDF park outside Gaza City, and Khan Younis, and Rafah to conduct their murders? And where are those open pits in Gaza where IDF soldiers have been killing tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, each one dispatched with a shot to the back of the head, then toppling over — sometimes still alive — into the pit full of bodies, where eventually they will be covered over with earth? We haven’t, of course, seen any of those. But Lula da Silva knows. The IDF are “just like” the Nazis. They are committing a Holocaust in Gaza.

Lula 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.  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:

Lula made these statements in an interview with journalists at a hotel he was staying at in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The president was previously in Cairo, where he met with his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. The Brazilian daily newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported that the war in Gaza was the main topic of Lula’s five-day trip abroad.

Lula had already criticized Israel for its “disproportionate response” after the Hamas attack and said that the UN Security Council “cannot do anything in the war between Israel and [Hamas in] the Gaza Strip. The only thing it can do is ask for peace through the press, but it seems to me that Israel has the primacy of not complying with any decision made by the leadership of the United Nations.”…

Lula knows that the UN General Assembly has no enforcement mechanism; it can pass all the lopsided and venomous anti-Israel resolutions it wants, but these have no effect. Only the Security Council has the ability to enforce its resolutions, but in that forum the American veto has been repeatedly used to prevent those hideous anti-Israel resolutions from being adopted. Only once, in the waning days of the Obama administration, instead of a veto, did the US cast a “Present” vote instead of a veto, thereby allowing an anti-Israel resolution to pass.

Comparing Israel’s attempt to defend itself by trying to dismantle Hamas, after the worst massacre of Jews since World War II, to those who murdered six million Jews in the Holocaust, is grotesque. Does Lula not really know what is going on in the Gaza War, and which side is trying to minimize, and which trying to maximize, harm to civilians?

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “Accusing Israel of perpetrating a Holocaust is outrageous and abhorrent. Brazil has stood with Israel for years.” Gallant later accused President Lula of supporting Hamas – describing them as “a genocidal terrorist organization.” The minister also said that Lula “brings great shame to his people and violates the values of the free world.”…

Of course Lula supports Hamas. He’s a classic left-winger. America is the main enemy, but Israel is firmly in America’s camp, so it too must be anathematized. And the extraordinary charge Lula makes against the IDF, that it is behaving like the Nazis with the Jews, creating a Holocaust in Gaza, is so crazed that one must conclude Lula’s anti-Israel animus has developed into a full-blown case of that peculiar mental disease known as antisemitism.

Every major Israeli official has replied with appropriate horror and disgust at Lula’s remarks. Prime Minister Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Israel Katz, Defense Minister Yoav Galant, the Yad Vashem Chairman Danny Dayan have all denounced his “shameful words,” his accusations that are “outrageous and abhorrent,” his “perverse distortion of reality.” But Lula is unlikely to be fazed. He’s too far gone in his pathological condition. What began as run-of-the-mill far-leftist anti-Israel animus has blossomed into full-blown antisemitism, because only an antisemite could possibly describe the Israelis as Nazis who are committing a new Holocaust in Gaza. Israel will just have to endure his tenure, and hope that the pro-Israel João Bolsonaro, or someone who shares Bolsonaro’s pro-Israel views, defeats him in the 2026 election. By that year, Lula is likely, as a Marxist, to have run the Brazilian economy into the ground. Lula, remember, won his last election by the thinnest of margins: 50.9% against 49.1% for Bolsonaro. Hold tight, Israel. Meanwhile, make the most of your newly-elected best friend In South America, President Javier Milei, who can be seen on his recent visit to Israel here.