Bolsonaro: Forgive crimes of the Holocaust, but don’t forget them
BRAZILIAN President Jair Bolsonaro has said he believes the crimes of the Holocaust can be forgiven, but should not be forgotten.
The far-Right leader was applauded when he made the comments during a meeting with evangelical pastors in Rio de Janeiro.
“We can forgive, but we cannot forget. That quote is mine. Those who forget their past are sentenced not to have a future,” Mr Bolsonaro said, adding that action was needed if the Holocaust was not to be repeated.
Mr Bolsonaro visited the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem alongside Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, on April 2. During that trip, the Brazilian leader labelled Nazism a Leftist ideology, a claim that has been rejected by historians.
More than six million Jews were killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.
Mr Bolsonaro has had ups and downs in his relationship with Brazil’s Jewish community. In 1998, as a federal deputy in the country’s congress, he defended students at a military school in the southern city of Porto Alegre who voted for Adolf Hitler, among other figures, as the character in history that they admired the most.
“They have to choose knew, in one way or another, how to impose order and discipline,” Mr Bolsonaro said at the time, adding that he did not agree with the atrocities committed by Hitler’s Nazi regime.
Official figures estimate the number of Jews in Brazil to be 120,000, corresponding to 0.06 per cent of the South American country’s population.
The American Museum of Natural History in New York said on Friday that it was considering its options after discovering a function booked to take place there would honour Mr Bolsonaro. The museum is the venue for an annual party organized by the Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce, where Mr Bolsonaro will be one of the people receiving awards this year.
“We are deeply concerned,” the museum wrote on Twitter, the day after the president’s comments.
Mr Bolsonaro has also taken a series of measures criticised by environmentalists, including several that transfer control of key policy areas from the environment ministry to Brazil’s agriculture department.