Lula’s likening of Israel’s war to Nazi Holocaust is absurd | Opinion

It’s not uncommon for Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to make reckless statements about world affairs. But his recent comparison of the Nazi Holocaust, which killed more than 6 million

Jews, to Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas is a monumental display of ignorance that promotes antisemitism.

It has made Brazil’s leftist-populist leader come across as a new champion of anti-Jewish racism.

Speaking at the 37th African Union Summit in Ethiopia on Feb. 18, Lula said that “what is happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people has no parallel in other historical moments.” Then he added, “In fact, it did exist when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.”

Israel rightly accused Lula, 78, of trivializing the Holocaust and denying the country’s right to selfdefense. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Lula “has disgraced the memory of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and demonized the Jewish state like the most virulent antisemite.”

The Israeli government declared Lula “persona non grata” in the country and summoned the Brazilian ambassador in Israel to the national Holocaust museum in Jerusalem for a reprimand.

The Brazilian government stood by Lula’s statement and recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv for consultations. Two days later, the leftist presidents of Colombia and Bolivia expressed their solidarity with Lula’s comments about the “genocide” in Gaza.

To be fair, Lula, unlike the presidents of Colombia and Bolivia, and the dictators of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, has condemned the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack.

An estimated 1,500 Hamas members sneaked into Israel that day and killed more than 1,200 people, most of them civilians, including grandparents, babies and 250 youths attending a music festival. The terrorists also took more than 200 hostages back to Gaza, killed many of them in captivity and systematically raped women.

By some measures, it was the deadliest singleday attack on Jews since the 1940s Nazi Holocaust. Hamas had been firing rockets at Israeli cities in previous weeks, and has launched an estimated 12,000 rockets since at Israel’s territory since Oct. 7, Israeli officials say.

But, as much as I hate to agree with Netanyahu and