If there’s one thing that socialist President of Brazil Lula da Silva lovers more than anything, it’s the sound of his own voice.
Time and again, he gets into hot water for his public manifestations, often on issues that are NOT in Brazil’s strategic interest.
After he burned his tongue with Russia and China by ad-libbing ‘creative solutions’ for the Ukraine war, Lula started to toe the Kremlin line on most, if not all, geopolitical themes of the day.
While the Western world was assembled for the Munich Security Conference, Lula was in Ethiopia for a summit of the African Union – an organization that, needless to say, South American Brazil is not a part of.
So, Lula decided that he needed to weigh in on the state of the war in the Middle East. There is absolutely NO UPSIDE for Brazilian diplomacy and national interest for the President to get caught in this maze of controversial assessments.
Needless to say, 87% of the reactions to Lula’s verbal diarrhea on social media were negative.
— Paul Serran (@paul_serran) February 19, 2024
The inevitable consequence of Lula wanting to hear the sound of his own voice and click-baiting the planet is that Israel harshly condemned him after he accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and compared its actions to the Holocaust.
Israel’s foreign minister described Lula’s comments as anti-Semitic, and the main Jewish organization in Brazil also criticized Lula’s comments.
BBC reported:
“Speaking from an African Union summit in Ethiopia, Lula said: ‘What is happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people has no parallel in other historical moments. In fact, it did exist when Hitler decided to kill the Jews. […] It’s not a war of soldiers against soldiers. It’s a war between a highly prepared army and women and children’.”
His latest comments come as Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pressing ahead with an offensive in Rafah, to where some 1.5 million people have fled.
“‘We will not forget nor forgive’, Israel’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz said in response. ‘The comparison between Israel and the Holocaust of the Nazis and Hitler is crossing a red line’, he said in a statement.”
Times of Israel reported:
“Foreign Minister Israel Katz, the son of Holocaust survivors, takes Brazil’s Ambassador Federico Mayer to Israel’s Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem to reprimand him over Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s comparison of Israel’s campaign against Hamas to the Holocaust.
In front of the cameras, Katz tells Mayer that Lula is not welcome in Israel. ‘We will not forget nor forgive. It is a serious anti-Semitic attack. In my name and the name of the citizens of Israel – tell President Lula that he is persona non grata in Israel until he takes it back’.
‘I brought you to a place that testifies more than anything else to what the Nazis and Hitler did to the Jews, including members of my family’, says Katz. ‘The comparison between Israel’s just war against Hamas, and the atrocities of Hitler and the Nazis, is a shame’.”
Read more:
RIDICULOUS: Brazilian Communist President Lula Attacks Israel Again and Downplays Hamas Terrorism