In a very extensive interview yesterday with RedeTV! Brazilian President Lula da Silva went into detail about his Feb. 18 remarks at the African Union summit in Ethiopia, in which he likened Israel’s actions against the Palestinians in Gaza to Adolf Hitler’s mistreatment of the Jews. Noting that Lula’s remarks had “enormous repercussions,” interviewer Kennedy Alencar observed that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had demanded a retraction, and asked Lula whether, if he could go back in time, he would have said things differently.
Lula responded: “I would say the same thing, because that is exactly what is happening in the Gaza Strip. People can’t be so hypocritical as to think that one death is different from another. You don’t have in Gaza one highly-trained army fighting against another highly-trained one. What you have, in fact, is a war of a highly-trained army against women and children. Out of 6,000 wounded you have 30,000 dead.… How many Hamas dead have been discovered?”
Lula explained that he never used the word “Holocaust” in his remarks to the AU in Addis Ababa. That was Netanyahu’s interpretation, when he accused Lula of “trivializing the Holocaust.” He also reminded his interviewer that Brazil was the first country to condemn Hamas’s terrorist attack on Oct. 7. “The first country, but I can’t condemn Hamas’s terrorist action and then watch the State of Israel commit the same barbarity against innocents through its army and its Prime Minister.” That is, he said, “what are we calling for?” Stop the shooting, let food, medicine, doctors and nurses come in; set up a humanitarian corridor.
