B’nai B’rith Latin America describes as unacceptable, shameful and scandalous the statements offered by the president of the Federative Republic of Brazil, Mr. Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva, where he pointed out that “what is happening in Gaza with the Palestinian people has not precedents in history. In fact, it happened when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.”

The words of President Lula Da Silva, offered during the 37th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of the African Union at its headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, are hurtful, represent a trivialization of the Holocaust and desecrate the memory of the Six Million Jews murdered by Nazism and its collaborators during the Second World War, while ignoring the responsibilities of the Palestinian terrorist groups who, breaking the current ceasefire, invaded the south of Israel on October 7, 2023, perpetrating the largest massacre of Jews since 1945, along with the rapes, mutilations, beheadings and kidnappings that triggered the war between Israel and the aforementioned terrorist groups that use the civilian population of Gaza as human shields.

With his words, the Brazilian president divorces his country from his intentions to become a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, IHRA, standing on the side of countries like Iran or organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah that justify the global murder of Jews.

Brazil played an important role during World War II by adding its expeditionary force to the Allied side in the liberation of Italy, a campaign in which the Jewish Brigade of the Land of Israel also participated, both paying a high price for the freedom of the world. It is our hope that Mr. Lula Da Silva reconsiders and learns from his mistakes, returning to the level of world statesmen who firmly yearn for peace, condemn acts of terrorism and do not deny friendly countries to exercise the right to defense enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations.

Read the statement as a PDF here.