It Is Netanyahu Who Is Trivializing the Nazi Holocaust, Not Lula da Silva

It is rather curious and bizarre for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to virulently and intemperately accuse Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio da Silva of “trivializing” the Nazi Holocaust, merely because Mr. Da Silva, popularly and affectionately known in his country as “Lula,” has dared to call a spade a spade by poignantly and appropriately characterizing the Israeli government’s authorized massacre of defenseless Palestinian residents on the Gaza Strip as being strikingly akin to the Hitler-authorized Nazi Holocaust in the 1930s (See Benjamin Netanyahu accuses 'shameful' Brazilian president Lula of trivialising Holocaust The Telegraph 2/18/24).

Israel’s angry response to President Da Silva, who made his very opportune observation while attending an African Union (AU) Summit in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, is at once unmistakably ironic and problematic, if also because such morally unwarranted conniption seeks to “trivialize” the estimated Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) slaughter of some 40,000 Palestinians as one lacking global relevance and sympathy, simply because the still-ongoing latter barbaric event comes in the wake of the October 7, 2023, surprise attack in southern Israel, widely alleged to have been staged by Hamas government-sponsored militants, which resulted in the deaths of some 1,200 Israeli citizens and residents, including dozens of foreign nationals.

For President Da Silva, who spent some time in prison on charges of official corruption, what has been routinely labeled as a War Between Israel and Hamas or Israel and the Palestinian People, for that matter, is absolutely no war at all but an unspeakable act of Nazi-type Genocide. “This is not a [conventional] war of soldiers against soldiers. Rather, it is a war between a highly prepared army [fully backed to the hilt by the foremost global Superpower] and [defenseless] women and children,” Mr. Da Silva told reporters on the sidelines at the AU’s Addis Ababa Headquarters. The 78-year-old Brazilian leader added that “What’s happening on the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian People hasn’t happened at any other moment. Actually, it has happened before: That was when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s swift response to his Brazilian counterpart lacks logical appeal, pertinence and moral gravity because absolutely in no way does Mr. Da Silva’s call for immediate exercise of restraint and ceasefire pose any harm to the Jewish People, as a livid Mr. Netanyahu contends, by preventing the State of Israel from fiercely defending itself as a sovereign nation. Now, what is crystal clear here is that for Mr. Da Silva it was more a question of “punitive proportionality” rightfully and surgically targeted than an indiscriminately targeted overkill response. More so, when the Palestinians practically lack a coercive and a highly organized national defensive capability and/or apparatus to formidably defend themselves.

It is also not clear precisely what he means, when Mr. Netanyahu rather blasphemously and imperiously asserts that any attempt to compare the still raging savage and wanton slaughter of Gaza-resident Palestinians “to the Holocaust of the Nazis and Hitler is [tantamount to] crossing a redline.” Precisely what is the veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces talking about or implying here? That, somehow, the humanity and the human rights and the dignity of the Palestinians are of far less relevance and significance compared to the Jews? This is the kind of Semito-Zionist racial and ethnic supremacy that we have been discussing for quite a considerable while now, that is, even well before the October 7, 2023, massive guerilla assault allegedly launched by the Hamas authorities, the same political establishment that was once staunchly backed and heavily armed by the Netanyahu-led Likud Coalition Government, according to reliable sources, against an increasingly autocratic State of Israel, strikingly akin to the Eternal Law of the Boomerang.

If, indeed, “a redline has been crossed” by Brazil’s President Da Silva, then what are we citizens of the so-called Civilized World really to make of the NATO-backed slaughter of defenseless Palestinian women and children, for the most part, by the Netanyahu-commanded Israeli Defense Forces? Are we to, somehow, envisage the IDF to have been dropping candies and other forms of goodies on the Palestinian residents on the Gaza Strip over the past six months, and absolutely nothing else? Maybe somebody from hereabouts or, more precisely, the Joseph R Biden White House had better promptly inform the 74- or 75-year-old former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations that it is high time he hung up his Neo-Nazi Political Boots and get thoroughly examined and treated by some high-end psychiatrists and/or clinical psychologists. I would gladly recommend one of my own Ivy-League educated nieces, a recent graduate of Columbia College and New York City’s John Jay College of the City University of New York, in effect, a freshly minted top-of-the-line clinical psychologist, for a heavily discounted healthcare provider’s fee.

You see, the more he gushes lunatically about “Israel fighting to defend itself and to ensure its future until total victory” is achieved, the more strikingly and eerily the career Israeli Prime Minister begins to sound like Hitler’s avatar or latter-day incarnation. He had better look himself up in the mirror, pronto! As for this baloney about “slaughtering the Palestinians while at the same time upholding International Law,” maybe only Mr. Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard University Law School Professor Emeritus and some say, Head of the Legal Wing of the Israeli-Taliban Likud Coalition Government of Mr. Netanyahu, could morally authenticate the same. “Agyimisem Kwa!” as the Akan-speaking Ghanaian people are wont to say.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]