The president of Venezuela backed the assessment of the Gaza conflict made by his Brazilian counterpart Lula da Silva

FILE PHOTO. President of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro. ©  Getty Images / Carlos Becerra

Modern Israel enjoys “the same encouragement, the same funding, and the same support” of the collective West like Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany before the World War II, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has said.

The president made the remarks on his own TV program With Maduro Plus, backing the assessment of the situation in the Middle East provided recently by his Brazilian counterpart Lula da Silva.

“Powerful family names in the US, Europe and London supported and celebrated Hitler’s arrival to power in 1933. They encouraged him and allowed him to persecute my Jewish ancestors,” Maduro stated. The president made public his Jewish ancestry back in early 2010s, revealing his grandparents were Sephardic Jews who converted to Catholicism.

 

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The Western elites “kept quiet because they were preparing Hitler for him to launch his military power against the Soviet Union,” Maduro explained, stressing that, ultimately, Hitler was “a construct, a monster” created by the collective West.

Modern Israel has turned into the very same thing, the president asserted, urging Jewish people who are still true to their roots to end the ongoing “massacre” of the Palestinians.

“The criminal military apparatus of the State of Israel also has the same encouragement, the same funding, and the same support” of the West, Maduro stressed. “As President Lula da Silva said, the Israeli government is doing the same thing [to the Palestinians] that Hitler did to the Jewish people.”

Brazil’s da Silva delivered the explosive remarks over the weekend, describing Israel’s military action against Hamas militants in Gaza as “genocide” and “slaughter.”

 

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“What is happening in the Gaza Strip and with the Palestinian people did not exist at any other historical moment. In fact, it did exist: when Hitler decided to kill the Jews,” he stated.

The remarks got an extremely poor reception in Israel, with multiple top officials expressing their outrage over his Holocaust comments. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu slammed the Brazilian president’s words as “shameful and serious,” warning they were “crossing a red line.”

Ultimately, the Brazilian president was declared persona non-grata in Israel altogether, with the country’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz warning West Jerusalem “will not forget nor forgive” the alleged “serious anti-Semitic attack” by Lula, urging the leader to take his words back. Brasilia, however, has apparently rebuked the criticism, with Lula’s chief adviser Celso Amorim describing the move of declaring the president persona non grata as “absurd.”