Lula, the Patron Saint of Antisemitism in Brazil

Brazil awaits Sunday’s elections, the 4th, amid one of the worst moments in its history. Beyond the crises and scandals plaguing national politics, the country is living through a diplomatic darkness. It is also a moral and ethical darkness, in which the government of President Lula aligns itself with the most degenerate forces on the international stage.

Since November 15, 1889, when Brazil became a republic, no Brazilian president had ever been officially declared persona non grata by a foreign country — an unprecedented situation that came to define Lula da Silva in February 2024, when Israel classified him as such! Lula committed a blunder, as he placed Brazil in the position of international pariah, even though Israel took care to separate the Brazilian president from the country he governs.

In August 2025, Israel announced the downgrading of diplomatic relations with Brazil. The country withdrew its nomination of a new ambassador to Brasília after Itamaraty failed to respond to the request for authorization, and officially reaffirmed that Lula remains considered persona non grata.

After all, Lula and leaders of the ruling party and its allies openly condemn Israel as a “murderous state,” equating it with Nazism and accusing it of committing genocide in Gaza — a kind of imaginary Holocaust conjured by the current president and his followers. This abject declaration by the sitting head of state plunged the country into one of the gravest diplomatic incidents in our history, bringing us to the brink of a rupture in relations with Israel, and stems from the old communist trick of inverting the facts.

The terrorist group Hamas thanked the Brazilian president for his statements against Israel. In a message posted on Telegram, Hamas said it “appreciates” Lula’s words, having also congratulated him in 2022 on his election victory after he defeated Jair Bolsonaro in the runoff.

We cannot forget when Lula and his government adopted a position of hypocritical — and, in practice, impossible — neutrality in the face of the October 7 terrorist attack. While every democratic country in the world condemned, in forceful terms and without leaving any doubt, the crimes committed against Israel, Brazil remained neutral, for all practical purposes. On the surface, it laments the killings, but it leans in favor of the killers. It calls for “peace,” yet treats as understandable an attack involving thousands of rockets disguised as resistance, along with the kidnapping of children, women, and the elderly, the torture of hostages, and the massacre of civilians. That “neutrality” amounts to complicity with terrorism and a manifestation of old-fashioned Western antisemitism.

Lula has always been “a dream figure for the European intellectual politician”: the native who, like the indigenous peoples catechized by Jesuit missionaries five centuries ago, has been turned into an interlocutor who utters only politically correct sounds and serves the interests of Europe’s ideological, progressive establishment.

Lula’s “foreign policy” is defined by hostility toward the world’s great democracies and by association with dictatorial and autocratic regimes. Among this circle of friendships are representatives of Burkina Faso, Angola, Gambia, Equatorial Guinea, Cuba, China, Vietnam, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Jordan, Uzbekistan, and Iran. Among this select list, it is worth highlighting Ali Khamenei, Ebrahim Raisi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Muammar Gaddafi, Islam Karimov, Nursultan Nazarbayev, Blaise Compaoré, Bashar al-Assad, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, the FARC, and terrorist groups such as Hamas.

Lula’s ambition to cast himself as a great international leader is nothing new, but his image abroad is no longer as esteemed as it was during his first terms, from 2003 to 2011. Lula has made at least two unsuccessful attempts to position himself as a mediator of international conflicts. In the wars involving Israel and Ukraine, he shamefully downplayed the conflicts and attacked the very countries that were victims of aggression.

It is worth recalling that, driven by this fantasy of ruling the world and styling himself as a kind of Brazilian Nelson Mandela, Lula supported the case brought by South Africa against the State of Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), a United Nations body. Lula, together with his party, signed manifestos in favor of the “Palestinian cause” and lends support to Hamas’s domination of the Arab territories it controls through crime and terror. Lula embodies this political rot, which fuels this distortion of history — from antisemitism to ideological hatred of the State of Israel.

Following President Lula’s remarks and his stance comparing Israel’s actions in its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip to Hitler’s actions against the Jews during the Holocaust, reports of antisemitism in Brazil surged to record levels. Verbal attacks and discrimination against Jews, intensified by these public statements, underscore the urgency of concrete action to combat hatred and promote tolerance. Lula, therefore, has historically contributed to the rise of antisemitism in Brazil.

Ultimately, a warning for the 2026 elections: the Lula government’s foreign policy amounts, in practice, to nothing more than submission to an ideological agenda that places the country at odds with the nations that “got it right,” with concrete costs to Brazil’s image, security, and strategic interests. By systematically choosing the side of dictatorships and regimes hostile to the democratic West, Brazil would be renouncing its historic role and jeopardizing its future.

Lula has always been on the wrong side of history…

Shema Yisrael שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל