Colombian far-left President Gustavo Petro compared Israel to Nazi Germany in remarks on Monday, accusing it of turning Gaza into Auschwitz in a series of posts made on his personal Twitter account.
Much of the international community has condemned Petro’s statements. Petro is Colombia’s first-ever leftist president, a former member of the Marxist M19 guerrilla, and an outspoken critic of Israel. Under Petro, Bogotá has failed to condemn Hamas for its ongoing wave of terror targeting Israeli civilians, including infants and the elderly.
“No democrat in the world can accept that Gaza be turned into a concentration camp,” Petro commented on Monday morning, responding to the Israeli defense minister’s announcement of a military operation against Hamas.
Shortly afterward, Petro further commented on Israel’s decision to cut supplies such as water, food, and electricity to Hamas targets by writing, “this is what the Nazis said about the Jews.”
“Democratic peoples cannot allow Nazism to re-establish itself in international politics,” he continued. “Israelis and Palestinians are human beings subject to international law. This hate speech, if it continues, will only bring a holocaust.”
Hamas launched a large-scale terrorist invasion of Israel over the weekend that has claimed the lives of over 1,000 Israeli citizens and left thousands more injured at press time. Hamas, a genocidal Sunni radical Islamist terrorist organization, fired thousands of rockets into Israel and infiltrated the country by foot, kidnapping over 150 people from southern Israel. The terrorist organization has uploaded gruesome videos of murdered civilians onto Facebook using their profiles, as well as sharing general videos depicting the jihadists desecrating the corpses of their victims. Israeli soldiers reported on Tuesday that they found beheaded babies and gunned down families in their homes located in the southern Israeli town of Kfar Aza.
On Sunday, Petro claimed to have studied the Israeli-Palestine conflict since he was “very young” and to know the “immense injustice that the Palestinian people have suffered since 1948. Just as I know about the immense injustice that the Jewish people suffered from the Nazis in Europe since 1933.”
“If I had lived in Germany in 1933 I would have fought on the side of the Jews and if I had lived in Palestine in 1948 I would have fought on the Palestinian side,” Petro said. “Now the neo-Nazis want the destruction of the Palestinian people, freedom and culture. Now the democrats and progressives want peace and freedom for the Israeli and Palestinian people.”
Petro’s commentary, coupled with a failure to condemn Hamas’s terrorism, led to a brief exchange of messages with Israeli Ambassador to Colombia Gali Dagan in which the latter urged Petro to condemn Hamas.
In an interview given to Colombia’s Blu Radio on Monday, Dagan suggested Petro stop making comparisons between Gaza and a Nazi Germany concentration camp and invited him to visit Auschwitz.
“I would be happy to invite the honorable Mr. President [Petro] with me and we can travel to Israel,” Dagan said. “I invite him to visit the Yad Vashem museum. We can also make a little stop in Poland, visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, the Majdanek death camp.”
Dagan continued by expressing that Petro’s comparison between Gaza and a concentration camp was “terrible.”
“We Jews lost a third of our population in the Holocaust,” he commented. “It hurts me in the deepest way. Personally it is very hard, because these are comparisons that have nothing to do with reality.”
“If there is a people that can understand the mourning of terrorism, it is the Colombian people,” Dagan continued, referencing Colombia’s decades long fight against the Marxist National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) terrorist organizations – and groups such as Petro’s M19.
Petro responded to Dagan’s invitation claiming to have already visited Auschwitz “and now I see it mirrored in Gaza.”
Petro’s message prompted the President of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Dani Dayan to respond by identifying the Colombian president as the only world leader outside of Iran to so trivialize the Holocaust.
“President [Gustavo Petro], as president of Yad Vashem I affirm that you did not understand absolutely anything you saw in Auschwitz or you refused to see it,” Dayan’s message read. “You have the dubious honor of being the only world leader outside Iran to thus trivialize – indeed deny – the Holocaust.”
“Your comments here [on Twitter], and the others on your page completely ignore the hundreds of dead and kidnapped during Hamas’ murderous attack on Israeli civilians,” the organization’s message read. “This post is a shame to you and your country. A world leader should do better.”
Similarly, the Confederation of Jewish Communities of Colombia issued a statement on Sunday rejecting Petro’s “obstinacy” in refusing to condemn Hamas’ terrorist acts against Israel, adding that Petro’s recurring statements “seem to be justifying the actions of Hamas, its war crimes and crimes against humanity.
On Tuesday Morning, Petro posted a new, lengthly message on his Twitter account where he stated, “You can have all the Zionists speak in the press but here I am going to make another historical comparison.”
Pueden poner a todos lo sionistas a hablar en la prensa pero aquí voy a hacer otra comparación histórica.
Gaza aparece hoy tan destruida o más que el guetto de Varsovia después que como respuesta a la insurreción judía y socialista en ese campo de concentración fue destruido por… https://t.co/bSQWLZReD8
— Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) October 10, 2023
“Gaza today appears as destroyed or more so than the Warsaw ghetto after it was destroyed by Nazi barbarity in response to the Jewish and socialist insurrection in that concentration camp,” Petro claimed.
“140 Palestinian boys and girls have been bombed dead. They were not Hamas militants. Hamas and the Israeli right feed each other in blood,” he claimed. “Before our eyes, Western societies elected right-wing parties in their governments, scared by immigration, and those right-wing parties ended up supporting the Israeli extreme right, leading the world to a global 1933.”
Petro further states in his message that the “era of barbarism as I wrote in my book has begun.”
“Immigration will become an exodus given the European refusal to address democracy and peace as the axes of its foreign policy,” he predicted. “The government of Colombia supports the UN resolutions that advocate for two free states: one Israeli and the other Palestinian, recognizes the two states and requests the state of Israel to stop militarily occupying the Palestinian state.”
Last month, during his intervention at the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Petro asked, “what’s the difference between Ukraine and Palestine?” after asserting that the “same reasons that are expressed to defend [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky apply to Palestinians.”
At press time, Colombia has identified two missing citizens in the ongoing Hamas terrorism in Israel: Antonio Mesías and Ivonne Rubio, a Colombian couple attending the Supernova music festival in southern Israel.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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