Brazilian education minister
with Jewish roots in the Bolsonaro administration was criticized by the Israeli
government and Jewish groups for comparing police investigation raids against
allies to Nazi persecution against Jews
By Julio Severo
Brazil’s education minister drew criticism
from the Israeli government and Jewish groups in the U.S. and Brazil for
likening Federal Police raids against allies of the Brazilian President Jair
Bolsonaro to Kristallnacht — the beginning of the Nazi persecution against Jews.
 |
| Abraham Weintraub |
“Today was the day of infamy, national
shame, and it will be remembered as the Brazilian Night of the Broken Glass,” tweeted on May 27, 2020, Abraham Weintraub, whose Jewish
paternal grandparents fled the Nazis.
“They desecrated our homes and are
suffocating us. Do you know what the great oligarch/socialist press will say?
SIEG HEIL!” continued the minister in his tweet, adding a picture that shows
the boycott to Jewish stores in Germany in 1933.
Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken
Glass, refers to the 1938 Nazi persecution marking as the beginning of the
Holocaust.
Weintraub was born to a Catholic mother
and a Jewish father whose family members were killed in Nazi concentration
camps. He is usually mistaken as Jewish due to his name, but, according to the
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, he does not identify as a Jew.
Jewish organizations in the U.S. and
Brazil harshly criticized his comments.
“The comparison is totally unreasonable
and inopportune, unacceptably minimizing those terrible events, the beginning
of the Nazi march that culminated in the death of 6 million Jews,” said Fernando Lottenberg, president of the Brazilian
Israelite Confederation, the most important Jewish organization in Brazil.
“Enough is enough! The repeated political
weaponization of Holocaust language by Brazilian government officials is
profoundly offensive to world Jewry and an insult to the victims and survivors
of the Nazi terror. It needs to stop immediately,” tweeted the American Jewish Committee, the most important
Jewish organization in the U.S.
Even though the Bolsonaro administration
is an ally of Israel, especially because evangelicals, Bolsonaro’s most
important political base, are traditional supporters of Israel, the Israeli
government also criticized Weintraub’s comparison.
The consul general of Israel in São Paulo,
Alon Lavi, said:
“The Holocaust, the greatest tragedy in
modern history, where 6 million Jews, men, women, elderly and children were
systematically murdered by Nazi barbarism, is unprecedented. This episode can
never be compared to any political reality in the world.”
With the same critical tone, the Israeli
Embassy in Brazil issued a statement:
There was an increase in the frequency of
use of the Holocaust in public discourse, which unintentionally trivializes its
memory and also the tragedy of the Jewish people, which ended with the extermination
of 1/3 of our people out of hatred and ignorance of the Nazis and their
collaborators.
In the name of the strong friendship
between our countries, which has grown more and more for 72 years, we demand the
question of the Holocaust as well as the Jewish people or Judaism to be left
out of the daily political dialogue and the disputes between the sides in the
ideological game.
This is the first time that Israeli
diplomats have publicly criticized the Bolsonaro administration. Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Brazil to participate in the inauguration
of the Brazilian president in 2019. At the time, Netanyahu
said: “We have no better friends in the world than the Evangelical
community, and the Evangelical community has no better friend in the world than
the State of Israel.”
There were also other conflicts between
Jewish groups and the Bolsonaro administration. In April 2020, the American
Jewish Committee demanded an apology from Foreign Affairs Minister Ernesto
Araújo, who compared social isolation to contain COVID-19 to Nazi concentration
camps. It was an unreasonable comparison, as even Israel used social isolation
to contain COVID-19.
Weintraub’s comparison was made after on May
27, 2020 Brazil’s federal police held search and seizure warrants against several
allies of President Bolsonaro as part of an investigation about threats to
Supreme Court’s ministers and the spread of fake news.
Were the political allies worthy of Weintraub’s
comparison? The actions of the Brazilian federal police affected several individuals,
including Sara Winter, Allan dos Santos and Bernardo Kuster.
Sara Winter became internationally known
after LifeSiteNews, the most important international Catholic pro-life website,
published a 2015 report on her, presenting her alleged conversion to
Catholicism. The report
said,
Sara Fernanda Giromini first made herself
known to Brazil and to the world under the alias “Sara Winter” in 2012, when
she became the founding member of Femen Brazil, and led a trio of girls in a
number of topless protests that garnered much media attention. However, only
three years later, the young activist has done an about-face and has declared war
on feminism and abortion, and is apologizing to Christians for her offensive
behavior.
She continues using her nickname, Sara
Winter, which is the Portuguese form for “Sarah Winter,” a British Nazi supporter
and member of the British Union of Fascists.
In a May 27, 2020 video, Sara said that
she would like to “exchange punches” with a Supreme Court minister and stated
that this minister “will never again have peace in his life.” She said:
You wait for me, Mr. Alexandre de Moraes.
You will never have peace in your life again. We are going to make your life
hell, we are going to find out the places you go to, we are going to find out who
are the maids who work for you… We are going to find out everything in your
life until you ask to leave. Today you made the worst decision of your life.
Sara Winter is the leader of the self-titled
group “300 do Brasil” (300 of Brazil), who camped in front of the Brazilian
Supreme Court. The group, whose members wear camouflage clothing similar to
Army clothing and carry weapons, has already been called an “armed militia” by
the Federal Prosecutor’s Office of the Federal District and Territories. It
resembles a paramilitary group.
 |
| Sara Winter |
In an interview with the BBC’s Portuguese
news service in London, Sara said the presence of weapons in her camp is “for
the protection of the members themselves.” The BBC said:
Sara Winter likes to publish photos
holding guns and says on social media that she “shoots very well.”
She has given several versions for the
“300 of Brazil.” She says it was Olavo de Carvalho’s idea, who is her guru. She
also says, perhaps to please different groups, that the name was chosen based
on the “300 of Gideon,” from the Old Testament in the Bible. She also says it
was based on the “300 of Sparta.”
Sara has also given other explanations for
a tattoo on her shoulder of an Iron Cross, a Germanic symbol that became
popular during the Nazi regime and was the main Nazi decoration of war. Sara
says that the tattoo was a tribute to the “Knights Templar of the Middle Ages,”
but German researcher Carina Book has confirmed that it is the Iron Cross.
About the “300 of Brazil” camp in front of
the Supreme Court, she said: “Who asked me to do all this was Professor Olavo.”
It is no surprise then that on May 28,
2020, Olavo asked for the death penalty for the minister who requested the
Federal Police’s action against Sara and others. But if he defends the death
penalty for the minister who seeks to take away Sara’s right of speech, then
why is he
the greatest denier of the Inquisition in Brazil? The Inquisition took from
its victims not only their right of speech, but also their property and lives.
In the training sessions promoted by Sara
for her “300 of Brazil,” photos and videos are prohibited and adequate clothing
is required for physical combat training.
 |
| Sara Winter with her skull mask, according to the journalist website A Publica |
In a photo of “300 of Brazil,” Sara Winter
appears with other militants, wearing a skull mask. The mask is very popular in
Europe and the United States among neo-Nazis. “The skull mask has become a
universal fascist aesthetic,” journalist Jake Hanrahan wrote on Twitter.
 |
| Neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division and its skull masks |
In the film “A Vida de Sara” (Sara’s Life),
a biographical documentary produced by the Lumine platform, dubbed
“Conservative Netflix,” Sara Winter says that FEMEN sent money so she could be
trained in Ukraine and take this training back to Brazil.
In the movie, Sara says that she has already
prostituted herself and she appears shooting and handling firearms.
Such a picture seems problematic for the
image of conservative Christians who fight against the abortion and
homosexuality agenda.
Among the supporters of “300 of Brazil”
are Terça Livre journalist Allan dos Santos and psychiatrist Ítalo Marsilli,
who declared in one of his videos that women should not be allowed to vote
because they are easy to seduce. He said:
“In Greek democracy, the only one in the
world that worked, women were not expected to vote. When the vote becomes full,
that is, women and everyone else can vote, you see that there is a crisis in
the state’s governance. It is very easy for you to convince a woman to vote,
you just have to seduce her.”
On Netanyahu’s next visit to Brazil, he
should give a copy of this book to each member of the Bolsonaro administration.
Some of them, who follow Carvalho, believe that the Inquisition was a lie,
although it also tortured and killed Jews in Brazil.
By its very nature, the occult brings
chaos.
Despite reprimands from the Israeli
government and Jewish organizations in the U.S. and Brazil, Education Minister
Abraham Weintraub did not back down in his comparison. In fact, he defended it,
in the name of free speech. He said in a
tweet of May 28, 2020:
Do not speak on behalf of all Christians
or Jews in the world. I SPEAK FOR ME! I had Catholic grandparents and surviving
grandparents from the Nazi concentration camps (photo). All were Brazilian. I
HAVE THE RIGHT TO SPEAK ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST! I don’t need any more people
attacking MY FREEDOM!
Yes, he has a right to talk about the
Holocaust. But since he has grandparents who survived the Holocaust, why doesn’t
he condemn the signs of fascism in the movement he is supporting?
If Weintraub knows how to confront Israel
and the Jews in his stubborn stance comparing the Holocaust with the actions of
the Federal Police against Sara Winters and other Carvalho supporters, why does
he not know or cannot confront Carvalho about the Inquisition? Why doesn’t he
know how to confront the signs of fascism and occultism in Carvalho and his adherents?
Why doesn’t Weintraub question and
confront this?
And regarding his defense of free speech,
is this defense total or limited? In 2019, using lies and slander, Olavo
de Carvalho, considered Bolsonaro’s Rasputin, called for the Federal Police
to investigate me, in a blatant desire to see the state machine silencing my
voice and my evangelical articles against the occult and the Inquisition. You
can check everything here: http://bit.ly/2CPK0tX
At the time, Weintraub said nothing
against Carvalho’s dictatorial desire to censor me.
But today Weintraub, confronting Israel
and Jewish groups, speaks out against the Federal Police acting against an activist
who has a Nazi surname and was trained in Ukraine by groups funded by George
Soros.
Weintraub also defended Terça Livre, a channel
that defends the Inquisition and has already attacked, cursed and defamed me.
Is the free speech that Weintraub
advocates for everyone or only for those using Nazi nicknames and for those cursing
and slandering?
How would an evangelical writer be in this
defense? I don’t know, because when Carvalho called for the Federal Police
against me, I didn’t see Weintraub defending free speech. But his brother,
Arthur Weintraub, who also has an important position in the Bolsonaro administration,
when he came across my tweet criticizing Carvalho, blocked me on Twitter.
For them, even Israel can be confronted.
But criticizing Carvalho, the advocate of the Inquisition, is unacceptable.
Weintraub seeks to defend against the Supreme
Court Sara and others in the pure logic of free speech, but are not the armed behavior
of Sara’s group and her use of symbols so linked to fascism enough red flags that
her threats may eventually become violent?
There are three phases in Sara’s history
over the past ten years. She was linked to FEMEN in the early 2010s. By the
middle of that decade, she was already apparently changed, becoming a pro-life
Catholic personality on LifeSiteNews. And there is the most recent Sara, who is
connected to Olavo and training a group that has paramilitary characteristics.
This is a Sara who wears a fascist mask, swears, uses weapons and threatens
ministers of the Supreme Court.
How does not Weintraub confront this, but
confronts the Israeli government and Jewish organizations? How does he view this
as mere opinion, not as danger signs?
With information from Jewish Telegraphic
Agency, Notícias R7, Istoé, Yahoo, CONIB, Correio Braziliense, Estado de Minas,
A Publica, BBC, LifeSiteNews, Revista Forum and UOL.
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