From M-19 to Hamas: President Gustavo Petro's fascination with terrorism

It should be no surprise that today when the terrorist group Hamas is killing Israeli children and women, the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, sides with the murderers.

Without context, this could be read as an abominable blunder, to say the least. How is it possible that someone could, in the context of the largest anti-Semitic attack since the Holocaust, side with the perpetrators? How is it possible that, while social media is filled with heartbreaking images of children kidnapped by Hamas, someone rallies against Israel?

Early Saturday began, in the south of Israel, what is far from over: Hamas invaded, surely taking advantage of some security flaw, Israel and, thus, started the first formal war since 1973. To date, more than 800 civilians have been killed by Islamic terrorism and more than 2,000 injured. Women raped, kidnapped, then murdered and their corpses displayed. Entire families massacred inside their homes. Kidnapped girls and who knows if what has already happened to them will happen to them under the clutches of Islamic barbarism. There is only terror and fear. And the world reacted indignantly, of course, condemning the savages. The world, almost all of it, except Gustavo Petro.

In a rather unhappy tweet, Petro said that Israel has always massacred children in Palestine, which is a lie. He talks about Israel's illegal occupation of Gaza, which is also a lie (it should be noted that Israel has not set foot in Gaza since 2005, and since then the Palestinians have done whatever they want in that land, instead of turning it into the Monaco of the Middle East, they have transformed into a miserable sewer from which only rockets escape). And he said, without shame, that Israel is like the Nazis because they have Gaza as if it were Auschwitz.

Thus, lightly, Gustavo Petro equates the State of Israel, which fights every day for its existence, with the Third Reich, which massacred Jews without discretion.

The World Jewish Congress responded very well to Petro's nonsense:

“What you are saying is an insult to the six million victims of the Holocaust and to the Jewish People. Your comments here, and the others on your page completely ignore the hundreds of dead and kidnapped during Hamas’ murderous attack on Israeli civilians. This post is a shame to you and your country. A world leader should do better.”

But, again, just without context some might be surprised. When you see Gustavo Petro defending a terrorist and bloodthirsty group like Hamas, it is impossible to forget that the President of Colombia has a historical relationship with terrorism: he himself was a member of the M-19, a Colombian terrorist group that in the 1980s carried out one of the worst attacks in Colombian history—the massacre at the Palace of Justice.

Of course, Petro feels a tremendous weakness for terrorism. His affinity for groups that kill many people forces him to smile when he reads in the press that far away in the Middle East, there are criminals slaughtering Jews. It's what Petro, when he was a boy, fantasized about: killing, killing, killing.