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Good morning, dear readers.
“Some great journalists are determined to show that no debate or controversy on Twitter, now X, replaces flesh-and-blood stories; that the microcosm of the platform reverberating with echoes is not necessarily a faithful representation of anything. You’re right: In a world with almost 8 billion people, the fact that around 500 million users – mostly politicians, opinion makers and journalists – tweet about this or that doesn’t have much meaning in the real world in most cases. And what’s more: to tirelessly report on what so-and-so said in X is to fall into declarative journalism, the laziest aspect of the profession. However, sometimes there is no other option, and the trill undoubtedly becomes a novelty.
This has happened in Colombia in the last few days. We’re talking about little more than President Gustavo Petro’s tweets about the intensifying conflict between Israel and Palestine, while the stories happening in the fenced Gaza Strip, in Israel’s border areas and in the foreign affairs ministries are “significant” or at least relevant to the affairs of the countries involved . Since early Saturday morning, Hamas, the Islamist and terrorist group that controls the Gaza Strip, has launched a surprise attack on Israel in a highly coordinated exercise that killed hundreds of civilians and soldiers and abducted about a hundred more people. hostages and Israel’s subsequent response to Gaza, Petro published his opinion on X unfiltered.
“This Monday, for example: “I was in the Auschwitz concentration camp and now I see how it is being copied in Gaza,” the president wrote as part of an exchange with the Israeli ambassador to Colombia, Gali Dagan, who was angered by the position of the President. Or, put another way, on Tuesday, in response to a video showing an area of Gaza flattened by Israeli bombing: “You can get all the Zionists to speak in the press, but here I will make another historical comparison.” Gaza today appears to be destroyed, or even more so than the Warsaw Ghetto, having been destroyed by Nazi barbarism in response to the Jewish and socialist uprising in this concentration camp.
There were also numerous reactions to President Petro’s many tweets on this topic, of which this is only a very small excerpt. And the vast majority were negative. We can divide them into three aspects: those who accuse him of being anti-Semitic because he clearly positions himself against the State of Israel, those who accuse him of being pro-terrorist – citing his membership in the M-19 and his support for the peace process with the FARC, and those who simply criticize him for not clearly condemning the Hamas attack. The criticism is more or less well-founded and reasonable, depending on who is judging, but it increased this Tuesday when it became known that the Salafist group had shared a tweet from the president in one of its Telegram broadcast groups.
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But aside from the content of Petro’s trills, which also deserves attention, some accusatory responses were disproportionate and misplaced. On the one hand, as Petro himself has defended, his comments could at best be interpreted as anti-Zionist – a complex historical concept, but which in this context could be summarized as directed against what he sees as Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories. , which is not the same as anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic, although Petro is far from the only one to be accused of this based on his opinions on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. On the other hand, a comparison with the Colombian armed conflict is a poor attempt to derive political benefit from a human tragedy on the other side of the world, not to mention that it is based on little meaningful comparisons.
“Although the entire debate is full of simplifications that only cloud it, President Petro would do well not to use his trills so carelessly. His comments contradicted an official statement from the State Department that condemned Hamas’s terrorist actions without any nuance. After the President’s initial trills, the State Department deleted the text and replaced it with another in which this elementary condemnation no longer appears, putting national diplomacy in an uncomfortable position and affecting its institutional functioning. In addition, the president’s image outside of his closest circles is being damaged by his constant, unfiltered, controversial opinions on very sensitive facts.
And with this erratic behavior, his desire to be an international leader fades. One only has to look at the reaction of his friend and Chilean colleague Gabriel Boric, with whom he generally shares his reading of the situation, and who trilled diplomatically and confidently: “We condemn without any nuance the brutal attacks, murders and kidnappings of Hamas.” Nothing can justify it or put into perspective its most vigorous rejection. We also condemn the Israeli army’s indiscriminate attacks on civilians in the Gaza Strip and its decades-long illegal occupation of Palestinian territory in violation of international law. In pain there are no possible bonds, each event is a tragedy in itself. From Chile we will push firmly for peace in all spaces and recognize the right to exist of both states, Israel and Palestine, and of the peoples who inhabit them, to a dignified and secure life.” It is not that difficult.
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