The Real Boys (And Girls) From Brazil

In 1976 a novel came out by author Ira Levin. It was called The Boys From Brazil.

Most of us are familiar with it through the 1978 film incarnation. Starring Laurence Olivier, Gregory Peck and James Mason. It is about a Nazi hunter (based loosely on Simon Wiesenthal) who gets a tip that Josef Mengele is alive and well in Brazil. He eventually discovers that Mengele is planning to murder 95 men, all aged 65. Why? Because each has an identical son, a clone of Adolph Hitler, that Mengele had genetically engineered years earlier. He planned to activate the clones to create a new, “Fourth Reich.”

The “boys” in question are obviously the young Hitlers.

Almost 50 years later, while we still can’t produce the technological clones, something far more nefarious has produced a growing cadre of ideological clones.

Boys & girls from Brazil.

I have always disdained lazy Nazi/Hitler comparisons. But post-October 7, sadly, we are in a new era, and I think the analogy is accurate at this point.

If we use the timeline of the Shoah as a guide, we’re easily in 1933 as a newly elected Hitler, and his allies, are transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship. During that time the notorious “Nuremberg Laws,” as well as dozens of other pieces of legislation, are being passed (“democratically”) to marginalize, and “other” Jews, effectively blaming us for every societal ill, and eventually transforming us from German citizens to total outcasts within German society.

By 1938 that “othering” created the climate in which Kristallnacht occurred. That paved the way for the “Einsatzgruppen,” the concentration camps, the Wannsee conference, and then the death camps.

By 1945, six million Jews were murdered, including 1.6 million precious Jewish children. Two out of every three European Jews were murdered, as we lost more than 1/3 of the entire global Jewish population. It was an actual genocide: one that our global numbers have still not recovered from.

Around the world today, there is a relentless parade of incidents which prove that we must act to ensure that 1933 doesn’t become 1945.

A recent episode screaming “1930s” is the revelation that Israelis are being arrested in Europe once again: just for being Jews. Of course, the claim today is that “Zionists” were targeted, not Jews – which is obviously absurd and false (note to Jew haters: I am a proud Jewish Zionist, and will forever say so publicly).

As the Times of Israel reported in July:

“Two Israelis were briefly detained and questioned by Belgian police while attending the Tomorrowland music festival in Belgium, after a complaint was lodged against them by the Hind Rajab Foundation.”

The “Hind Rajab Foundation” was created specifically to harass Israeli Jews. The two men “detained” in Belgium were accused of waving an IDF flag at the music festival they were there to attend. The group referred the “complaint” to the prosecutor’s office, and the men were promptly arrested. That they were also released is immaterial – Jews were arrested merely for expressing pride in the Jewish nation.

While it was England and not Belgium, there were zero consequences when chants of “death, death to the IDF” were chanted by performers (who shall remain nameless here) and the crowd at a music festival in Glastonbury.

Also in Europe and earlier in July, Ireland passed a bill banning all goods produced in Judea and Samaria. It referred to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem, as “settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” Ireland recognized a “Palestinian” state in 2024. In 2026 it became the first member of the European Union to enact a ban on Israeli goods.

It is hoping to motivate countries across Europe to act similarly and is now in the same company as Arab nations who have carried out anti-Israel boycotts since 1948. Already, Britain’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, is considering a similar measure.

If you don’t get that the target is Jews, not specifically Israelis, I don’t know what to say about your level of naiveté.

In the United States, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have a sudden, alarming, presence in American politics, facilitated by an obvious and outsized influence in the Democratic Party.

The most publicly glaring example is leading “Boy From Brazil” Zohran Mamdani.

In July, Mamdani threatened to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu (they love arresting Jews) when he arrives in New York for a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly in September.  The reason was his indictment by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

However, the United States is not a signatory to the ICC and Netanyahu is protected by the diplomatic treaty put in place when the U.N. was created. Mamdani, unless he is as stupid as I think he is, must have known both facts. But the blood lust for Jews makes it a win for him just to suggest that he would arrest the prime minister of the Jewish State.

Almost immediately, Mamdani acknowledged that he does not have the power to arrest Bibi. But, in admitting it, his announcement outlined the usual blood-libel against Israel. Including the lie of genocide in Gaza.

The statement may have been the point all along, because it was much worse than the original threat.

In his little speech, the “man” who refused to call the Oct. 7 massacre of Jews a genocide, backed by bizarre music, sitting at a desk with his customary Orwellian circus conman smirk, said that “Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal” and the “architect of a horrific genocide.”

He claimed that Bibi is responsible for the “killing of 73,000 people,” using Hamas’ own number, and of course leaving out that the vast majority were combatant terrorists.

He baselessly claimed that Netanyahu was responsible for the “maiming of tens of thousands of children,” absurdly claiming that they “had to undergo surgery or amputation without anesthesia.”

He claimed that Israel targeted “neonatal hospitals and maternity care centers” (endangering Jewish lives while exploiting people’s visceral feelings about harm to children is a longstanding Arab/Muslim lie).

Mamdani then spewed more garbage saying that Israel “starved countless people,” while outrageously stating that Israel “blocked food and humanitarian aid,” claiming that Netanyahu was responsible for the “gunning down of hundreds of aid workers.”

What about the fact that combat has been mostly over for months? Given that truth doesn’t matter to slime like this, he returned to the false “suffering children” narrative by claiming that “Palestinian (sic) children continue to be deliberately targeted and killed by Israeli forces.”

Literally every smoothly uttered phrase was a lie.

Earlier in the month Mamdani had called members of AIPAC “monsters,” saying that it spends “millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal, to preserve their power so that they can turn us against one another instead of our leaders turning toward the moral change we all know to be necessary.” That cabal of world-running Jews are at it again.

Like all historic blood libels, these aren’t just words, these are lies that endanger Jewish lives in the real world.

Just two days later, two Jewish men were stabbed in the streets of New York.

There are many more ideological  clones, almost all aligned with the DSA.

At a DSA event in March, attended by Ro Khanna (D-CA) and former democratic Rep. Cori Bush, attendees bemoaned the loss of Iranian Leader Khamenei and Iran’s (apparent) inability to fund Hezbollah and Hamas. One speaker at the event referred to Israelis as “terrorists” and compared them to Hitler and Mussolini, while ironically claiming that America and Israel are building a “fourth Reich.”

In attendance were DSA congressional candidates, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Melat Kiros. Both of whom won their respective Democratic primaries.

More clones.

Mamdani endorsed Chevalier who participated in an October 8, 2023 rally – in support of the events of October 7. She subsequently converted to Islam, does not believe that Israel has a right to exist, and refuses to condemn Oct. 7, claiming that anyone who does “ignores the 75 years of occupation that the Palestinian people have endured.”

The district in which she won includes Yeshiva University.

On the night Melat Kiros won in Colorado, she immediately claimed that she wants to “‘end genocide in Palestine.” She called Oct. 7 “inevitable,” and refused to label the deadly June 2025 firebombing in Boulder targeting people at a rally in support of Israeli hostages as “antisemitic.”  In typical “blame the Jews” fashion, her solution to antisemitism is to “reevaluate our relationship with Israel.”

Claire Valdez, another Mamdani endorsed candidate, also running for Congress in New York, was the first person to organize the attempt to release Jew hater Mahmoud Khalil. He, in turn, led the crowd in chants of “free, free Palestine” while introducing her at her inaugural campaign event. She has also repeated the false “genocide” claim.

More clones.

Then there is Abdul El-Sayed, who is running for a Senate seat from Michigan(istan). Like all of the above-mentioned candidates, El-Sayed has demonized AIPAC, routinely denigrating anyone who will not say that Israel is guilty of genocide as somehow being compromised by AIPAC.

As of this writing, El-Sayed is scheduled to attend a fundraiser hosted by a woman, who very literally honored the service of her grandfather – an actual Nazi.

Finally, let’s not forget about defeated Texas Democrat Maureen Galindo who called for “Zionists” to be arrested and put in camps, while saying that the camps will also “be a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists.”

More clones.

Meanwhile outside of the world of the political, in Italy, Jewish News Service reported an incident which they, correctly, deemed “reminiscent of the 1930s”:

“An online campaign calling on people to surveil and report the whereabouts of Jewish and Israeli tourists, or anyone suspected of having ties to ‘Zionists,’ has sparked anger among Israeli diplomats, local Jewish leaders and Italian politicians.”

In Mongolia Muslims shouted “heil Hitler” at Israeli tourists.

Finally, two more synagogues were attacked in Queens, New York.

To go back to the previous scenario, we are still at some point in the mid-1930s, so it is critical that we wake up and, most of all, act: before the clock strikes 1939.

The ideological boys and girls from Brazil represent every imaginable or possible outside threat to the Jewish people. They are the progeny of not traditional Jew hatred, which is bad enough, but of genuine Nazism (with a dose of Soviet fueled anti-Zionism). And there are thousands of them, in every aspect of Western public life – those that I outlined here are a tiny sample. But, unlike our grandparents or great-grandparents, we have the nightmare example of the Shoah to guide us. I’ve written about this before, but if “never again” means anything, the gathering storm clouds are our cue to stop this. Now.

Never give in. Never give up.

Am Yisrael Chai.

Joshua Namm is a longtime Jewish community pro, passionate Israel advocate, and co-founder/co-CEO of Moptu, a unique social platform designed specifically for article sharing and dedicated to the principle of free speech.