Mick Hartley

On the subject of Ireland, here's Terry Glavin – Antisemitic Ireland needs to shake off the imbecility:

Three weeks ago, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar kicked things off by asserting that Israel’s military operations in Gaza constituted “something approaching revenge.” On Sunday, Varadkar told Ireland’s national broadcaster RTE that the EU is applying “double standards” in the case of Vladimir Putin’s war of conquest in Ukraine, compared to Israel’s Operation Swords of Iron in Gaza.

Between these two histrionic bookends, the Irish legislature came 16 votes away from approving a motion to expel Israeli ambassador Dana Erlich, and 10 votes away from approving a motion to haul Israel before the International Criminal Court. Along the way, the several political parties in the Irish legislature have appeared to compete with one another for the most outlandish thing that can be said about Gaza’s ongoing misery.

On Monday, Varadkar was called upon to assure People Before Profit Teachta Dála (member of Parliament) Paul Murphy that U.S. planes were not stopping at Shannon Airport carrying weapons bound for Israel. Murphy had insisted that any Israel-bound aircraft at Shannon had to be formally inspected. “Israel is carrying out a genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Its number one supporter and military backer is the U.S. … by allowing Shannon Airport to be used by the U.S. military while it is aiding and abetting genocide, Ireland is complicit.”…

Ireland is a comical EU outlier on the matter of Israel for a variety of reasons. Irish politicians generally like to claim that it’s because of Ireland’s history of dispossession, occupation and resistance to colonialism — three subaltern virtues fashionably attributable nowadays to the Palestinians.

In a recent interview with the Guardian, the retired Irish diplomat Niall Holohan put it this way: “We feel we have been victimized over the centuries. It’s part of our psyche — underneath it all we side with the underdog.”

But there’s something else in the Irish psyche that’s impolite to mention in the comfy Dublin pubs and bistros of Portobello, Ranelagh and Rathmines. Not a few of Ireland’s gallant and celebrated champions of the underdog, its heroes of Irish freedom, were vulgar antisemites and Nazi collaborators.

Irish neutrality in WW2 is well known, but there are some inconvenient facts here that I was unaware of. For instance:

Just one awkward thing buried in the Irish psyche is the Limerick Pogrom of 1904, a series of incitements led by a renegade Redemptorist priest that resulted in mob assaults on Jewish businesses and the beatings of several Limerick Jews. The republican pamphleteer Arthur Griffith approved, calling Jews “usurers and parasites.” Griffiths was one of the founders of Sinn Féin, in 1905, and he served as Sinn Féin’s president in 1911….

The Irish political class needs to show a great deal more humility and a great deal less sanctimony and imbecility on the Israeli-Palestinian predicament. It’s fair enough to empathize with the Palestinians, even to see something in the Palestinian struggle for statehood that harkens to Ireland’s long journey. But for all the similarities, there is a difference, even between the IRA at its worst and savage moments in the 1980s, and Hamas, in its routine conduct and standpoints.

The IRA never vowed to slaughter every British loyalist on the island of Ireland and hunt every Englishman to the ends of the Earth, to the ends of time. That’s what Hamas has in mind for the Jews.

The Irish should remember that.