Harps, Shamrocks and Anti-Semitism

“Two days after neo-Nazi terrorists from Gaza slaughtered, raped and burnt 1400 Israeli Jews, hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside the Israel Embassy in Dublin to denounce Israel.” Now that is the kind of absurd sentence that once upon a very distant time would have got students at journalism class into dire trouble. “It doesn’t make sense,” would scold the dried-out old veteran of two hundred bars, half a dozen newsrooms and three and half wives. “You clearly mean the protesters had gathered outside the Palestinian Embassy in Dublin to protest at the murder of Jews, so please don’t dress up the hideous truth with these misbegotten attempts at satire.”

Ah, but that was once upon a distant time. In the woeful here and now, this is surreal, a bad dream, a very bad dream. This after all had occurred on October 7, 2023, not October 7, 1943. The latter date was when Hitler met his Gauleiters at his Wolf’s Lair to discuss the remaining details of the Final Solution, to be concluded that year. But since that terrible day in 1943, and up until its eightieth anniversary in 2023, no government could publicly mass-murder Jews anywhere. Even Himmler, Hitler’s executioner of the Jewish people, that October had written of the extermination program, “This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.”

That was the point about that Final Solution: even by the utterly debased standards of the Nazis, it was such a shameful business that it had to be kept secret. “The Jews must be exterminated,” said Himmler privately. “I do not consider myself justified murdering the menfolk … while leaving their children to grow up and to take their vengeance on our sons and grandsons.”

Whereas the Final Solution of October 7, 2023, was to be a very public affair, and the first target would be the fun-loving liberal Jews attending an all-night rave, to be videoed and celebrated on social media. All previous genocides had been secret, and covered up, as in the Nazi execution pits at Babi Yar, the gas chambers of Belzec, or the death camps of the Khmer Rouge, Stalin’s NKVD and Mao’s Red China.

But in the new moral order of the 2020s, the Hamas Einsatzkommando felt free not merely to massacre over a thousand people but also to behead children, to burn people alive, to rape women before killing them, and most incredible of all, to film these atrocities for showing to the world and meanwhile rejoicing.

Logically (well, accordingly to the standards that once existed) the perpetrators of such atrocities would be universally condemned and execrated. But not anymore. So, on October 9, just two days after the slaughter, hundreds of demonstrators in Dublin gathered outside the embassy of the victims, not to denounce the murderers but effectively to take their side.

I’ve been a journalist for many decades, and I’ve never written a more absurd sentence. Yet despite its utter absurdity, it is nonetheless true. Moreover, in about two hours the Islamist terrorists murdered more people than had been killed in the final twenty years of the Irish terrorist war known as “The Troubles”.

At least, October 7 gives us an apocalyptic image of what an Arab victory over Israel would consist of. So now we know. And another date now comes to mind; January 30, 1939, when Hitler announced that in the event of a world war, the Jews of Europe would be exterminated. What was the first foreign military alliance the Nazis struck after that? It was with the IRA in Dublin. Three months after Hitler’s threat to Europe’s Jews, after meeting an emissary from the Third Reich. the IRA agreed to go to war against Britain, which it did later that year.

In 1940, at the height of the Battle of Britain, two senior IRA men, Sean Russell and Frank Ryan, were sent from Germany as agents of the Third Reich to Ireland in a U-boat. This was a highly precious commodity to be diverted away from the Nazi strategy of sinking all British ships, but it was a measure nonetheless of the importance that the Third Reich attached to the IRA. However, Ryan died on this treasonable journey to his homeland and, wrapped in a swastika flag, his body was buried at sea, while the mission was abandoned.

At the end of the Second World War, the Irish prime minister Eamon de Valera put on his top hat and frock coat and paid a visit to Herr Hempel, the Nazi-accredited diplomat, to express his condolences on the death of Hitler. A few years later, a statue was erected to Sean Russell in Dublin, the only such monument to a Nazi collaborator in all of Europe, despite what Ireland now knew of the alphabet-horrors of Auschwitz, Belsen, Chelmno, Dachau, Einsatzkommando, through to Sobibor and Treblinka and concluding with Zyklon B. In 2003, a young woman politician made her public debut at this statue, singing the praises of the man to whom it had been raised. Far from this being the passport to political extinction that it would have been anywhere else in the European Union, it was the start of a political career that has resulted in that same woman, Mary Lou McDonald, becoming the most popular leader in the island, North and South, while the party she leads, Sinn Fein, is almost irresistibly ahead in the polls.

McDonald did not condemn the attack by the Hamas Einsatzkommando on October 7 for three days, and then only after it was clear that an Irish/Israeli citizen was missing. Sinn Fein’s annual conference in early November was almost an unbroken celebration of the PLO and a condemnation of Israel. Meanwhile, Ireland’s President Michael D. Higgins had certainly condemned the Hamas violence but largely as if a plague of violent locusts had mysteriously arrived out of nowhere.

No country in the world with a military would have failed to attack the base of such satanic operations as occurred on October 7. But this is especially true of Israel, whose peoples have fled holocausts, pogroms, evictions and oppression across the world. To expect a calm and clinical response to such mass atrocities is to presume that the Jews are not products of a history that had made the formation of Israel an unavoidable necessity.

Meanwhile, Hamas-Islamic Jihad are still hidden behind the ramparts of their fortress that are built upon the blood and bone of the Arab civilians of Gaza. H-IJ knew that it was psychologically, morally and militarily impossible for Israelis not to go after the perpetrators of the greatest public display of genocide in history, for the ambush worked on two levels. As a pre-emptive strike, it was one of the most brilliant in history, to rank with Rommel’s crossing of the Meuse in 1940 or Israel’s assaults in the Six-Day War in 1967. But whereas those two operations had purely military intent and outcome, October 7 was genocidal theatre at its purest. This would appeal to the Islamist taste for such delights while trapping the Israelis into making the savage reply that was all along part of the H-IJ game plan. Gotterdammerung is not a metaphor for these people, but their Holy Grail. “You are destined to certain death,” the Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif warned Israel over a decade ago. “You have found your hell in Gaza, because we love death more than you love life.”

It was probably he who ordered the creation of the perhaps two thousand miles of tunnels beneath Gaza, which are a living embodiment of Hades. Again, this is not a metaphor. This underworld is a place where Israeli soldiers were intended to be drawn to their deaths. Myth becomes reality in this Manichean vision of Islamist martyr-nihilists, for whom death is the glorious outcome.

The useful idiots in Europe and North America who have paraded through city streets demanding a unilateral ceasefire by Israel in Gaza while the Jewish hostages remain in what must be an unspeakable captivity seem to have no concept of the depravity of the war that H-IJ is fighting. Led by Sinn Fein, the noisy Irish Left certainly do not, reflecting the sanctimonious ignorance that is common throughout Irish life when contemplating almost anything that is foreign, never mind the horrors of the Middle East. Though we cannot overlook the unconscious and unspoken anti-Semitism in Ireland that alone in Europe could have allowed the erection of a statue in Dublin to the Nazis’ foremost Irish ally.

“Neutrality” is Ireland’s most repeatedly proclaimed virtue, though it is not like Swiss or Swedish (now finished) neutrality, armed and ready to fight to the death. In contrast, Ireland is virtually without an army or a navy or an air force (to speak of), and in essence is dependent on the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force to protect its skies and its seas from intrusion by hostile powers. Yet nonetheless, Irish politicians feel free to scold, denounce and educationally uplift the rest of Europe on the ethics of warfare. This is quite a feat for a state that allowed Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA which conducted a twenty-seven-year war against the Northern Ireland state, to headquarter itself in its territory. Throughout much of that time, the authorities in Ireland even permitted the IRA-Sinn Fein alliance to use government property to host its annual conferences.

Moreover, Ireland has a long history of perceiving itself to be morally above all other societies. It is often proclaimed today that the Irish were “colonised” by the British, which is peculiar term to describe the political union between Britain and Ireland in which the Irish were demographically over-represented in the House of Commons, and happily availed themselves of the opportunities to emigrate to that empire as well as its former colonies in the US. An Arapaho, Comanche or Lakota Indian might have a clearer sense of what it is to be colonised than would most Irish people, especially Americans named Murphy, O’Sullivan and Kennedy who are living on lands that were once theirs.

The hero of the Irish Left is the UN’s Craig Mokhiber, the Lebanese-American United Nations official who resigned in protest at the failure of the UN to intervene in Gaza. Mokhiber’s letter of resignation made no mention whatever of the genocidal assault on Israel on October 7. Instead, he wrote of Israel’s operations in response to that massacre: “This is a text-book case of Genocide. The European, ethno-nationalist settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, towards the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine.”

Only in the UN would an idiot who could write such racist drivel be given paid employment, and though his words would be echoed in those vast anti-Israel demonstrations across Europe and North America, while in Ireland they are accepted as Holy Writ by many politicians, the media and the mob. But if Israel were a European settler-project, why does the national language use Hebrew script, which predates the Roman script by at least 8000 years? In 1920, 40 per cent of the population of Baghdad was Jewish. Where are their descendants today? In Israel, of course, which is also home to the millions of the descendants of Jews who were forced to flee from their homes across the Arab world. Moreover, this “Arab world” is not composed of indigenous aborigines, but is the consequence of the brutal conquest and subjugation of the Christian and Jewish peoples of Asia Minor and North Africa by the Islamic caliphates of the seventh century.

Of course, Israel’s case is not helped by the personality of its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. If a country is really unfortunate, it finds itself being led by a politician who embodies its worst characteristics, as with Boris Johnson of Britain, Charles Haughey of Ireland, Angela Merkel of Germany, Silvio Berlusconi of Italy and just about every French President since Napoleon. Netanyahu is such a man, but this is not why Hamas embarked on their murder spree, but because, quite simply, they could. As with Nazis, killing Jews is what they do, but unlike the Nazis, they simultaneously boast about it.

A few Irish politicians understand what is going on. Senator Ned O’Sullivan made apposite comparisons between Hamas and the IRA: “My personal view is that demonstrations that are going ahead, ostensibly pro-Palestinian, are heavily marked by all the characteristics of anti-Semitism.”

However, another Irish politician, Diarmuid Wilson, preferred the usual undergraduate babble of the mob: “Irish politicians are not anti-Israeli, but pro-democracy and human rights.” He was talking of Gaza, where there hasn’t been an election since 2006, where Hamas simply dealt with the rival forces of Fateh in 2007 by lining them up and shooting them, and where gay men are allowed to depart the enclave usually from the rooftops of tall buildings, leaving gravity and Allah to do the rest. Well before the horrors of October 2023, Hamas had turned Gaza into a sort of Chernobyl-on-Sea, a festering cauldron of human discontent made ungovernable by madrassahs and screeching imams and suicide cults, with just about enough money from Iran to keep body and soul together but not enough to make its inhabitants happy.

If Israel had intended to commit genocide in Gaza, it would not have warned the people of Gaza that it was time to flee. As for the supposed impossibility of moving one million people in one direction over a few days, as Israel demanded at the start of its Gaza operations, perhaps Ireland should remember: 1979, the Pope’s visit, Phoenix Park, Dublin, one million people in and out in half a day.

This is not to trivialise the catastrophe that has befallen the people of Gaza, but merely to blame their leaders who brought it about: Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Everything that has happened to the wretches of Gaza was intended from the outset: murderous, ruthless awfulness: to provoke the Israelis into “over-reaction” and thereby sicken the world of the Israelis—and why not? Hasn’t the world picked on Jews often enough in the past? Why not again? Easy pickings.

It was certainly easy pickings for the 600 academics of Britain and Ireland who signed a petition denouncing Israel’s “genocide” of the Palestinians of Gaza. The statement’s description of the mini-genocide of Jews runs as follows: “The incursion by Palestinian armed groups on October 7 included criminal attacks against civilians.” “Incursion”: that’s how these baying pseudo-scholars described the cold-blooded murder of 1200 innocent people at a festival and in their homes, some being raped, some babies being beheaded, some victims burnt alive. However, there was a gender pay-gap: 450 of the 600 signatories were women, most of them in liberal studies and the humanities, where feelings are far more important than the empirical, mathematically-assessable qualities required in computing, science, engineering and medicine. It’s not that feelings don’t matter. They just don’t count. And nor indeed does truth about Israel anymore, especially in Ireland, where simplistic mob-perceptions of the Middle East rule all. Meanwhile the dwindling number of Irish Jews are wondering how long they can stay before the rhetoric turns really, really nasty. Not long, probably.