The whole business of being, in Ireland, a left-wing professional hater of Israel is a complicated affair which requires many years of training and dedication in order to master the craft. It should not, as a general rule, be taken up by amateurs and newbies, for when it is, things like this have a nasty habit of occurring:
The most amusing thing about Fine Gael Councillor Punam Rane’s intervention at Dublin City Council on Monday evening was, I think, that it was People before Profit’s Councillor Conor Reddy and Sinn Fein’s Councillor Daithi Doolan who nobly jumped in to reprimand the errant councillor for her comments. Doolan was careful to warn her about “the use of inflammatory language” – this was two days after Doolan had attended a protest in Dublin which heard chants of “Bomb Tel Aviv”.
Conor Reddy, meanwhile, is the fellow who tweeted on October 8th of last year – while the bodies of Jews were still cooling – that “decolonisation should be celebrated and supported”. He did so while sharing a message which stated that “the valor (sic) and heroism of the Palestinian resistance fighters is monumental”. There is, and can be, no doubt about what he meant. Slaughtering civilian Jews in Israel is fine if done in the cause of Palestinian resistance.
It is funny, one might think, that is perfectly acceptable in Conor Reddy’s mind to write that the murder of thousands of individual Jews should be celebrated and supported, but that to say that Jews control the US economy is beyond the pale.
In any case, the good voters of Dublin decided to punish Conor Reddy for those comments about October 7th by sentencing him to five years on Dublin City Council, which – and I mean this genuinely – is about the worst thing that the Irish Criminal Justice system could inflict on a person. So perhaps there is some justice in the karmic universe.
I might venture to speculate at this point that their noble interventions on Monday night can be explained by the fact that Doolan and Reddy are, of course, practiced and seasoned opponents of Israel and its citizens, and they know the score: You never, ever, ever mention the Jews. Because, amongst other reasons, the Zionists would only use that against you. Besides, everyone (by which I mean everybody in their camp on this issue) knows that some Jews – ironically usually adherents to an extremist sect of that faith – don’t support Israel. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Zionist.
In any case, this whole business must be very disappointing for Dublin City Council, spoiling as it did one of the week’s great diplomatic initiatives in world affairs. One can only imagine that diplomats across the entirety of the Middle East and Arabian Peninsula, from Damascus to Riyadh, were waiting with bated breath for the verdict that was to issue forth from the elected representatives of Sandymount and Clontarf. Now the whole initiative has been derailed by slightly impolitic comments by a newbie councillor who doesn’t understand the polite and reasonable ways to suggest that the Jews are behind it all.
For example, she could simply have said, as other Irish politicians have, that there are “powerful financial interests” at play. Or she could have said what the leading political correspondent for Virgin Media said when he claimed that Michael D. Higgins had faced opposition in his false claims that Israel leaked his letter from “the global Jewish lobby”, instead of, you know, just people who care about the truth. She could have made the President’s false claim that Israel had threatened Irish soldiers. Or she could have echoed a voice of old, and gone the full Oliver J. Flanagan about routing the Jews out of Ireland.
She could have done what Sinn Fein TD Reada Cronin did, and suggested that Adolf Hitler himself was a pawn of the Jews – specifically the Rothschilds – and kept her seat in the national parliament without any controversy.
Perhaps she could do what Fianna Fáil TD Niall Collins did, when he said that there was a “huge Jewish lobby across America that suppresses criticism of Israel”, and simply apologise “if anyone was offended”.
She could have praised Ireland, alternatively, for being one of the only countries in Europe not to recognise the UN’s definition of anti-semitism. Free Speech!
Last week, I received, via the email address at which people can contact the editor, the following email from an elderly Jewish lady living in Terenure, which is one of the few places in Ireland that Jewish people still reside in some numbers. Her specific objection was to two relatively normal Irish Times headlines about sympathy amongst the Irish Jewish community for Israel’s cause. She feared, as she wrote:
“In their casual disregard for public safety, the headline writers have put a mostly elderly community at risk of retaliation. The community is already reeling from a sense of hazard, as epithets are being shouted at people as they walk to synagogue, anti semitic graffiti tags all over Terenure Cross, and countless stories of discrimination, redolent of decades past.
You may be assured I have already written the Irish Times, and I am now waiting my two weeks’ until I can write the Press Ombudsman. However, writing angry letters feels hopeless and empty.
This is not the country I moved to, thirteen years ago. I want to believe there are still Irish people who don’t loathe Jews, but every day that sentiment seems ever more distant.”
Now, as it happens, I cannot take issue with the Irish Times for publishing factual information about the views of Jewish people living in Ireland – but I can and do take issue with the fact that an elderly lady would be so afraid for her own safety that a headline in the Irish Times would scare her.
This country likes to pretend that it does not have an anti-semitism problem.
It is just a coincidence that we have politicians who endorse the murder of Jews as beautiful, politicians who stand on marches where there are chants to bomb Tel Aviv, Journalists who talk about a global Jewish lobby, Councillors who declare that the Jews run America, and dunderheaded clowns who apologise “if anyone is offended” by this stuff being said, and a Jewish community that is regularly subjected to abuse and insults on the streets.
Journalism, someone once said, is about holding a mirror up to your society.
Take a long, hard look in it, I ask you.