Ireland’s paper of record has published an opinion piece directly comparing U.S. President Donald Trump to the “jihadists who inspired 9/11” ahead of the leader’s visit to the island this week.
The Irish Times piece, penned by the outlet’s star columnist Fintan O’Toole, features an image of United Airlines flight 175 flying into the South Tower of the World Trade Center while claiming that the men who inspired the terror attack have similar ideological penchants to the current American administration.
“The deep roots of this barbaric assault on Americans lie in the same hatred of women that is now embedded in American reactionary politics,” O’Toole writes, describing them both as arising from “the manosphere”.
He goes on to accuse Trump and the jihadists who inspired the terror attack of having a “shared hatred of women”, adding that allegedly recognising this openly would be “too close for comfort”.
“Shared hatred of women will be, as always, unspeakable,” he said in the piece, which is punctuated with an image of the World Trade Center burning.
O’Toole also criticised other members of Donald Trump’s administration, calling the country’s Secretary of War Pete Hegseth a “Christian jihadist”.
“Both appeal to men who share the most fundamental impulse of the jihadis: the desire to create a society in which women are under male control,” he wrote of Hegseth and Trump.
The Irish Times columnist also claimed that there were similarities between jihadist figures and those of Ireland’s war of independence, explicitly saying that revolutionary leader Seán South “would have got on very well” with the spiritual founder of contemporary radical Islam, Sayyid Qutb.
“Little versions of Qutb could have been found in 1950s Ireland too, foaming at the mouth about dirty dancing and Jews and “Negro” music and young women flaunting themselves,” O’Toole writes.
“Seán South (of Garryowen), also a 1950s political and religious martyr, would have got on very well with Qutb if only they could have agreed on which One True Faith everyone must follow on pain of death.”
Fintan O’Toole is also a regular contributor to the New York Times, with his last contribution being published in June of this year.