Israel is right to cut ties with Ireland | The Spectator

Israel is right to cut ties with Ireland | The Spectator

• 1.    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/israel-is-right-to-cut-ties-with-ireland/ Brendan O’Neill 6 min read Israel is right to cut ties with Ireland Everything that has gone wrong in modern Ireland is summed up in the fact that it is winning praise from Hamas and criticism from Israel. Last week Ireland was gushed over by that army of anti-Semites that carried out the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, while being spurned by the Jewish homeland that was the target of that barbarous assault. Listen, if you’re getting love from racist terrorists, and rejection from their victims, it’s time for some self-reflection. It was the Irish government’s decision to join South Africa’s ‘genocide’ case against Israel at the International Court of Justice that saw it get love-bombed by Hamas and dumped by Israel. ‘Hamas applauds Ireland’s decision’, as one headline put it. Hamas put out a statement welcoming the ‘pressure’ being put on ‘the Israeli enemy’ by Ireland and the other nations backing South Africa against Israel. Well done, Ireland: you’ve made a mob of Jew-killers very happy. For Israel, though, it was the final straw. It has taken the extraordinary decision to close its embassy in Dublin. It cited Ireland’s ‘extreme anti-Israeli policies’. Ireland now joins such lovely nations as Libya, Somalia and Albania in having no Israeli embassy. It is drifting from the realm of the democratic into the ranks of the despotic. It’s not often I feel ashamed to be Irish. But this unconscionable state of affairs, where my motherland finds greater favour among the neo-fascists of Hamas than it does with the democratic nation of Israel – this makes me ashamed to be Irish. Israel is right to cut ties with Ireland. It is right to say the Irish government’s attitude to Israel is fuelled by ‘double standards’. Consider Ireland’s intervention in the ICJ case. Israel cited Ireland’s ‘extreme anti-Israeli policies’ for its decision

• 2. Micheál Martin, the minister for foreign affairs, didn’t only say that Israel must be investigated for what he haughtily calls its ‘collective punishment’ of Palestinians – he also said the ICJ should ‘broaden’ its interpretation of what constitutes a genocide. Most popular How Ireland declared diplomatic war on Israel Shorter version: Can’t find Israel guilty of genocide? No problem, just change the meaning of genocide! Martin said there is too often a ‘narrow interpretation’ of genocide, which gives states like Israel ‘impunity’. Ireland, he pompously declared, takes a ‘broader’ view of what constitutes ‘genocide’. Bully for you. The rest of us are happy to stick with the true meaning – an act of mass killing carried out with the genocidal intent to destroy a people – rather than broaden out the meaning just to ensnare a state we don’t like. The cynicism of Ireland’s position, the slipperiness of it, is mindblowing. To twist the rules of both war and language in order that Israel might finally get the comeuppance its Western haters think it deserves – that is the sign of a deeply unserious state. A state more committed to the bourgeois cult of Israelophobia than to truth. A state that has allowed its rash animus for the Jewish nation to override whatever diplomatic good sense it has left. No wonder Israel is fleeing. Ireland’s ruling class is reacting with faux shock to Israel’s decision. ‘I utterly reject that Ireland is anti-Israel’, said Taoiseach Simon Harris. We’re just ‘pro-peace, pro-human rights and pro-international law’, he insisted. The amount of cant in that statement is extraordinary. Virtually none of it is true.

• 3. Ireland is ‘pro-human rights’? That will be news to Irish folk who’ve watched with growing dread as Dublin has cosied up to China and Saudi Arabia. Ireland happily receives oodles of investment from the Chinese regime, leading even the BBC to wonder if such economic intimacy will have a ‘reputational cost’ for the republic. So lustful is Ireland for Saudi money that it studiously avoided criticising the Saudi onslaught on Yemen, a calamity whose horrors dwarf Gaza’s. Even Sinn Fein called that one right when it denounced Dublin’s ‘shameful silence on [the] Saudi war on Yemen’. Yet when it comes to Israel, suddenly the Dublin elite morphs into a bunch of humanrights-loving peaceniks. These are the ‘double standards’ Israel talked about. If you’re schtum on Saudi warmongering but you go mad when Israel dares to fight back against the anti-Semitic terrorists who raped and murdered more than a thousand of its people, then you are not ‘pro-peace’: you’re just a garden variety Israel-hater. Ireland’s infantile posturing on Israel proves, not its devotion to human rights, but its rank hypocrisy and false virtue. It has exposed itself as a nation whose silence can be bought for the right amount of riyals or yuan. As to the idea that Ireland is not anti-Israel – please. Anyone who has visited Ireland lately will know that its middle classes are among the most Israelophobic in all of Europe. Trinity College in Dublin is a veritable sea of keffiyehs. Venture into any wine bar in Dublin 4 and you’ll hear streams of invective about Israel. The Hezbollah flag has been flown on the streets of Dublin. And as we’ve seen, no war on earth gets Ireland’s rulers frothing as much as Israel’s war on the monsters who attacked it last year. Here’s the truth: the Irish elites are pathologically anti-Israel. Animosity towards Israel has become the ideological glue of Ireland’s influential classes. Ireland has failed the great moral test of our time, the test set by the barbarous acts of 7 October, and now finds itself loved more by the killers of that day than by their victims. For shame. Brendan O’Neill’s new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, is out now Ireland is ‘pro-human rights’? That will be news to Irish folk

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