The truth about Ireland’s hatred for Israel
Spiked ^ | 18 Dec 2024 | Brendan O'Neill
Posted on 12/19/2024 5:40:25 AM PST by Rummyfan
Is there a politician more sanctimonious, more smug, than Ireland’s president, Michael D Higgins? His pompous scolding of Israel this week after it had the temerity to call out the anti-Israel animus of the Irish elites was a truly unedifying spectacle of false virtue and cant. Shaking with fury, every word bitterly spat out, he said it is a ‘gross defamation and slander’ to ‘brand a people’ anti-Semitic just because they ‘criticise Benjamin Netanyahu’. He seemed to be in the grip of a paroxysm of pique. I’ve never seen him quake and froth like this over anything else: not poverty, not homelessness, not war. Well, unless it’s a war being fought by Israel.
It’s hard to decide what was most grating in Higgins’s theatre of fury, which, as he knows, will have been lapped up by every scribe at the Irish Times, every patron of the wine bars of Dublin 4, every rich kid in a keffiyeh at Trinity. Let’s start with the fact that his windy invective was in large part misinformation. Israel has not accused the Irish people of anti-Semitism. It has accused ‘the Irish government’ of pursuing ‘extreme anti-Israel policies’. That’s why it took the decision to shut its embassy in Dublin: not because it thinks every Irishman is a Jew-hater but because it thinks Ireland’s ruling class is possessed of a curious abhorrence for the Jewish nation. Imagine accusing Israel of ‘slander’ even as you wilfully twist its words.
Then there’s the sanctimony. Higgins reaches for the smelling salts when an uppity nation like Israel has the brass neck to accuse people like him of possibly being bigots, yet he’s more than happy to make that accusation against others. The Irish establishment loves nothing more than pontificating on the pox of racism in modern Ireland....
(Excerpt) Read more at spiked-online.com ...
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1 posted on 12/19/2024 5:40:25 AM PST by Rummyfan
To: Rummyfan
2 posted on 12/19/2024 5:44:05 AM PST by sauropod ("You didn't take a country. You only won a football game!" - Dan Dakich Ne supra crepidam)
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