BRENDAN O’NEILL: The truth about Ireland’s hatred for Israel.
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.
Read the whole thing.
Related: Israel’s Irish Goodbye. “Do you know when Israel’s embassy in Ireland was established? 1996. So please, Irish President Michael Higgins and Prime Minister Simon Harris, spare us the feigned offense and the community-theater histrionics and the supposed shock in reaction to Israel’s announcement that it would close its embassy in Dublin. Ireland’s history with Israel is uniquely shameful among supposed Western democracies…Ireland has always treated Israel with special contempt. Decades after Eamon de Valera offered Germany his condolences on the death of Adolf Hitler, the country he helped found seemed permanently stuck in time. Ireland had to be dragged kicking and screaming into recognizing the Jews. The Israeli embassy barely predates the Good Friday Agreement.”