The Times article hallucinates Ireland as antisemitic hellhole

The Times has continued its decline as a place with zero editorial standards by printing evidence-free anti-Irish shite that ought to have been thrown in the bin with a giant red ‘Citations Needed’ stamped across its face. The piece by Jon Ihle claims that the country is unique among European nations in its hostility towards Jewish people. He says:

…when I travel around Europe on my Irish passport, whether to Rome, Paris, Amsterdam or Cologne — every one of which was a site, within living memory, of Jewish persecution — I don’t worry at all.

Yet at home in Dublin, I do worry.

In fact, in deeply irresponsible fashion, Ihle goes on to engender fear in Ireland’s 2,000 member Jewish community by suggesting there are antisemitic child murderers waiting to strike at any moment:

I worry every time I attend a Jewish community event that this will be the time someone gets through the many layers of security to attack us. I worry that my partner, who is publicly visible as a Holocaust education activist and a Jewish business owner, will be targeted. I worry that when I bring my six-year-old son to places where other Jews are present, I’m putting him in danger.

The writer spends the best part of a dozen or so paragraphs providing precisely zero meaningful evidence to support this suggestion. His best attempt is – and you’ll be shocked – that strong pro-Palestine sentiment in Ireland is evidence of burning hatred of Jews. He pursues the smear beloved of those seeking to crush Palestine activism by conflating:

….a context of relentless protest against Israel and a boycott movement that is trying to isolate the country from the community of nations…

with “violence against diaspora Jews…around the world”. The latter is a real issue, and should be taken seriously. Notice, however, that Ihle is talking globally. There is no indication that Jewish people are under violent threat in Ireland.

We may have said this before – protesting ‘Israel’ isn’t antisemitic

Furthermore, the idea that it is linked in any way to the overwhelmingly peaceful Palestine solidarity demonstrations that often contain large Jewish contingents is a total fiction. Ihle goes on to claim an:

…atmosphere in Ireland [that] is almost febrile at times.

This is as he adds to his above comments by mentioning the campaign to stop the Ireland vs ‘Israel’ football match, and Ireland’s withdrawal from Eurovision.

It is entirely appropriate for so-called ‘Israel’ to be relentlessly protested and ostracised – this is the only meaningful way of holding the genocidal terror project to account. Especially in the absence of continued failure to act by governments across the world, including Ireland’s own complicit Taoiseach Micheál Martin.

Yet more egregiously, The Times’ own human reality distortion field generator proceeds to claim that “Irish Jews end up as collateral damage” through actions like the call for Herzog Park to be renamed.

Ihle says:

Before he was president of Israel, Chaim Herzog was an Irish Jew…

This is indeed correct. However, and significantly more pertinently, he was also a fucking war criminal piece of shit. As pointed out by the Canary, this brutish coloniser:

…served in the Zionist Haganah paramilitary group, which carried out atrocities in the years leading up to the Nakba, and during the mass ethnic cleansing process itself. Following this, he is described as having “built and led the establishment of IDF Military intelligence”. In 1967 he became military governor of occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and was integral in the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem’s Mughrabi Quarter, calling the area a “toilet” that the Zionists “decided to remove”.

No one in Ireland is objecting in the least to the park being named after another Irish Jewish person. Jews for Palestine Ireland backed the campaign to get rid of the Herzog stain, and replace it with one of:

…many worthy names to choose from – Harry Kernoff, Estella Solomons, Con Leventhal, David Marcus, and Robert Briscoe, to name just a few options.

The Times printing racist clairvoyance masquerading as fact

Ihle continues his descent by engaging in mindreading, saying:

If “horror in Gaza” is the first thing that springs to mind when you hear “Jew in London”, you should ask yourself some hard questions about why.

You should indeed, but given this is a rather over-ambitious attempt to engage in telepathy, we don’t have any actual – here’s that word again – EVIDENCE, to suggest such thinking is occurring. Apparently Ihle the Celt Whisperer has established that it is, however. Perhaps he can get his calipers out and instruct us that it’s the unique structure of the Irish skull that allows his brain waves to penetrate our feeble defences.

Ihle proceeds, further sans citations, through more fictions about supposed widespread latent Irish antisemitism on social media. So widespread apparently that he can’t find a single example to substantiate his case.

We then get a telling paragraph on so-called ‘Israel’ and Palestine, in which Palestinians are merely the “perceived underdog”. You know the ones who have had the equivalent of over six nukes dropped on them by Zionist butchers over the past two and a half years? Yeah, our mate Jon’s still on the fence about who’s the underdog there. Meanwhile, the Zionist entity’s indisputable status as a “colonial occupier” gets scare quotes.

So yeah, several hundred words, and nothing of any substance, amounting only to an anti-Irish diatribe. File this as case #20,231,007 under “more rubbish intended to smear Palestine activism via conflation with antisemitism”.

Featured image via the Canary

By Robert Freeman

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