Ruth Dudley Edwards: Acts that Hamas carried out on October 7, 2023 were savage, yet Ireland demonises Israel

There are 2,500 Jews in Ireland, they are a peaceable and industrious community, and they have been patriotic citizens since the foundation of the state.

But they have always been hated by some.

In the early days, it was extreme Roman Catholics who denounced them as Jesus-killers.

Oliver Flanagan, a Fine Gael TD who later would rise to be a minister, was regarded by my parents as a lunatic.

During the war, when he was in his early 20s, he demanded that the anti-IRA Emergency Powers Acts should be re-directed against Freemasons and Jews whom he believed were controlling the financial system and thus the people of Ireland.

He would mellow a bit, and his story has always given me hope, since his son Charlie who succeeded him was one of the most intelligent, decent and open-minded TDs I ever came across.

It was he who wore a poppy and sought proper recognition for the Royal Irish Constabulary.

It was also he who accused the Irish media of the "demonisation" of Israel and "slavishly dancing to the Palestinian drumbeat for decades".

As he retired from politics in 2023, he warned about the fragility and volatility of democracy and the serious and dangerous fringe on both sides of the political spectrum.

As is happening in the UK, noisy politicians speak of the far-right and largely ignore the far-left, yet it is in an unholy alliance with Islamists who seek to destroy the West.

A Dublin councillor this week posted a video in praise of Hitler and called for a “real final solution” against “satanic” Jews.

He has back-tracked and denounced it, but as I looked at X for similar Irish anti-semitic messages, I was horrified by their prevalence and viciousness.

On RTE, Boy George called out Irish anti-semitism, which the Irish claim is righteously anti-Israeli.

“You don’t blame a whole nation for what's going on in America or in Russia or anywhere else,” he said.

Remember British tolerance when IRA bombs were going off?

But we have president Catherine Connolly criticising Galway University for its ties to Israeli universities, politicians competing to denounce the Israeli navy for blocking the ridiculous flotilla to Gaza, and Kneecap being feted by the young.

Brenda Power, a brave Irish commentator who still gets houseroom in a newspaper, pointed out that Irish media have almost completely ignored the horrifying and fully-documented findings in ‘Silenced No More’.

This independent commission’s report of the atrocities of October 7, 2023 showed a “premeditated pattern of sexual torture; mutilations, genital burnings, spikes, nails and tin cans hammered into vaginas, pelvises broken from gang rapes, breasts cut off and tossed about.”

I’m reading it now and it’s infinitely more horrifying than the terrible Omagh inquest reports I read when writing about that bomb.

What Hamas planned, carried out, recorded and disseminated was utter savagery.

And yet the obsessional hatred of Israel known as Israeli Derangement Syndrome has poisoned Irish nationalist opinion and blinded it to the truth.

l Ruth Dudley Edwards is the author of The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions and also of Aftermath: the Omagh bombing and the families’ pursuit of justice