Ruth Dudley Edwards: Irish Republic’s apparent loathing of Jews will have serious consequences

Clearly, they're not reading the newspapers, listening to RTE or just looking around them.

Did they not notice the photos of Gerry Adams after the preposterous court case in Dublin where the BBC were found guilty of libelling him?

Sporting his awful vulpine grin, he flaunted his keffiyeh.

You’ll see many members of the Dail wearing such an accessory.

Every day, I read articles in the Irish newspapers reporting parades, protests and speeches from politicians and activists screaming for the boycotting of Israel and therefore, whether they understand that or not, essentially for its destruction.

As the IRA called themselves nationalists, so Hamas call themselves Palestinians, but both criminal organisations brutalised and terrified their own people and sacrificed them on the altar of a violent ideology.

Hamas is a death cult that deliberately and ruthlessly engineered the hideous rape, torture and murder of 1,200 innocents on October 7, 2023.

I see it as pure evil, and no more believe anything its representatives say than I ever trusted a word that came from IRA apologists.

It is Islamists that are genocidal, not the Israelis, who are fighting for their lives.

Brendan O’Neill, a British journalist, one-time Marxist and an Irish republican, and these days a fierce campaigner for free speech, reported this week in a powerful article in the Spectator’s online edition that on a recent visit to Ireland, he found Catholicism had been supplanted by a new “all-consuming faith. It’s name? Israelophobia.”

It seemed to him that the Jewish state was now “a Satan substitute in post-Catholic Ireland”.

Everywhere he went, “whether city or bog, you’ll see and hear it - that swirling animus for the Jewish state. The political class speaks of little else. The media are feverishly obsessed. From every political party, every TV set, every soap box, the cry goes out: Israel is evil.”

In this climate, boycotting Israel is a popular cause which has been brilliantly used by the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement.

A recent poll showed 74% of the Irish public support the Occupied Territories Bill, which will prevent Ireland from trading in goods and services with any business in Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

I thought it was right to try to eliminate the leaders of Hamas, but like many others who are instinctively on the side of tiny, brave Israel - the only Jewish country in a world that has persecuted them for millennia and the only democracy in the Middle East - I fear they have fallen into a Hamas trap in the way they have latterly prosecuted what was a just war against their tormentors.

The mob mentality that has gripped Irish politicians has made rational debate almost impossible.

It looks as if the bill will pass with almost unanimous support, thus infuriating Donald Trump and having serious consequences for the Irish economy.

“The country I love has fallen,” wrote O’Neill. “Who will save it?”

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l Ruth Dudley Edwards is the author of ‘The Faithful Tribe: an intimate portrait of the loyal institutions’ and 'Aftermath: The Omagh Bombing and the Families’ Pursuit of Justice.’