Why Ireland hates Israel
Many Western countries are pro-Palestinian, but Ireland is one of the more extreme. There have been many articles over the years that attempt to explain this.
Here’s Melanie Phillips on the subject back in 2019:
The essence of this Irish passion for the EU is that Ireland doesn’t understand what it means to be an independent nation. Like so many cultures with a shaky sense of what they are, with an outsize chip on their shoulder and infantilized by being almost entirely dependent on others to survive (their “Palestinian” friends fall into that category too) the Irish hate Israel, the paradigm nation state of a people with an unequivocal sense of itself.
So, of course, Ireland bought wholesale into the whole farrago of lies and distortions that make up western left-wing globalist discourse about Israel, which is shared by the EU itself. …
In the 1970s, Sinn Fein publicly supported the Palestinian cause. The IRA and the PLO became extremely close, training together and sharing terrorist strategies and tactics. The IRA received substantial funding and military aid from Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, and also collaborated with Hamas and Hezbollah. …
During the Second World War, Ireland was neutral. Upon learning of Hitler’s death, its Taoiseach or prime minister, Eamon de Valera, visited the German Embassy in Dublin to express his condolences.
Some IRA members, such as the high ranking Sean Russell, collaborated with the Nazis. The Fianna Fáil government denied residential visas to many Jews trying to escape Nazi Germany and to Holocaust survivors after the war.
Historically, the Catholic church in Ireland bears a heavy responsibility for this anti-Jewish hatred. Over the years, the church has pumped out stereotypical hatred of Jews as parasitical moneylenders and exploiters of working people.
That history was reversed in many countries, and today Christians in those places – which include the US – are among the most fervent Israel supporters. But apparently not Ireland.
Here’s a post-10/7 article about Ireland and Israel:
The major Irish media and political focus in the days that followed [10/7] rapidly became the carnage in Gaza and presented Israel as the aggressor in a war initiated by Hamas.
In the Irish Parliament all contributions by opposition politicians promoted a narrative demonizing Israel with limited government pushback. Throughout the early weeks of the conflict rarely was any reference made to Hamas’s continuous rocket attacks, to the hostages, nor to Hamas being embedded with civilians and using them as human shields.
Irish mainstream media resisted reporting the existence of tunnels with terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, in particular under or adjacent to schools and hospitals, as it undermined the preferred anti-Israeli narrative and did not acknowledge a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) rocket as responsible for a fire in the car park of a Gaza City hospital (where deaths were first reported by Hamas as 500 and then turned out to be 50 or less).
While in Ireland, Israeli briefings, even those verified by other intelligence agencies, videos, and photos, were frequently disregarded, Hamas statements were too easily given Irish media and political credibility.
And here’s a recent statement by Ireland’s PM:
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said that Israel has become “blinded by rage” and is not even listening to the advice of its close ally, the United States, anymore.
The Fine Gael was answering questions in the Dáil about the number of Palestinians that have been forced to crowd into Rafah, which was targeted in a recent Israeli military operation.
Labour leader Ivana Bacik said people had been killed or “brutally displaced”, and that there was “nowhere left” for Palestinian citizens to go.
“We’re witnessing Armageddon,” she told TDs.
You can watch a recent discussion of the position of Ireland towards Israel here:
Some interesting theories there, but it seems like plain, old-fashioned antisemitism.
Right alongside, we might ask: “Why does Norway hate Israel?” and “Why does Belgium hate Israel?”. These sorts of lists — whether superficially puzzling or no — will grow the closer we look and the longer we dwell.
It appears that Princess Anne was right.
FWIW, I’m mostly Scots-Irish. My surname comes from Armagh, on the border of Northern Ireland and Ireland. I have Irish friends and I’ve been to Ireland. I’ve read Irish history.
Lord, what a complicated people.
Easier explanation…
Sinn Fein was communist… ie. IRA was fighting for communism.
Sooooo… like all ‘good’ Marxists, jews are hated.
Sinn Féin is an Irish republican and democratic socialist political party in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland
before soviet union was the Soviet Union, Lennin was first part of Germanys democratic socialists. wish people would learn all the sames for this form of government…
their position is oxymoronic… its not possible… though they try to say they are not stalinist, etc… but thats only recently… since the democrats took up the moniker…
From the 1890s through the early 20th century, the SPD was Europe’s largest Marxist party, and the most popular political party in Germany
The Party of Democratic Socialism (German: Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus, PDS) was a left-wing populist political party in Germany active between 1989 and 2007.[2] It was the legal successor to the communist Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), which ruled the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) as the de facto sole legal party until 1990
oh well..
guess you guys don’t know this
cause all i still see is made up stuff that tries to explain something old as if it was born yesterday… as if it had no history…
funny stuff as its completely in opposition to success and the language seems to be one of wanting success against such.
and what do they mean by our democracy? do they mean sovereign democracy?
is it an inclusive our or exclusive our?
i say its exclusive, but people here inclusive
ie. its our club/democracy stay out… vs its our club/democracy all are invited
they just leave that last part out… while they claim ownership
Few Americans realize what a big and a great thing it was that James Joyce made a Jew, Leopold Bloom, the sympathetic protagonist of “Ulysses,” Joyçe’s novel, arguably the towering achievement of modernist literature.
Official Irish Republican Army
The Officials were Marxist-Leninists and worked to form a united front with other Irish communist groups, named the Irish National Liberation Front (NLF).
in the years 1956–62. They were heavily influenced by popular front ideology and drew close to communist thinking. A key intermediary body was the Communist Party of Great Britain’s organisation for Irish exiles, the Connolly Association. The Marxist analysis was that the conflict in Northern Ireland was a “bourgeois nationalist” one between the Ulster Protestant and Irish Catholic working classes, fomented and continued by the ruling class. Its effect was to depress wages, since worker could be set against worker. They concluded that the first step on the road to a 32-county socialist republic in Ireland was the “democratisation” of Northern Ireland (i.e., the removal of discrimination against Catholics) and radicalisation of the southern working class. This would allow “class politics” to develop, eventually resulting in a challenge to the hegemony of both what they termed “British imperialism” and the respective unionist and Irish nationalist establishments north and south of the Irish border.
“On the Jewish Question” is a response by Karl Marx to then-current debates over the Jewish question. Marx wrote the piece in 1843, and it was first published in Paris in 1844 under the German title “Zur Judenfrage” in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher.
Bauer argued that Jews could achieve political emancipation only by relinquishing their particular religious consciousness since political emancipation requires a secular state; Bauer assumes that there isn’t any “space” remaining for social identities such as religion. According to Bauer, such religious demands are incompatible with the idea of the “Rights of Man”. True political emancipation, for Bauer, requires the abolition of religion.
[remember the jews will not give up their religion]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Jewish_Question
If you guys just read all his books like his followers, then the questions you ask wouldnt be questions
Artfldgr:
Do you really believe that Irish anti-Semitism reduces to Karl Marx?
And soon (like, tomorrow) we’ll be asking “Why does the United States hate Israel?”, if we’re to be the least bit honest with ourselves: Caroline Glick Show, https://youtu.be/isrxHK0HOB8?si=3QVJzr6cbamvDryk
Badges? Just shut-up, Israel: we don’t need no stinkin’ badges.
Um, not so much “the United States” as “‘Biden'”… and “his” minions….
I am reminded of a blog commenter of Irish ancestry taking a trip to Ireland who noted a cold response among the Irish to his visiting the ancestral homeland. “The cream left,” was the response. Those with drive and ambition left. IIRC, around half of Ireland emigrated after the potato famine. The cream left. The not-so-much-cream remained. So, no big surprise about Irish anti-Semitism.
(I’d made a similar argument about the Scots. 1700s: Hume and Watt. Outsize contribution of the Scots to the British Empire- with the emigration that implied. 2000s: zilch.)
A quarter to a half of my ancestry is Scots-Irish.
huxley made a good point about Ulysses. I started the book a half century ago, but never finished it. If I finish a tenth of the unread books on my bookshelves before I die, I’ll count myself well-read.
I tired of mincing with excuses on behalf of the careless, ignorant masses who want to claim “clean hands” as they stand to the side and watch (or don’t watch) “Biden” run amok, Barry. So, for me, the US it is.
Not only did Eamon de Valera visit the German Embassy in Dublin to express his condolences on Hitler’s death, but he did so well after the horrors of Auschwitz and other death camps had been revealed to the world.
sdferr on February 15, 2024 at 2:51 pm said:
Right alongside, we might ask: “Why does Norway hate Israel?” and “Why does Belgium hate Israel?”. These sorts of lists — whether superficially puzzling or no — will grow the closer we look and the longer we dwell.
No, Ireland stands out as particularly anti-Israel.
I am reminded of a blog commenter of Irish ancestry taking a trip to Ireland who noted a cold response among the Irish to his visiting the ancestral homeland. “The cream left,” was the response.
Gringo:
I went to Ireland as an American and they loved me. I asked my Irish friend and he explained that the Irish hate the Irish. You don’t want to be on the inside of those feuds. But for strangers, they’re beautiful.
He had the “cream” problem. He left for sunny California to become a well-paid computer programmer in Silicon Valley and didn’t look back. But when he visited, his old friends were … not so friendly.
The Irish have a word for it:
____________________________________
begrudgery (noun)
–(Irish informal) resentment of any person who has achieved success or wealth
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/begrudgery
Not many Irish are even nominally Christian these days.
Honestly Ireland has a complex about being Western and tied to the UK in general. And to some degree that is warranted given longstanding abuses, misrule, and so on by outsiders. However they also ignore those outsiders’ benefits, and this has resulted in a kind of toxic Third Worldism sort of like what we’d associate with South Africa, India, Indonesia, or the like. Not helped by the prevalence of Sinn Fein and the IRA.
These fuckers have a remarkable track record of being on the wrong side of almost every major conflict in the 20th century, from supporting the Central Powers in WWI to supporting Hamas now. There’s no shortage of Jew hatred in Irish culture and the need to curry Muslim votes and diplomatic support, but I think most of it traces to the failure of Home Rule and sour grapes towards the British, with a side effect of the IRA and SF being tied to a host of Islamist and “Arab Nationalist” terrorist groups. So they often conflate the Israelis with the Unionists and themselves with the “Palestinians” and go from there.
It’s not healthy or sane and while we are seeing some turmoil erupting against it we see seeing some push back it has not gone far enough and Dublin remains mostly obsessed with the North, sticking it to the British, and so on.
The new First Minister of Northern Ireland (still part of the UK) is Sinn Fein Vice President Michelle O’Neill.
She has expressed her views that Hamas will be a “future partner for peace. ”
Why do I expect that ‘the troubles” in N. Ireland may make a come back??
And recently I read (I forget where) that some Republic of Ireland politician stated that Ireland was “too white.”
And one can see online the women’s Irish vs Israeli basketball game in which the Irish team refused to shake hands with their opponents. The Israeli team got the last laugh; they kicked the ass of the Irish team.
As for my part, when I buy butter at Costco, I now buy the Costco / New Zealand butter instead of the Irish butter, though I am baffled as to how the butter from New Zealand is quite a bit less expensive than that of Ireland.
One comes from the other side of the planet, and the other from 3000 miles away; but the former is less expensive.
Go figure.
After an Algerian immigrant–of some years–stabbed some kids just because stabbing kids struck him as a good idea, there was a riot against such things. Authorities, of course, deplored such violence (the riot). As a result, it has been reported that saying “irish lives matter” is a crime.
I remember robert fisk who would become a verb wrote his 800 page thesis on irish neutrality then he became hezbollahs publicists
“I am reminded of a blog commenter of Irish ancestry taking a trip to Ireland who noted a cold response among the Irish to his visiting the ancestral homeland. “The cream left,” was the response.” Gringo
Leaving only the Black Irish to remain? At least for now but given immigration trends, Ireland will become Islamized along with the rest of Western Europe.
Are the Irish to be blamed for the O’Maroons they elect to govern them or the repulsive anti-Semitic actions of their national basketball team?
Seems so.
My brother worked for the US State Dept. in a technical support role. Many postings overseas. Our surname is not common in the US but is very common in Northern Ireland; or so my brother told me from looking at the Londonderry phone book.
Princess Anne was right, but only some not all?
Good point about Irish butter, John Tyler. I’ll look for an alternative.
I blame the Irish for James Joyce! 🙂
If they celebrated the Battle of Boyne, then Scotch Irish, Huxley. Don’t give in to ethnospelling modernism. Be retrograde. (As if anyone cares. haha)
And frankly I have never met an “American” [ that self identifying ancestral ethnicity of the upper south] that had the faintest awareness of that tribal militancy tradition. 200 years of residence on this continent might have left them still recognizing themselves as “Scotch-Irish” in origin, but minus any rememberance of the significance of the color orange so far as I noticed.
Of course, you might actually be Scots and Irish, in which case “Nevermind”
Or, if your Scottish ancestors were fron Argyll, rather than further east in Caledonia, then that would make them Scots-Scotch-Irish-Irish reflux or something …. as I am now losing track, and perhaps even more.
Then in 93 he became bin ladens publicist
Of course another part of this soup was otto skorzeny remember him he lived in ireland inbetween stints in egypt spain and argentina
At least for now but given immigration trends, Ireland will become Islamized along with the rest of Western Europe.
Geoffrey Britain:
Not quite yet. Ireland is getting much more immigration from Eastern Europe.
_________________________________
Ireland has always been a popular destination for immigrants for the last 50 years, particularly immigrants from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and the Czech Republic.
https://www.y-axis.com/news/where-do-migrants-to-ireland-come-from/
Of course, you might actually be Scots and Irish, in which case “Nevermind”
DNW:
Aye, I’m also a MacLennan on my mother’s side and I’ve got the tartan to prove it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clan_MacLennan
My Irish grandfather on my father’s side was apparently born out of wedlock and shipped as an orphan to New York City with just his name.
Then there’s my grandmother Antonita Romero from Chihuahua. My Irish grandfather fought for the US in WWI, then wandered around the US before settling in Santa Fe.
I’m an All-American mongrel and proud of it.
Though I do wish my father had taught me Spanish when I was young.
I once had a certain fascination with the Irish and the Celts in general.
Although I cannot say that I have ever had a good grasp of the national psychology of the Irish, ancient or modern, I do know that numbers of English writers had favorable things to say about ‘the race” in general; referring to them as inoffending and hospitable and even as attractive. (Bede and Edmund Campion for example) and we all recall Mayo of the Saxons. Though its origins may point to a somewhat different fundamental attitude between the so-called “races”
Yet, there is no doubt whatsoever of the attrocious and virtually genocidal behavior of the British who intended to colonize Ireland much as the Nazi’s figured to do with their General Government in the east. Dirty Jews and Slavs? Barbaric, barefooted, snot nosed Irish.
Of course when Parliament was sending in teams of searchers to comb through the manor houses of the remaining English Catholic aristocrat recusants, and considering bills to remove Catholic children from their parents (an impetus for the Gunpowder Plot according to one famous historian) one can hardly have expected the poor Celtic Irish, or even the acclimated and Irish-ized Anglo Norman Irish of the old pale, to have fared much better.
Hell is probably well populated with landlords who even interfered with the poor gathering kelp on the Atlantic beaches.
Anyone remember Blazing Saddles?
“But we don’t want the Irish!”
For the record, and you ” history buffs”
In my jocular remarks to Huxley concerning Argyll and Dal Riata I am not suggesting in the least that the resettlement of Ulster with plantation immigrants was with Northern Scots.
I think we all know better than that.
It appears that Princess Anne was right.
==
It was Princess Margaret.
The twist
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-30571335
He also trained the plo
The Irish Republic is an affluent country. It’s consumption levels are equal to those of Britain. It has not, in the last five generations, been a poor country when measured on a global scale, though it has been less affluent than Britain. Its parliamentary institutions have been in operation without interruption since 1923. At one time, it had a very vigorous sense of self. It was, as Cdl. Cahal Daly said, a society at prayer. It has discarded that. It’s doubtful Irish antagonism has much to do with the Church. A different hypothesis would be that Eurotrash publics, including Ireland’s are abnormally influenced by the attitudes of the word merchant class. It is modal among the word merchant class in occidential societies to side with the more disgusting party in any conflict. Question: why is our intelligentsia so perverse and malevolent?
==
Note the legislation the Varadkar ministry is sponsoring which criminalizes antagonism to a list of leftoid mascot groups. This is what you get when the politicians replicate the attitudes of the faculty.
I got nothing. Sitting this one out.
Re: Princess Margaret or Princess Anne on the Irish
Since two previous commenters are too shy or too lazy to cough up whatever they know or think they know:
____________________________________
In August 1979, Margaret’s cousin Lord Mountbatten and members of his family were killed by a bomb planted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army. That October, while on a fundraising tour of the United States on behalf of the Royal Opera House, Margaret was seated at a dinner reception in Chicago with columnist Abra Anderson and Mayor Jane Byrne. Margaret told them that the royal family had been moved by the many letters of condolence from Ireland. The following day, Anderson’s rival Irv Kupcinet published a claim that Margaret had referred to the Irish as “pigs”. Margaret, Anderson, and Byrne all issued immediate denials,] but the damage was already done. The rest of the tour drew demonstrations, and Margaret’s security was doubled in the face of physical threats
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Margaret,_Countess_of_Snowdon
____________________________________
I remember being shocked by that bombing, though not the quote. I don’t know the final truth either which way, but there’s the place to start.
However, it did point me to some fun quotes from Princess Margaret, younger sister to Queen Elizabeth II. Boy, I’d love to have been seated next to her at an otherwise dismal, dull affair.
__________________________________
I have no intention of telling people what I have for breakfast.
My children are not royal; they just happen to have the Queen for their aunt.
The Queen is the only person who can put on a tiara with one hand, while walking down stairs.
–Princess Margaret
“
Oh, I don’t know.
How about this. Without hate there is no ideological crusade. Without an ideological crusade and an enemy there is no attention collecting controversy. Without the attention grabbing controversy which they help preciptate and feed, there is no attention, no status nor income, and they are nothing, or nothing special.
It has actually been years since I paid for cable, and decades since I have passively sat through the presentations of professional loudmouths. [ Although their increasing capture of the Internet and their designing of directive algorithms makes them increasingly difficult to avoid]
And the fact is that on those few occasions when I see them because someone I am with has them on, the purveyors of this malevolent garbage strike me now as … morally insane … Or possessed.
There are a great many people who produce either nothing or very little of broad value, screaming for attention as if their lives, or livelihoods, depended on it.
And I guess they do.
Art Deco and huxley:
Thanks for the correction it was Princess Margaret and that quote I was referring to.
On a land tour, say, 20 or so years ago, which included a day or two in Northern Ireland, it was obvious from the glances which we were getting there that they did not like Americans.
This was the only time on the tour that we were told that we could not get out of the tour bus to look around.
It was go straight through town to our hotel, where the people who delivered our bags just about threw them into our room, and, after dinner, you could only go across the street to a safe bar whose entrance was guarded by some tough looking bouncers.
On the way to our hotel I noticed that there were many brick houses which had all sorts of anti-American propaganda scenes painted on their sides, and some were pro Palestinian, with an arm holding a rifle up in front of a Palestinian banner/ flag of some sort.
Didn’t many of the Irish end up as essentially slaves in the Caribbean? I admit, I am not familiar with Irish history other than some broad notion they were highly abused by the English and were maybe one of the latter Western European groups to be Christianized. It seems my late father said we had ” Scots – Irish , English and Welch and ancestry and maybe some Gypsy through our ” Lee ” family side. ( Apparently there is more than one type of ” Scott-Irish ” from what ” DNW was saying ? )
Re: Northern Ireland hostility to Americans
Snow on Pine:
I hadn’t heard that.
I have heard from Boston Irish and Irish Irish that it’s a poorly kept secret that it is American dollars from American Irish which largely kept the IRA afloat in those troubled days.
Didn’t many of the Irish end up as essentially slaves in the Caribbean
Jon baker:
So much I don’t know. So much I have to read. Halp, ChatGPT:
________________________________
Yes, during the 17th and 18th centuries, many Irish people were forcibly transported to the Caribbean as indentured servants or were deported as prisoners. While the conditions of indentured servitude were harsh and often compared to slavery, it’s important to distinguish between the two. Indentured servants, including those from Ireland, typically had contracts for a fixed number of years, after which they were supposed to gain their freedom, although in practice, many were treated poorly and their contracts were sometimes extended unjustly.
The term “slaves” is more accurately applied to the African people who were forcibly brought to the Americas and the Caribbean under the transatlantic slave trade, where they were subjected to chattel slavery, a condition of permanent and hereditary servitude.
The Irish who were sent to the Caribbean as indentured servants or prisoners experienced exploitation and suffering, but their legal status was different from that of enslaved Africans. The history of Irish servitude in the Caribbean is a complex and painful chapter that reflects the broader history of colonialism and forced labor during that period.
________________________________
So relieved that the Irish weren’t absolutely slaves. A good example of Chat’s Woke tendencies.
huxley
Poorly kept secret, indeed- even I had heard it. Which helps explain why Protestants in Northern Ireland might not have liked Americans. 🙂
jon baker, Huxley
Didn’t many of the Irish end up as essentially slaves in the Caribbean
I haven’t read it , but Michael Walsh’s book White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America looks worth investigating. Though “indentured servants” might be more accurate.
Regarding Protestant/Catholic Irish conflict, some of that carried over into the US. It has long been the custom to wear green to school on St. Patrick’s Day. I don’t recall what I wore, but I was quite aware that my family was partly Scots Irish Protestant. My sister wore orange some times. My brother told me that, tired of hearing green from his Irish Catholic principal, made it a point to wear orange on St. Patrick’s Day in 8th grade. The principal noticed. 🙂
Hello,
No, I don’t want to mislead you , not exactly.
I should have been more clear and bored everyone even more. The main quasi Celtic migrant groups that emigrated to the United States in the 1700s were from Ulster, and became those frontier dwelling populations so familiar from history prior to and after the Revolutionary War.
I say quasi Celtic because they were apparently an ethnically blended and reputedly militant border population of lowland Scots and English before migrating from northern England/ south Scotland to Ulster first, and then eventually on to Pennsylvania, Virginia, and points directly west.
That’s the standard thumbnail sketch, and I have seen nothing to refute that general outline. These people used to be referred to and self-identified as “Scotch-Irish”, the Irish part coming from their sojurn of some generations in Ulster.
There were also notable emigrations of “real” Scots to the Colonies too: sometimes in planned settlements. Apparently as relative latecomers they remained loyal to the crown in the Carolinas, whereas the Scotch-Irish largely identified as Americans. And they met in battle more than once. The famous battle of King’s Mountain has some elements of this split.
David Hackett Fischer is still the modern go-to historian on this topic as far as I am concerned.
https://www.amazon.com/Albions-Seed-British-Folkways-cultural/dp/0195069056
I guess modern Scottish people make a point of insisting they be called Scots. (Shrug) Although the husband of my cousin whose parents were from Edinburgh is the one who told me “Scottish” when I asked him how they had referred to themselves.
Huxley’s Scots-Irish was meant to convey the idea of one ancestor who was a Scot and another who was Irish, rather in parallel to someone who is German (and) Spanish, I guess.
It just happens to come off as similar to how the Ulster migrants identified their ancestry after arriving here.
There were of course Irish Irish in the Colonies too. I even came across an amusing reference in an old family recod where someone referred to one of the males marrying an “Irish, Irish” woman. Red hair and all was mentioned. Haha Don’t recall her maiden name exactly. Dunville or something.
Doesn’t sound too Irish to me.
Many poorly-off, Irish youngsters immigrated—or were sent—to Canada, especially Quebec (if those youngsters were Catholic, as they often were).
The result over several generations is a certain number of true Quebecois with Anglo-Saxon names….
Could be, OTOH, that the Irish are actually “leading edge”….
“UN Relief Chief: Hamas is not a terrorist group for us”—
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/385294
From my limited experience,
The Irish stupidly construct the following (false) analogy:
“We Irish Catholics are to our land and history as the Palestinians are to their land and history.”
They hated the British and the enemy of their enemy was their friend, even if that meant siding with the Nazis. Hence DeValera’s telegram.
My ancestors came from Ireland. I saw a video some film student made of their family. We’re likely distant relatives. I watched and thought, “Wow. Dodged a bullet. Thank goodness my great grandfather left.”
The Otters (Luttrells), Burkes, and McClures got out while the gettin’ was good. Only to enlist in the Union Army and get their asses shot off. But it was for the best of causes. And I’m here. Thank you, my Irish elders.
But it’s no more going back to Ireland for me. The old days are gone forever, sure.
“Sinn Fein publicly supported the Palestinian cause.”
Of course! Commies have always supported the Pallies.
They hated the British and the enemy of their enemy was their friend, even if that meant siding with the Nazis.
The Brits were no friends of the Jews in the 30s and 40s. They restricted and eventually cut off Jewish immigration into Palestine, stranding hundreds of thousands in Europe to be killed by the Nazis, while allowing unrestricted Arab migration there. So even British antisemitism wasn’t enough to make the Irish friends of the Jews.
Ireland has been on my bucket list of places to visit, but maybe I’ll have to reconsider.
Indeed they put haj amin in power, instead of his brother they double crossed the arabs that lawrence had encouraged the leader of the baghdad farhud ghailani was the son of one of the first post occupation prime ministers in iraq they gave monies to ibn saud as well as abdullah
And yet, Robert Emmet Briscoe, a Jew from an Orthodox Jewish family, was a prominent figure in the Irish War of Independence, and subsequently elected mayor of Dublin in 1956.
His son, Benjamin, also served as mayor Dublin.
Gringo on February 15, 2024 at 4:14 pm said:
I am reminded of a blog commenter of Irish ancestry taking a trip to Ireland who noted a cold response among the Irish to his visiting the ancestral homeland. “The cream left,” was the response. Those with drive and ambition left. IIRC, around half of Ireland emigrated after the potato famine. The cream left. The not-so-much-cream remained. So, no big surprise about Irish anti-Semitism.
That “commenter” was me. A good friend, another doctor born in Ireland, was the source for my theory. He was also the source for many funny stories about the Irish. One was about a shop owner in Cobh, an island in Cork Harbor, where my friend grew up. The shop owner discovered someone had stolen a new TV set. He called the Garda, the Irish police, but as usual they were useless. He then ran down to the ferry terminal, which is the only way off the island unless you have a car. There were the thieves and the TV set. He held them until the Garda arrived. After that the residents of Cobh began calling him “Kojack” after the TV show. He was even called upon a few times to solve minor crimes.
My friend, whose father was a ship’s pilot in Cork Harbor, told his father he wanted to be a doctor. The father knocked him down and called him a “bloody snob.” My father did not want me to go to college so I went on a scholarship. At least he didn’t attack me.
Oh, I don’t know.
==
You’re referring to a small segment of the word merchant element.
there was also a novel, I can’t find the name of, was about the real life version of the Liam Devlin in Eagle has Landed, in the story, he was an IRA figure he worked the republic side in the Spanish Civil War, then was captured,
Another and yet: Irish writer and diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote one of the best books I know on the history of Israel: “The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism” (1986). It’s very sympathetic to Israel and the Zionist project. Not so sympathetic to the Brits.
Having grown up in Massachusetts as a child of native Bostonians, I’m pretty familiar with Irish-American political attitudes. The hatred of the Boston (and Springfield, and Holyoke, and Greenfield, and Pittsfield…) Irish for the English–and their American stand-ins, the Brahmins–was still burning fiercely in the 1970s-1980s. They didn’t have much use for Jews either. But it was the English they hated.
@Miguel Cervantes
Agreed except for
The Rashidis defrauded and double crossed them first, habitually over promising and under delivering, while demanding essentially divine right to be Lord of All Arabs while being unable to secure both of the Holy Cities even after the Ottoman capitulation (the garrison remained defiant until 1919).
The Western Allies figured this out and also realized from contacts in Syria and Mesopotamia that very few Arabs actually wanted to bow their necks to the Rashidis. So the British and French unsurprisingly confronted the Rashidis about this and justified “altering the deal.”
This gives a pretty thorough shellacking to the traditional narrative.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248951099_Myth_in_the_desert_or_not_the_Great_Arab_Revolt
certainly Lawrence thought he had betrayed their trust, and this worked against the Hashemites, when they tried to hold the Hejaz, the Rashidis were the lead opposition of Ibn Azziz, the future Ibn Saud, who had taken the weapons the Brits had handed him through the likes of St John Philby, and used them against the Rashidis and other tribes, the late king Abdullah was of the Rashidi,
When I think of indentured people being held beyond their contract or poorly treated I ask myself this question. Why didn’t that particular group of people stick together to form bands that could easily access weapons and plan successful escapes. The only answer it that each believed their own personal success was to not support the other. I wonder if things get really bad here in the US how many will form together against the “overlord”?
I always thought the Irish were a bit funny and daft when it came to politics, forming their political opinions based on what UK and continental Europe were thinking on any given topic.
Now that I look at it again on a brief farewell scroll before this topic disappears, it appears to me to be a more weighty question and important observation on many levels than I noticed earlier.
Whether it is fear or comparative opportunism or some combination that demotivates some of the resistance party members, the effect on those sticking to their guns as other complainers flee or fail to show is the same. A condition worse than before, unless death is the result and judged better than the alternative.
And as regards forming resistance groups and successfully resisting tyranny be it on a grand or small scale, the historical record demonstrates that one of the main preoccupations of the tyrant and slave driver, is to nip such impulses in the bud with threats and promises. And of course whether it was in the Australian penal colonies, or the Gulag, or in almost any situation on that trend line, the program is to inhibit, limit, and control what the subjects may say to each other, to place informers or buy informers among them, and to retaliate to any rule breaking or decree with shocking and seemingly disproportionate and brutal retaliation. A retaliation meant to ensure the targets felt the pain and observers got the nessage.
Those whose ability to eat depends on your labor or obedience, will stop at nothing: as it is for them a matter of life and death. And that is something the target, be he an Australian penal colonist or an American working class man watching his life cracking under organized assault, just cannot quite grasp.
“Why should they care so much? Don’t they have anything better to do than try and control me?” he asks; never suspecting that the answer is, ” No. As far as they are concerned, no.”
Wow, a fascinating discussion! I have nothing to add but: Eamonn DeValera was truly a right bastard, and an embezzler also (he used money he raised in the USA to fund his Irish Independent newspaper). Ireland would have been much less poor for decades had DeValera died and Michael Collins lived.
But give him one bit of credit. His recalcitrance cost the UK the port of Cobh/Queenstown and the airfield at Shannon a decade before World War II (use of those would have saved thousands of lives of sailors). DeValera did quietly sneak Allied pilots who crashed in Ireland across the border to the UK in the North. German pilots who went down in Ireland were interned for the duration, which was the proper thing under neutrality.