What’s the Matter with Ireland?

Original article here

One of the more bizarre artifacts of the Israel-Hamas War—which Hamas started just over two years ago, when it attacked, murdered, and kidnapped more than 1,000 Israeli civilians—is the exposure of the rabid and rampant antisemitism among the Irish, especially Irish Catholics. One might expect that Catholics—whose popes have denounced antisemitism off and on since the sixth century and have clearly and repeatedly condemned it since the 1930s—would be understanding of the Jewish people’s plight and willing to listen to Pope Pius XI’s admonition that “Antisemitism is inadmissible. Spiritually, we are all Semites.” In the case of many Irish Catholics, however, one would be wrong.

Throughout the recently ended war, then-Irish President Michael Higgins, a nasty little troll of a man, never missed an opportunity to attack Israel or disparage “Zionism.” Like most of his fellow antisemites, he tried to cloak his loathing of Jews in political terms, but also like the rest, he failed miserably. It was always clear that he hated Jews and used “Israel” and “Zionism” to try (unsuccessfully) to appear less grotesque. While never bothering to take formal action against the Hamas terrorists who started the war and intentionally targeted civilians in the most horrific ways possible, just six months after Israel’s retaliation began, the Irish government announced its intention to join South Africa (of all countries) in its case at the United Nations’ International Court of Justice, charging Israel with genocide. Eleven months ago exactly, the government did precisely that, officially filing its declaration of intervention “in the case concerning Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip.” While many nations loathe Israel and many peoples detest the Jews, only the Irish Catholics and the corrupt remnants of the African National Congress are brash and hateful enough to accuse them of crimes against humanity before the court created 80 years ago, in the wake of the Holocaust, specifically to ensure that Jews were never targeted again.

In an effort to prove that antisemitism is not relegated to the Republic of Ireland, earlier this week, members of Sinn Féin—the political arm of the Irish Republican Army—introduced and shepherded legislation through the city council to fly the Palestinian flag over Belfast Town Hall for 24 hours, in a show of “solidarity” with the Palestinian people. Interestingly, the virtue-signaling stunt didn’t quite last its intended 24 hours, as Irish Protestants—carrying the Union Jack before them—nearly started a riot and forced the city council to remove the Palestinian flag early.

Not surprisingly, the Catholic Sinn Féin has led the Northern Irish opposition to Israel for years, especially after October 7, including calls for boycotts, accusations of genocide, and demands for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador to the UK. All things considered, over the past two-plus years, Irish Catholics—in the South and the North—have been among the most aggressively anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and antisemitic people outside of the Muslim world (and the Ivy League, natch).

But why?

If you scour the internet, you’ll find dozens of explanations for the Irish Catholics’ detestation of Israel and the Jewish people. Some of these are intelligent and interesting, but most are not. Most are simplistic and are themselves grounded in antisemitic tropes. What most people forget, and most of these explanations ignore, is the fact that Irish Catholics have been conditioned over the decades to see their plight as one that serves as a shining example to other oppressed people throughout the world. Irish Catholics, in particular, detest Israel in large part because they see themselves as proto-Palestinians. And, indeed, their struggle for freedom and the Palestinian resistance have something in common, something that explains their affinity for one another, something that, in their collective imaginations, unifies them in the struggles against “colonialist” oppressors, something that can be summed up in three short words: the Soviet Union.

It’s important to note here that throughout the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) and the Irish Civil War (1921-1923), only one country in the world established diplomatic ties with the fledgling republic, the Soviet Union. Although Lenin stopped just short of formal recognition of the Republic (for fear of alienating the British too completely), he nevertheless praised Irish republican leaders and provided them with loans and other financial support. Starting in 1925, Stalin supported the anti-treaty Irish Republican Army with funding, weapons, and logistical help. In 1927, the IRA pledged that if war should ever break out between Great Britain and the Soviet Union, it would enter the war on the Soviets’ side. After 1969, the Soviets limited their support for the Irish resistance, backing the Original IRA against the more aggressive, more active, and nominally less Marxist Provisional IRA, which split from the main faction that year. Nevertheless, throughout the 1970s, IRA members continued to train in the Soviet Union and were provided arms by the Soviets and Soviet allies (namely North Korea).

The story of Soviet involvement in the Palestinian Territories is similarly rife with support for radicals and advocacy of ideological hatred for “oppressors.” It is the Soviet game plan in Ireland, only on steroids.

Although the Soviets officially supported the U.N. partition of Palestine in 1947, they also continued to call for the creation of a Palestinian state for years afterward, seeing such a state as a thumb in the proverbial eye of the United States and Great Britain. In 1964, when the Palestinian Liberation Organization was formed, the Soviet Union initially refused to provide support and funding for the operation. Soviet leaders had already identified a different faction of the resistance and a different leader they would use to advance their goals in the area. That faction was Fatah, and the leader was Yasser Arafat. According to multiple former Soviet sources, KGB leaders forged Arafat’s birth certificate, trained him at their Balashikha special ops school near Moscow, funded him and Fatah lavishly for years, and constantly provided him and his acolytes with weapons and combat instruction.

Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former intelligence chief of Soviet Romania, who defected to the West in 1978, is perhaps the most important and prolific source of information on Soviet operations in the Palestinian Territories. He told the story as follows:

Before I defected to America from Romania, leaving my post as chief of Romanian intelligence, I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. I also sent two cargo planes to Beirut a week, stuffed with uniforms and supplies. Other Soviet bloc states did much the same. Terrorism has been extremely profitable for Arafat. According to Forbes magazine, he is today the sixth wealthiest among the world’s “kings, queens & despots,” with more than $300 million stashed in Swiss bank accounts….

Arafat was an important undercover operative for the KGB. Right after the 1967 Six Day Arab-Israeli war, Moscow got him appointed to chairman of the PLO. Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, a Soviet puppet, proposed the appointment. In 1969 the KGB asked Arafat to declare war on American “imperial-Zionism” during the first summit of the Black Terrorist International, a neo-Fascist pro-Palestine organization financed by the KGB and Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi. It appealed to him so much, Arafat later claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, “imperial-Zionism” was a Moscow invention, a modern adaptation of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and long a favorite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The KGB always regarded anti-Semitism plus anti-imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism….

In an article for The Spectator last spring, Irish writer Rory Hanrahan noted that the modern Irish Left “steeped in a simplistic oppressor-oppressed binary, finds this [Palestinian] narrative [created largely by the Soviets] irresistible.” He also notes that “By the 1980s, Belfast murals in nationalist areas showed IRA and PLO fighters united under the slogan ‘IRA-PLO one struggle.’”

All of this is, of course, consistent with the spread of antisemitism throughout the West. As I have noted in these pages, leftist academics—some Soviet-influenced, others more traditionally Marxist—are largely responsible for teaching American and European youths to hate Israel and Jewish people. More than three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, communism is still a source of countless grave evils, not all of which have been targeted at “capitalism” specifically.