(National Post-Canada) Terry Glavin - Since the bloody pogrom of Oct. 7, which drew Israel into a last-straw determination to smash the Hamas terror infrastructure in Gaza entirely, the Irish legislature came 16 votes away from approving a motion to expel the Israeli ambassador and 10 votes away from approving a motion to haul Israel before the International Criminal Court. Ireland is an EU outlier on the matter of Israel. Irish politicians like to claim that it's because of Ireland's history of dispossession, occupation and resistance to colonialism - three virtues fashionably attributable nowadays to the Palestinians. But there's something else in the Irish psyche that's impolite to mention. Not a few of Ireland's celebrated champions of the underdog, its heroes of Irish freedom, were vulgar antisemites and Nazi collaborators. Mary Lou McDonald assumed the reins of Sinn Fein party in 2018. As a social justice activist in Dublin, she spoke at a commemoration for Sean Russell, a 1930s-era IRA chief of staff who spent time in Nazi Germany training in the use of explosives. Russell died of a perforated ulcer in a Nazi submarine that was returning him to Ireland to lay the groundwork for an IRA sabotage campaign to assist a planned Nazi invasion of British-controlled Ulster. Today's proud Irish "pro-Palestine" shouters would rather forget that Ze'ev Jabotinsky, founder of the Zionist Irgun organization in British Mandate Palestine, wrote to IRA leader and later Irish president Eamon de Valera asking to learn about Ireland's guerrilla war against the British. De Valera invited Jabotinsky to Ireland, where he stayed for several weeks. It's fair enough to empathize with the Palestinians. But there is a difference between the IRA at its worst and savage moments, and Hamas in its routine conduct. The IRA never vowed to slaughter every British loyalist on the island of Ireland and hunt every Englishman to the ends of the Earth, to the ends of time. That's what Hamas has in mind for the Jews. The Irish should remember that.
2023-11-24 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive