Thoughts on the Irish Antisemitism report
The limitations of yesterday’s report on antisemitism in Ireland were, in fairness, openly admitted by the report’s authors on the final page of the document. After laying out 143 alleged incidents of anti-Jewish hate in Ireland over six months, the authors issued the following caveats. The emphasis is in the original:
“It is not a population-representative prevalence study. It does not estimate actual incident rates across the whole country. It does not draw statistical comparisons with other jurisdictions… It offers a community-generated baseline of lived experience that previously had no systematic public record in Ireland”.
If you wish to discount the report, or say that the claims in it are almost impossible to verify, then there is more than enough in that disclaimer for you to do so. In shorthand terms, it is not, nor does it pretend to be, a scientifically infallible document.
Of the incidents counted in the report, just under a quarter (24%) are described as having been reported to “an authority”, a term that does not automatically mean the Gardai. It may mean a line manager, for example. So, the level of actual claimed criminality in the report is also very low.
However, if you accept the limitations of the report on the downside, you must also accept them on the upside. As the report also points out (emphasis, again, in the original):
“It undercounts. It filters out the most vulnerable. It reflects only those who still believe that documentation matters. Based on this data, international data regarding reporting, and our own experience, it is clear that the real scale of antisemitic incidents in Ireland is far larger than the number of incidents reported here”.
My own view on this, for what it’s worth, is that there’s more evidence for the latter position than the former. This report makes no count at all, for example, of anti-semitism experienced online. Simply perusing the replies to RTE and Irish Times tweets covering the contents of the report would tend to lead one to believe that 143 incidents is on the low side. Some selected quotes from social media, responding directly to RTE and Irish Times news reports. All of the accounts below are geo-confirmed to be based on the island of Ireland, according to X’s location tracking:
“With all due respect, no-one wants them here” (The “them” in the post refers to the Irish Jewish Council, since no other group is named)
“Oh wise up Irish times. Stop giving oxygen to the eternal victims. Genocide supporters of any hocus pocus religious order ARE NOT VICTIMS. ISRAEL and it’s genocide supporters will be rightly hated EVERYWHERE THEY GO 👊. Israel is run by Nazis. Israelis vote these Nazis in 💣”
“Have they tried being less Jewish?”
“Is it anti-Semitic if I dont care in any way about these perpetual victims? Are these new laws they lobbied for, designed to force us to care? When do us Irish get our own special word for the “famine” genocide? Or are special words reserved for the self-proclaimed “chosen ones”
“The Jewish Representative Council are just sharing their anti semitic lines to take, probably helped by the Israeli spy”
“Tell them to go back to Israel then 👍 it is their chosen land, as they say !!”
“European Ashkenazi Jews are not Semites so disliking them is not Anti-Semitic.”
“RTE and their Zionist agenda is blatant for all to see. When the next compulsory viewing of Schindler’s list during prime time?? Pathetic”
“Oi Vey!! The Goyim are noticing!!! Thats very anti semitic of them!!”
There’s nine examples, right there, of fairly blatant Irish-based antisemitism (or anti-Jewishness, for the pedant above) online. There were many more to choose from, not including the great number of people who appear to honestly think that simply inserting the word “Zionist” instead of “Jew” does the trick in terms of insulating them from charges of anti-jewish bigotry.
Nevertheless, it is true that a great many Irish people do believe this little verbal insurance policy insulates them from the charges. After all, it is objectively true that not every criticism of the state of Israel is, or must de-facto be, antisemitic. And it is also true that Zionism is a political position, not a religious faith. But this position has gross limitations.
For example, there was great hullaballoo over a line in the report which cited as antisemitic an incident where an Irish pub put up a sign saying that “no Zionists were welcome” in the building. This, critics claimed, was not an example of anti-semitism but a political statement. Little more than the equivalent of a publican with strong pro-abortion views writing “pro-lifers not welcome in this pub”.
But of course, even in the very heated environment of Ireland’s abortion referendum, no such signs were erected in or on pubs. At the height of the Rwandan genocide against their Tutsi neighbours, no such signs were erected about Hutus, of whom there are not many fewer in Ireland than Jews. There are by most counts almost twice as many ethnic Serbs in Ireland as there are Jews, yet you will not find an Irish pub that erected such a sign during the Bosnian genocide.
This by any measure should pose a reasonable question: What is it about the “Zionists” that appears to drive a particular section of Irish society completely and utterly doo-lally?
This brings me to another point: If you accept the “Zionist not Jewish” framing, you must de-facto accept that you are placing a conditionality upon Jews: “We are fine with Jews so long as they are willing to denounce the world’s only majority Jewish country”. This confers explicit political conditions on a person’s acceptance of another person’s Judaism, which is strange and interesting.
Why? Well, it is interesting that, as a publicly identifiable – though Roman Catholic – Zionist, I have never once experienced an incident of “anti-zionist hate” in public. I have never been shouted at, nor abused, despite being a public figure who clearly and unambiguously defends the right for the Jews to have a country in their ancestral homeland of Israel.
If the country were uniformly “anti-zionist”, as is claimed, I would expect this to be different. Indeed, I have been repeatedly warned by concerned friends over the last three years that my public skepticism of the Palestinian cause might cause me “trouble” on nights out. Yet that has never happened, despite my being one of, certainly, the fifty most prominent “Zionists” in the country and somebody recognised often enough to have an interaction with a reader almost every time I leave the house.
The most I get is online abuse about it, a great percentage of which references Jewishness – like accusing me of taking “shekels” or being a “goy” or speculating about whether I was circumcised. In other words the tone is that if one is non-Jewish, and yet a Zionist, one must be doing the bidding of Jews. Yet these people still insist themselves not to be antisemitic.
This is, for the record, entirely untrue of Jewish people who hold the exact same views as I do: Their (perceived and often much less public) Zionism is regularly met with hostility linked to symbols of their faith. The Star of David, for example, is a religious symbol which I do not wear in public since I am not a Jew, yet one Jewish person I know who does wear it was told to “take that disgusting swastika off you” by an Irish woman in a Supermarket. Yesterday’s report details a legion of other such incidents.
Many Irish people firmly believe, of course, that the accusations of widespread anti-semitism in Ireland are unfair and exaggerated and are used as a political tool to suppress criticism of Israel. I think it only fair to note that if this is a tactic to suppress criticism of Israel, then fewer tactics in history have been such monumental failures, given that the Irish Oireachtas spent more time on Gaza last year than the parliaments of France, Germany, and Italy combined. Nevertheless, as Editor I am obliged to give space to such voices, and will do so in balance to this piece should one of my colleagues who feel that way care to write one.
But a weakness of that position is that it also poses the question as to a “why?” – why would the world bother smearing Ireland as antisemitic given that, clearly, Israel and the United States have bigger fish to fry? People may believe, and are welcome to continue believing, that the entire narrative is some kind of Zionist conspiracy to hurt Ireland.
But then, consider that position: “We’re not antisemitic, it’s just that there’s a concerted campaign by the global Zionists to smear us”.
It is not, perhaps, as persuasive as its advocates might hope to believe.
