President Higgins’s hatred for Israel is bringing shame on Ireland

Two striking, sick things happened in Dublin this weekend. On Saturday, at a ‘pro-Palestine’ demo, people waved the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah. With their faces wrapped tight in keffiyehs, the must-have fashion item of every self-righteous Israel-hater, the lowlifes merrily displayed the banners of those two armies of anti-Semites that have sworn themselves to the annihilation of the world’s only Jewish state. Then, on Sunday, a Jew was ejected from a Holocaust memorial event, after she dared to protest against Irish president Michael D Higgins when he used his speech at the memorial event to take yet another pompous swipe at Israel.

So this is Ireland. A country where you can openly honour Jew-killers but you can’t rebuke a president for politicising a Holocaust event. A country where you can publicly cheer the neo-fascist militia of Hamas that recently carried out the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, but you can’t express your displeasure with the president for using the Holocaust as a soapbox from which to bash Israel. A country where you can swan through the capital waving the flags of terror groups that have promised to excise the ‘cancerous’ Jews from the Middle East, but heaven help you if you politely suggest the president should leave the Jewish State alone for one night.

The sight of that Jewish lady being dragged from Mansion House as President Higgins swerved from remembering the slain Jews of the 1940s to slamming the Jewish State of today was horrendous. It was Ireland’s official memorial event for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. A small group of protesters turned their backs on Higgins when he brought up Israel, when he went from lamenting the Nazis’ ‘extermination of the Jewish population of Europe’ to fuming about Israel’s ‘unimaginable’ assaults on ‘civilian life’ in Gaza. They were right to protest. Higgins’s exploitation of a commemoration for dead Jews to bemoan the Jewish nation was a new low, proof of the depthless cynicism of Israelophobia.

Even before he laid into Israel, Higgins was engaging in a species of Holocaust relativism. Like many in the cultural establishment, he seems incapable of mentioning the Nazis’ industrialised vaporisation of six million Jews without also mentioning the other groups they targeted for oppression. We must remember the ‘other categories’ that were ‘defined as “Other”’ in Nazi Europe, he said: ‘The disabled, Romani, those of same-sexual orientation…’ The lesson the Holocaust ‘offers to the world’, he said, is that we should always be on our guard against ‘cruelty and hatred’. Not only anti-Semitism but also ‘Islamophobia, xenophobia, racism, homophobia…’.

This use of the Holocaust to make a finger-wagging homily about ‘prejudice’ in general downplays what was distinctive about this cruellest of history’s crimes. Yes, the Nazis persecuted various groups. But it was the Jews they targeted for total eradication. They built whole factories for the sole purpose of ridding humanity of its Jews. The likes of Higgins think they are being ‘inclusive’ when they remind us of the ‘other categories’ that suffered under the Nazis, but in truth they are diluting the unique horror of the Nazis’ frenzied mission to murder every last Jew on Earth. The lesson of the Holocaust is not that bigotry is bad – it’s that anti-Semitism is an entirely specific derangement driven by a murderous, conspiracist belief that Jews are the source of humanity’s every ill. To cloud this ‘lesson’ with platitudinous inanities about why we should be nice to everyone is unforgivable, especially with anti-Semitism soaring once more.

Then Higgins got on to Israel. Jewish spokespeople, even a Holocaust survivor, had pleaded with him to avoid ‘the Israel issue’ in his memorial speech. But he ignored them. It seems winning the moral favour of Dublin’s bourgeois Israel-haters counts for more than the feelings of Dublin’s Jews. Higgins denounced Hamas’s attack of 7 October and then moved on to Israel’s ‘unimaginable’ response to it. Israel has laid waste to ‘women and children’, ‘homes’ and ‘the necessary institutions for life itself’, he said. His speech hinted at a direct comparison between what the Nazis did 80 years ago and what Israel is doing today. For example, he went from talking about the ‘emaciated’ Jews of the death camps to saying we mustn’t look away from ‘the empty bowls of the starving [in Gaza]’.

Can we talk about how loathsome this is? To use a Holocaust memorial event to hector and damn the nation that was born from the fires of that Holocaust is beyond contemptible. It almost defies belief that Higgins would switch so shamelessly from commemorating the Nazi genocide of the Jews to rebuking Israel for its ‘unimaginable’ response to Hamas’s genocidal assault of 7 October. There are any number of recent, far bloodier wars he could have referenced in the service of his banal belief that the Holocaust was about ‘cruelty and hatred’. Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, the Congo. Why Gaza? Why Israel? Why that tiny nation built by the survivors of the very barbarism Higgins was meant to be commemorating? Shame on Ireland’s president for engaging in such a low and dangerous debasement of historical truth to the end of hectoring the Jewish nation.

This transformation of the Jews’ darkest moment into a megaphone for berating the Jewish State is ever-present in ‘pro-Palestine’ activism. On every one of those hate marches there is someone branding Israel ‘the New Nazis’. Protesters often mangle the Star of David with the Nazi swastika on their placards to drive home their sick belief that the Jews have become the very monsters they were once plagued by. It’s Jew-taunting, plain and simple. As Howard Jacobson once said, this feverish comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany is entirely intended ‘to wound Jews’, to ‘punish them with their own grief’. This is the obscene dynamic that more mainstream anti-Israel political figures are playing into, unwittingly or not.

Ireland’s elites are playing a lethal game. They scandalously pressed the International Court of Justice to water down its definition of ‘genocide’ in order that Israel might finally be found guilty of that crime. They watched as Israel shut its embassy in Dublin from sheer exasperation with Ireland’s rulers. And the president can’t even get through one commemoration for Europe’s slaughtered Jews without pontificating about the Jewish State. Every Irish person should be horrified that their nation is now a land where the flag of Jew-killers is waved in the streets while Jews are silenced for opposing the political exploitation of their people’s suffering.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy