Ireland’s insane witch-hunting of Ed Sheeran

Every day is an uphill struggle to not feel ashamed of being Irish. Watching the land of Swift, Joyce and Wilde become the land of Kneecap, Sally Rooney and infinity tits in keffiyehs would shatter even the hardest Irish heart. This week has been especially challenging. Dublin’s insufferably smug media class has risen up like a racket of demented banshees against – wait for it – Ed Sheeran. His crime? He refuses to hate the Jewish State as ferally and rabidly as they do.

The Sheeranphobia that has swept the Emerald Isle is insane. Five minutes ago Sheeran was being celebrated in Ireland as the ‘culturally Irish’ penner of popular if vanilla love songs. Now he’s damned as a ‘gutless coward’ and an ‘extreme disappointment’ who should ‘never feel welcome in Ireland again’. Got that? Unless you bow and scrape before the Palestine cult and gorge on all its filthy falsehoods about Israel, Ireland will blacklist you. McCarthyism in a tricolour balaclava.

It all springs from the Macklemore scandal. The irritant rapper famous for his 14-year-old song ‘Thrift Shop’ and his Pavlovian wails of ‘Free Palestine’ was dropped from Sheeran’s US tour after stadium bosses balked at his Israel-bashing. All of Sheeran’s other support acts and even his house band – Irish group Beoga – walked out in solidarity with Macklemore. Sheeran’s statement saying he hates the ‘suffering’ on ‘both sides’ in the Israel-Gaza war made things worse. Doesn’t he know that sympathy for the Jews who were raped and butchered by the Islamofascists of Hamas is tantamount to a thoughtcrime in virtuous circles? Educate yourself, Ed.

Sheeran’s failure to convert to the crackpot cult of Israelophobia has made him the bête noire of every wanker on the internet. It’s especially bad in Ireland, a land that has traded the cassock for the keffiyeh, swapping Vatican dogma for the godless, truthless rituals of Palestinianism. ‘Irish people now HATE Ed Sheeran’, said a ‘socialist’ diatribe on YouTube that’s had 350,000 views. Fake news. I’m Irish and I don’t hate him.

It’s genuinely mad. ‘Ireland disowns Ed Sheeran over Macklemore stance’, as a headline in Newsweek summed it up. Disowns! The Irish radio station Classic Hits Radio has even removed Sheeran’s songs from its playlists for the ‘foreseeable future’. Unpersoning a musician for failing to parrot political orthodoxies? How very Stalin of you. I often listen to Classic Hits when I’m in Ireland. Not anymore. I prefer to get my tunes from radio stations that don’t do the dirty work of the digital inquisition, which prize artistry more highly than orthodoxy.

Then came the screeds. ‘Ed Sheeran should never feel welcome in Ireland ever again’, said a headline in the Irish Mirror. Sheeran is a ‘gutless coward’, the writer frothed. He said Sheeran likes to think of himself as a ‘son of Eire’ – his grandparents are Irish – but in truth he’s the ‘very antithesis of what it is to be Irish’. I’ll say it if no one else will: making Irishness contingent on hating the world’s only Jewish state is crazy. To define Ireland’s morality by its hostility towards Jewish sovereignty risks turning Ireland into an envious, bigoted, stupid backwater.

The infantile decree that to be Irish is to be a keffiyeh-wearing ponce who moans morning, noon and night about Israel’s ‘settler colonialism’ is gospel in Ireland’s cultural establishment. Aaron Rowe, the Irish crooner who withdrew from Sheeran’s tour, titillated both the Irish and British bourgeois left with his statement about how the Irish are all too familiar with ‘genocide, forced famine and violent occupation’. Oh change the record. No one in the Republic of Ireland has been famished or occupied for more than a hundred years.

It’s the Irish elite’s depthless capacity for self-pity that gets me. The Famine jabber in particular is appropriation of the most nauseating kind. They plunder the horrors of history and pull on the rags of the starved to try to coat themselves in the holy shroud of victimhood. If these moral bloviators knew the first thing about history, they’d know the Irish have far more in common with Israel than with Hamas-ruled Gaza. Two tiny, plucky countries with huge diasporas who won their freedom through force of arms against the British. And yet the Trinity grads of the keffiyeh mob identify more with a death cult that rapes Jews for sport.

What arrogance to say that Sheeran is no longer welcome in Ireland. And coming from the same people who say the Eritrean fella who arrived five minutes ago and who now aggressively panhandles outside the GPO is welcome and you’re racist if you say otherwise. We are witnessing the Kneecapification of Irish culture. Ireland is overrun by ridiculous fake rebels who hate the Brits but bow down to the EU, who bemoan Ireland’s sexist history yet insist women throw open their spaces to cocks in frocks, and who pose as anti-fascists while being curiously, hysterically and tirelessly obsessed with the Jewish homeland. ‘Jewish billionaires who control America’ – that’s who Kneecap’s manager blamed the Macklemore scandal on. I guarantee you he will face no consequences whatsoever for this.

So there you have it: you can wang on about the Jews who control America but you can’t say there’s suffering on both sides in the Holy Land. You can fret over ‘ZioNazis’ but you can’t choose to be apolitical about the Middle East. The Sheeran scandal really has exposed what a one-eyed, hateful and authoritarian cult Palestinianism has become. And Ireland has been conquered by it.