Only a deranged pathogen could boycott Israel while murder gangs roam every other state in the region
THE most serious event of the past week wasn’t related to the ‘ Prime Time Investigates’ libel of Fr Kevin Reynolds, and it wasn’t what Cardinal Sean Brady did or didn’t do nearly 40 years ago. Far more serious than either for the health of this Republic – though connected to both by a sanctimonious tissue of lethal intolerance – was the intimidation of the band Dervish into cancelling a tour of Israel.
Dervish’s website was hit by venomous abuse from antiIsraeli activists, encouraged by the Irish Palestine Solidarity Campaign ( IPSC). Every bit as sinister as this has been the silence from politicians and “civil liberties groups”. The exception, of course, being Alan Shatter, who is Jewish. It was as if the intellectual bullies of the IPSC were trying to vindicate my recent suggestion that the largest threat to personal freedom these days comes not from government, but from single- interest pressure groups.
Tactics and techniques that would be called fascist by liberals if used against them were at the heart of the campaign against Dervish. For in the left- liberal culture, certain subjects are beyond the usual courtesies of a tolerant civilisation, and instead may be subjected to outright intoler- ance and bullying. Its targets are the Catholic Church, American Republicans, and of course Israel. So the libelling of Fr Kevin Reynolds by ‘ Prime Time Invstigates’ was not just a bizarre departure from some cultural norm, but actually was its very quintessence. In other words, when a black African woman and an Irish Catholic priest contradict one another, it is axiomatic that the white man must be lying. Indeed, the prevailing dogma rules that the opposite is quite simply impossible. With that contaminated mindset at the helm, no wonder RTE sailed right into the iceberg upon a sunlit noon.
And one can go absolutely nowhere with this culture. It permits no conversation, no exchange of ideas and no freedom of speech. One complies, or one is metaphorically lynched, take your pick. It is the liberal version of Sharia law: one obeys the instructions of the secular mullahs, and one hopes to have a peaceful life. But if you think peace results from the triumph of intolerance, just wait for the knock on your intellectual ‘ door’ – because sooner or later, the mind- police will be coming for you too.
These people need to be conscious of the lessons of history. This is the state whose Taoiseach went to offer his condolences on the tragic death of Herr Hitler just weeks after allied troops had liberated Buchenwald, Belsen and Dachau. This was the state that became a safe haven for Nazi war criminals in the 1950s. This was the state where the mayor of Limerick in 1970 praised the anti- Jewish boycott in the city in 1903, and far from being expelled from the Labour Party, was reelected TD for the party. And the handful of stupid Jews who are backing the Boycott Israel campaign need to examine their consciences.
ONLY a truly deranged pathogen could single out Israel for a boycott, while in every other state in the region, there are mass violations of civil rights by government- authorised murder gangs. In Egypt, Islamic mobs have killed hundreds of Christians, devastating Coptic communities whose roots predate the arrival of Islam. Before the catastrophic Anglo- French destruction of the Ottoman Empire, the largest single ethno- religious group in Baghdad were the Jews, and next came the Christians, who between them outnumbered the Sunnis, Shias and Kurds together. Today, all non- Muslim ethnic groups are facing utter extinction in Iraq. The Jews are gone, and the few remaining Christians are clinging on by their eyelids. Across the Arab world, fundamentalism is triumphant, as “honour- killings” – that truly moronic oxymoron – achieve a lawful status in Egypt and Jordan, as they soon will – make no mistake – in Libya and Syria. Women caught in “adultery” – even when raped – and homosexuals may legitimately be killed by selfappointed executioners.
The one country in the Middle East that does not recognise the deranged and barbaric precepts of Sharia Law is Israel. Yet this is the one and only state in the region that the Irish left not merely wish to stigmatise, but they want to pressurise the rest of us into stigmatising also. And to judge from the abject silence of our politicians, they seem to be succeeding admirably.