Ireland is no stranger to religious or racial hatred. Part of the trouble is geography. Nurtured by religion and isolation, island monocultures often breed narrow minds and asocial practice. Clerical pedophilia and chronic alcoholism might be two Irish markers. Vendetta and honor killings would be examples from other island cultures such as Sicily and Corsica. Ireland’s antipathy for English Protestants is surely a legacy of colonial repression and a Reformation that never came to the Emerald Isle. Absence of religious reform is something that Irish and Muslim worlds have in common. Irish cultural attitudes were surely influenced by English imperial overlords too who were for centuries the gold standard for presumptions of sectarian, class, and racial superiority. Not much of that history was lost on the Irish.
British influence may have been formative, yet a monolithic Catholic Church was dominant in Ireland for over a thousand years. Many Irishmen like to think of Eire as the land of “saints and scholars,” the most Catholic country in Europe. Many an Irish anecdote reveals, however, a darker side of Gaelic tribalism. The civilized way was thought to be, “Don’t get angry, get even.”
Indeed, another aphorism suggests the Irish make good soldiers because they will take any side of an argument as long as it ends in a fight. Brouhaha, blarney, boycott, donnybrook, Finnian, hooligan, kybosh, shillelagh, smithereens, paddy wagon, Irish wake, and whiskey are all Irish contributions to Anglo-American rhetoric, as is the word “phony.” The meme that binds linguistically might charitably be described as pugnacious chauvinism.
The latest fight in Ireland is about Jews, although the run-of-the-mill Finnian socialist is quick to claim that real issues are human rights, the so-called “occupation” of Palestine, or the oppressive policies of a “Zionist” Israel. Nonetheless, just as the Continent is plagued again by anti-Jewish hate, tiny Catholic Ireland is now thought to be the most anti-Semitic nation in the European Union. The evidence for Irish bigotry is overwhelming.
Irishmen played significant roles in two seaborne attempts to penetrate the Israeli naval blockade of terrorist Hamas in Gaza. Irish activists sought and received Turkish assistance for the “flotillas” which were designed to provoke the IDF and humiliate the Jewish state. Dublin’s collaboration with holocaust deniers of Ankara is an echo of Irish Republican collaboration with Nazi Germany. Arthur Griffith, Sinn Fein founder, was a notorious anti-Semite. Modern Irish institutions have been zealous supporters of the Boycott, Disinvestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, the global enterprise that aspires to punish the Israeli economy. Anti-Semitism is not a subtle affair in Ireland these days, the “Christ killer” phantasm thrives in Irish Catholic schools too.
Mother Ireland is now a hotbed for anti-Semitic activists. Under the Obama administration, Irish America might not be far behind.
No one would care what Ireland thinks about Israel, or anything else for that matter, were it not for the Irish diaspora, up to sixty million Americans of Irish descent, many of whom are influential American politicians. At the moment, the Irish mafia on the American Left, among others, includes the Vice-President, Secretary of State, Director of CIA, FBI Director, Chairman of the JCS, and the Ambassador to the UN. Indeed, Samantha Power is an Irish immigrant.
This is not to argue guilt by association, but the merge of Irish and official Irish American attitudes towards Israel and Islam is too close to be coincidence. Cultural bias is fungible. What Americans believe about Jews might be irrelevant too, but practice and foreign policy is another matter. In Dublin, Brussels, and Washington, Muslim pathology worldwide is minimized as isolated acts or common crime while every real or imagined Israeli defensive transgression is amplified. Most of the official rhetoric after each new Islamist atrocity is designed to protect Islamic reputation and minimize the significance of religion or Muslim culture.
If the complaint is human rights, the Arab and larger Muslim worlds are the worst offenders on the planet. The advent of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb ut Tahir, Hezb’allah, Boko Haram, and ISIS breathes new life into global imperial jihad and religious fascism. Muslim praxis in the age of terror now includes stoning, beheading, slavery, lethal homophobia, child trafficking, and religious genocide. Never mind that a passive, moderate, Muslim majority might not be directly involved. With religious terror and related barbarisms, a silent Islamic majority is also a moral minority.
Crucified Armenian girls, Turkey, early 20th Century
Indeed, two premises underwrite Irish, American and EU policy towards terror and Islam. The first holds that Islam is one of the world’s “great religions,” implying moral equivalence with other cultures. The second premise holds that Islam is a “religion of peace,” an assumption that ignores jihad as war, denies that Islam is at war with America and the democratic West.
If Islamic culture, in its Sunni and Shia incarnations, is “great,” how then does the West rationalize polygamy, misogyny, slavery, child trafficking, kidnapping, stoning, beheadings, crucifixions, capital homophobia, cultural vandalism, summary execution of infidels and apostates, terror in all its incarnations, bloody jihad, and a near universal intolerance that rejects Western values and culture, especially those associated Jews or Christians? How is it that the Muslim Turkish sponsors of the Armenian Genocide are not called to account after a 100 years? How is any Islamic state and associated clergy, scholars, mimbers, mosques, or fellaheen “great” by any of these standards?
The “peace” premise is even more preposterous. The conventional wisdom suggests that Muslim instability, angst, and genocidal rage are a legacy of imperialism, colonialism, or exploitation. Surely, Obama policies, like regime change, add fuel to those footnotes, but the true roots of modern Muslim wars are historical and internal.
Islamic xenophobia and civil wars are likely the product of three legacies: the absence of religious reform, especially Sharia law; the self-hate implicit in the perennial and ancient Shia/Sunni divide; and the profound intolerance, historical and modern, throughout the Ummah for modernity, for all things “unIslamic,” especially Jews.
Islam is at war with itself and all things unlike itself. To deny the war within the Ummah, and the war with Islam, is to deny reality. Huntington was correct. The Clash of Civilizations is here.
How a few million Jews could possibly oppress or threaten 370 million Arabs or 1.6 billion Muslims is a mystery anti-Semites in Ireland and elsewhere are loath to explain. A million or more Arabs still thrive within Israel as citizens. In contrast, all Jews have been removed from the West Bank and Gaza. Tolerance has always been a one-way street with Persia, Arabia, and the global community of Muslim nations.
Palestinian Arabs who are unhappy with Israel have the 22 nations of the Arab League to choose from. Any Muslim worldwide has the 57 nations of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to choose from. There is only one Jewish state. Jews have been purged from Muslim lands globally and now Jews are again imperiled in what used to be Christian Europe.
Israelis today have three choices: the uncertainties of diaspora, a last stand in historical homelands, or the final solution. Ironically, the term “final solution” was coined by Muslim Turks to describe the early 20th Century Armenian Christian Genocide. Palestinian Arabs, like the Turks and Irish, were notorious for their flirtations with Hitler and fascism in the Nazi era. History matters.
The face of religious fascism today is worse than the 20th century secular variety, dressed as it is now in the burka and veil of religious immunities.
The Palestinian Arab demographic alone has given birth to a dozen or more terror factions including Black September, Fatah, and now Hamas. The US State Department’s list of terror groups is for the most part a feeble charade, but even there, Palestinian Arabs are the most prominent. Ironically, the IRA is still on the terror list, but the global Muslim Brotherhood is not.
The same Irish demagogues that tolerate dog whistles like “Zionist” are very unlikely to use a term like “Islamist.” John Brennan at CIA sets the tone for team Obama’s Irish Mafia and the Arab/Muslim tilt in America. Irish immigrants like Ms. Powers at the UN have threatened to stop using US veto power at the UN to defend Israel.
Democratic Israel has become a pariah while Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims in general enjoy victim status no matter their behavior, no matter the atrocity. Somehow history and morality are ignored in Ireland and America to absolve Islamic terrorists, imperialists, and fascists, while Israelis and Jews are demonized by Catholic apologists.
Bigotry is a pernicious social meme. With enough practice, habits become character. In the end, character is the stuff that culture is made of. The intemperate defense of Islam and the unjust attacks on Judaism, in Ireland and America, are ominous signs of cultural decay, dystopia in the making.
Dublin, Brussels, and Washington are planting their flags on wrong side of history, decency, and morality. Wither Israel, so go us all.
G. Murphy Donovan is a Christian infidel and an apostate product of Irish parents and Catholic schools in the Bronx. He writes about the politics of national security.