Posted by Alan Shatter (@Alan__Shatter) posted at 6:23 pm on Wed, Dec 18, 2024:
See Micheal Martin couldn’t on the opening of the Dail miss an opportunity to yet again obsessively demonise Israel while ignoring the fact that if Hamas released all the hostages & abandoned its armed struggle, as PIRA did, the tragic conflict would end. Of course also ignored Iran’s malign destructive role in the ME. The obsession eloquently explained below.
(https://x.com/Alan__Shatter/status/1869448400493797768?t=QJprACmGGE0OKaEOtW5jxQ&s=03)
Dr. Eoin Lenihan
@EoinLenihan
18th December 2024
Ireland’s Obsession with Palestine Ireland is unusually obsessed with Israel/Palestine. And long before Oct 7th.
In my student days in Galway at the turn of the millennium the pro-Palestine crowd were always there, waving their flags, doing their chants. It was deadly fashionable among the various leftist and Sinn Fein student groups. It was very fashionable to be anti-Israel. It was a kind of 1st Year Sociology activism heavily encouraged by our professors. It was generally a phase people grew out of not long after graduation and entry to the real world.
That student angst element will always be there as long as Irish Arts departments are overrun with leftist academics. But on a wider scale, the talking points explaining the obsession – especially, that Ireland knows what it is to be colonised – comes straight from 1970/80s Gerry Adams’ Sinn Fein. SF’s collaborations with Libya and PLO is a story well told at this point but it is Adams’ harnessing of Irish nationalism to Arab nationalism under the banner of revolutionary socialism that popularised the Israel – UK, Palestine – Ireland. In more recent times it has moved far beyond these SF roots permeating Irish society more widely. President Higgins – a lifelong socialist – PBP, and other left wing politicians have put enough pressure on FF/G to make them adopt the same irrational obsession. And at this point, many Irish people will be foaming at the mouth unable to stop themselves from angrily telling me why Israel/Palestine is the only thing worth obsessing about this Christmas. “40K civilians! etc.” But the same people who are obsessed with dead Palestinian children don’t give a toss about Sudanese, Eritrean, Ethiopian etc. etc. kids. Because obsession isn’t rational.
In recent years, Ireland has become such a radical outlier in so many social and political causes. This is a good example. Other countries, even those with politicians who are very pro-Palestine – say, Spain, are nowhere near as obsessed, or at least that obsession is confined to the hard left end of the spectrum who are in the ascendancy in these nations. That’s largely because despite their loud socialist parties, Spain, and the rest of Europe, has a broadly (though strained) functioning democracy with established left and right spectrums that ensure countries don’t veer too wildly in one way or another. Ireland doesn’t have that. Ireland has two big blobs who pretend to be centrist but have no core values so go wherever the votes are. Before last months General Election, FF/G believed SF would benefit from being fashionably anti-Israel and went all in on that to steal their thunder.
The anti-Israel, pro-Palestine obsession in Ireland is symptomatic of SF’s creeping cultural victory over decades, their legacy to Ireland’s newer leftist micro-parties, as well as that of the leftist media and academia. FF/FG always outsourced social matters, first to the church, then to academia, now to the NGOs. They never had principles and now they find themselves caught flat footed, badly caught out on the international stage realising they’re having to defend the radical left policies that they only adopted as a vote-getter. It’s a political balls-up.
But what is a more fascinating case study, is how Ireland became so thoroughly obsessed and convinced that events over there in a desert far, far away are existentially intertwined with Irish affairs. They aren’t. Get a better obsession.
Who Watches the Watchers? 