MORE ON IRISH REPUBLICAN ANTISEMITISM

Consider again the statement of Chris Gaskin of the Irish Republican website Balrog:

“Now I despise Israel with my every waking bone, they have turned into what they fought against. The same racial and fascist tendency that is contained within Lebensraum is also integral to Zionism.”

Here Gaskin is saying that the Jewish state of Israel is a fascist Nazi state. It is very difficult to come to terms with the full horror of this assertion. Given the history of what the Jewish people have suffered at the hands of the Nazis could Gaskin have delivered a more horrible insult!

It is also at the centrwe of my opposition to Gaskin, and through him to to all of these so-called Irish republicans of today.

The Jewish struggle to create a Homeland is one of the most glorious national liberation struggle there has every been. For goodness sake it has been carried on for 3000 years at least. It has been carried on against the treachery of Ireland's traditional enemy Britain.

But the Irish republican movement if Gaskin is typical show nothing but hatred for Israel. Israel is a tiny country, much smaller than Ireland, nearer the size of say Munster.

This is the centre of Republican and neo-left antisemitism in Ireland. The antisemitism lies in the slander against Israel and against the philosophy and outlook of Zionism which is the wish and determination for the Jewish nation to have their own state in the land in which they have had a continuous presence for so long - at least 3000 years. Republican antisemitism is tied up not with hatred of individual Jews but with hatred of their country, Israel, and with support for the fascist Palestinian movement (PLO, Hamas) as seen in their fascist constitutions.

The following paragraphs were posted on the Irish website, Atlantic Blog, in 2004 and they are relevant. The writer is taking up the ideas of an Irish blogger on another Irish site called Crooked Timber who is maintaining that antisemitism is overrated in Ireland and is not a big factor:

“One common thread on Crooked Timber is that anti-Semitism in Europe is substantially less severe than the American press and American bloggers make it out to be. (I am working off dial-up, so I am not going to hunt for a bunch of links, but I think the observation is fair.) I cannot speak from personal experience about all of Europe, only of Ireland, but in that country anyway, they have a point. I have not encountered much in the way of either skinhead style anti-Semitism or the "Jews are crass" sort either. And I think it unlikely that someone who dressed so as to be identifiably Jewish would be unsafe on the streets in Ireland.

On the other hand, Israeli Jews I know who live tell me that, based on their discussions with friends in other parts of Europe, Ireland is a much better place to be a Jew than in most of the rest of Europe. And there is an obsession with Israel that simply transcends any of Israel's alleged offenses. In the fashionable bars (you know the ones, where everyone is pierced in all the right places), to be identified as an Israeli is to be abused in a way other nationalities would not be exposed to (except Americans, of course).
And the press is similarly obsessive. Typing "Israel" into the Irish Times search page generates 422 stories since the beginning of the year, compared to only 46 stories from typing in "Sudan", where there is a major genocide underway. Restricting the search to stories since the beginning of April, when the Sudan story was well established reduces the disparity, but only a little: 216 stories compared 32. That speaks volumes.

Posted by sjostrom on Atlantic Blog June 22, 2004 03:38 PM

So back to Gaskin of Balrog who we learn from above “despises” Israel and not just hates Israel but hates Israel “with every waking bone”.

The great benefit of the comments above by Sjostrom is that he places the position of Gaskin in the overall political reality of antisemitism in Ireland. You see it is not just IRA supporter Gaskin that we are talking about here.

You would not think of the Irish Times as being antisemitic. Yet above we find that Atlantic Blog discovered that that huge Irish newspaper covered Israel 216 times in the first 6 months of 2004 and Sudan only 32 times. That is 7 times more often.

During that time 2 million Black Sudanese Christian and Black African Muslims in Darfur have been killed in what is a real genocide. And these months of 2004 were at the height of that genocide.

Why? What is going on? I can only suggest the following ideas which are by no means exhaustive as an explanation.

A latent antisemitism lies dormant in Europe and it has taken this new form, not hatred of individual Jews as in Nazi Germany, but hatred of Israel.

In this new scenario Jews are being punished for having the ambition to set up their own independent state.

In this it is not a matter of fairness. On the original Mandate of 1921 the British signed over the majority of that internationally designated area, 80 per cent, to the Arabs which later became Jordan. The population of Jordan is now estimated to be made up of at least 80 per cent of Palestinian Arabs. They now want a further Arab state on the remainder.

Which would line up as the 23rd Arab state.

But not satisfied still, the aim is NO Jewish state at all (The one state solution) One state equals without any doubt a new and latest genocide of Jews. This aim of the destruction of Israel IS the aim of all branches of this Palestinian movement. The movement was originated by a clear and recognized fascist and creator of the Holocaust genocide - Hajj Amin el Husseini. Its aims remain the same. And that is what the neoleft and in Gaskin’s case Irish republican movement wants as well.

Another factor is at play here also. The Arabs have been very successful in selling the Palestinian myth of nationalism. This has been based on lying propaganda such as the Deir Yassin “massacre” myth.

Lying practices and media manipulation are carried on by the Palestinian Arabs to this day - an example being the Muhammad el Dura France 2 fraud. The latter (the role of the France 2 media network) shows media complicity in all of this.

Finally another reason may be that republican terrorists trained in the Middle East with the Palestinian PLO terrorists and so grew close politically together. All of this was made easier by the support of the neoleft for the fascist and Jew hating PLO.

Somewhere out of all that mess has crawled Chris Gaskin of Balrog and his politics of seeking the destruction of Israel. That is the eternal and ever present aim of the fascist PLO. As I noted in the previous article Gaskin has been given the thumbs up by Mick Fealty, the originator and editor of SluggerOtoole. In Fealty’s words it is congratulations all round to Chris and the boys for some mention or other in that rag called the Guardian. How cosy these bloggers and media types are! It would have been easy for Fealty with his considerable influence to attack the anti-Semitism of Gaskin. Standing on principles is not their forte. We will see how it develops.