A widely distributed freesheet newspaper called The Irish Light comes unbidden through my letterbox. It is edited by former Irish Independent journalist Gemma O’Doherty. Its associate editor and leading writer is former The Irish Times columnist John Waters.
Most readers will be wearily familiar with its general line. Ireland is an “occupied country”. Its society has lapsed into “dystopian degeneracy” since it stopped obeying the Catholic Church. Climate change is a hoax. Vaccines are poison. The Pope is not a Catholic. Everything, everywhere, is a conspiracy.
What’s interesting, though, is that it has now gone full-on antisemitic. Not as in dog whistles about globalists and rootless cosmopolitans, but as in rabid foaming-at-the-mouth incitement of hatred against Irish Jews.
Page five of the current issue of The Irish Light is devoted to an unsigned screed headlined The Jewish Cycle of Hate. Its essential point is that the Jews deserve to be destroyed because they rejected Jesus 2,000 years ago and in doing so “they chose a path of destruction which has resulted in their expulsion from more than 100 countries thousands of times”.
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All the old, vile libels are there. The Jews bring “child sacrifice [modern day abortion], money-lending, debt slavery, sexual depravity, and a culture of death”. The Holocaust is “at last being exposed for the lie that it is”. The Nazi concentration camps were merely “work factories”. Immigration into western countries is a sinister conspiracy run by the Jews.
There are some new lies thrown in for good measure. The war in Ukraine is “another Jewish-initiated charade”, part of a plot to clear that country of its current population so the Jews can occupy it as “Israel Part Two”.
Pages 18 and 19 present a two-page spread on How the Jews Conquered Ireland, credited to one Andrew Joyce. Since the actual Jewish population in Ireland is very small, this must be a conquest by proxy: “it is globalism that has now invaded Ireland, and Jewish activists are shaping the thought and policies of the new global-imperial culture”.
The writer can think of only two actual Irish Jews, but is blithely undaunted. The former minister for justice Alan Shatter and the former associate professor of sociology at TCD Ronit Lentin (and not, say, the attraction of all those American multinationals) are responsible for the globalisation of Ireland. It is a given of antisemitism that Jews are at once utterly backward and awesomely powerful, subhuman and superhuman.
On page 20, a rant against vaccines is illustrated with an image of the globe encircled by a gigantic snake bearing the Star of David. Page 24 has a fan letter to the Italian self-described “superfascista” Julius Evola who called Jews a “virus” and railed against “the Jewish horde”. The writer says that “Many of the young men who would describe themselves as traditional Catholics are aware of the ‘Jewish Question’, but are unsure of what they can do to combat the efforts of the Synagogue of Satan.”
It [antisemitism] has very deep roots in the soil of Christian Europe and, given any opening, it germinates again like a noxious and ineradicable weed
At one level, none of this is at all surprising. It’s a mishmash of medieval Christian hate-mongering, the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion and revived ultra-reactionary Catholicism. All western conspiracy manias default to antisemitism. It is their template.
The far right can’t excise the antisemitism encoded in its genes. It’s the muscle memory of fascism. Hence, The Irish Light in recent months has been running “stories” about how the Jews are responsible for “every single aspect” of “the Covid agenda”, of mass immigration, of abortion, of the LGBTQ movement, of “pornography and hookup culture” and of the corporate media. It’s Jews all the way down.
What’s striking, though, is just how brazen and open this incitement against Irish Jews has now become. There are no coded messages, no nods or winks. The line is clear: since Jews “chose the path of destruction” by refusing to become Christians, Ireland must play its part in that destruction.
The hate that, for a while, dared not speak its name is now being screamed through our letterboxes. The horrors of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in response to Hamas’s atrocities of October 7th have created what many on the far right see as an opportunity for antisemitism to come out of the closet. Hatred of Jews is not a “response” to this violence, but the mass killing of Palestinian civilians creates a space in which it can show itself in all its naked savagery.
This is not to say that the vast majority of those appalled by Israel’s actions are anti-Jewish – very many Jews are equally horrified. Nor should we concede any ground to the Israeli government’s deplorable tactic of dismissing all criticism of its actions as antisemitic.
Antisemitism is trivialised when it is used as a shield to deflect legitimate and urgent questions about the catastrophe in Gaza. But that does not mean that it is not real. It has very deep roots in the soil of Christian Europe and, given any opening, it germinates again like a noxious and ineradicable weed.
If you don’t understand that, you can’t understand why so many of Europe’s Jews concluded that the continent would never be safe for them and why the idea of a return to their ancient homeland seemed like an existential necessity. You can’t understand the visceral nature of the terror created by the Hamas pogroms of October 7th.
The collective punishment of the inhabitants of Gaza for those crimes is abominable. But so is the impulse to blame all Jews collectively for the indiscriminate nature of that response. Antisemitism is hard-core racism but, as David Baddiel puts it in his bracing polemic Jews Don’t Count, “A sacred circle is drawn around those whom the progressive left are prepared to go into battle for, and it seems as if Jews aren’t in it.”
Fighting antisemitism must always be an entry-level requirement for progressive politics. Any society in which Jewish people do not feel safe is one in which no one who can be defined as “other” can be safe either.