The Irish seem to hate the Jews as much as our own leftists

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Scott Johnson, PowerLine:

Ireland’s national soccer team bowed their heads as Israel’s anthem was played ahead of their UEFA Nations League match on Monday, and players refused to shake hands or exchange pennants. Unfortunately, Ireland beat Israel 3-0 at the near-empty Debrecen stadium in Hungary.

In their defense, the bog trotters are merely upholding a long-established tradition of the proud isle:

Johnson:

In the first paragraph above I borrowed from The Times of Israel story here. The ToI story adds: “Israel’s delegation explained earlier in the day that the Irish team had informed UEFA authorities that its members would not shake hands with their Israeli opponents, and that UEFA accepted this.” The ToI story also includes the X posts I have lifted. The New York Times has more here.

What’s it all about? This past June Brendan O’Neill devoted his Spiked column to the question. He answered: “Israelophobia is rotting Ireland’s soul.” The verb should probably be revised to the past tense. “Has rotted” might be more like it. Anticipating last night’s match, O’Neill wrote:

* * * * *

Israelophobia is rife in Europe. It stalks the academy. It travels at lightning speed through the digital highways. It is a mandatory belief in literary circles. But here in Ireland it is especially bad. It is everywhere. The nightly news still leads with lurid tales of Israel’s ‘murder’ in Gaza and Lebanon, as even the BBC has discovered that other things are happening in the world. You won’t walk two blocks in Dublin without encountering someone wearing a keffiyeh and a punchable smug smirk. Even way out West, on the Atlantic coast, there it was, flying from the roof of the first pub I ever got drunk in: the Palestine flag. Why?

That flag is so omnipresent that it feels like Ireland has been colonised again – not by the Brits this time but by that Euro-fervour of anti-Zionism. All of the most Guardian-approved, Shoreditch-thrilling Irish artists – Sally Rooney, Kneecap, the Mary Wallopers – bow obsequiously at the altar of Israelophobia.

It stinks up the political class, too. Indeed, just last week, Margaret Connolly, the sister of the Irish president, Catherine Connolly, returned from one of those thwarted flotilla jollies to Gaza that the hyper-smug love to engage in. She said Israel behaves like a “Nazi state.” She described her brief detention in Israel as being akin to a “concentration camp.” She said she and her fellow seafaring narcissists “got a feeling of what the Jews felt like during the Second World War.” Comparing the two-day detainment of posh, well-fed mugs with the incarceration and burning to death of millions of Jews? There’s repugnant, then there’s that. Stay classy, Israel-haters.

Israelophobia is rotting Ireland’s soul. The Irish establishment’s frothing animus for the Jewish state is an embarrassment to us Irish who refuse to convert to the cult of Israel-hate. It is disproportionate, hysterical, and so obviously driven by bigotry, meaning these people will go mental over a sports fixture against the Jewish nation but say nada about a sports fixture against an Islamist nation ruled by violent men who treat women like cattle. Let Ireland be a lesson – when you drink too heartily from the Kool-Aid of Israelophobia, you lose your reason and decency. You become so consumed by hatred for a tiny foreign state that you let your own state go to moral rack and ruin.

(FWIW): Just like our own Democrats and socialists, if the Irish didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all:

And over here, Cornell students sing a joyful song calling for the elimination of Israel and its Jews while the Democrat’s former presidential candidate cheers them on:

Crowd sings ‘from the river to the sea’ at AOC’s college student event promoting Dems ahead of midterms