Ireland’s Shameful Commemoration

The shocking news from Ireland is an important reminder to Jews everywhere today. That’s our response to the commemoration event yesterday at Dublin, where Jewish attendees, including an Israeli-Irish woman, were physically dragged from an event meant to commemorate the six million murdered Jews. This came after Ireland’s tiny and beleaguered Jewish community pleaded that the country’s president, Michael Higgins, not speak at the event.Ireland’s Jews have been warning for weeks that Mr. Higgins was an “inappropriate” pick for the event, due to his “grave insensitivity to Irish Jews.” The country’s chief rabbi, Yoni Wieder, cited Mr. Higgins’s depreciation of worries of antisemitism in his country as “a PR exercise.” In December, Israel closed its embassy, citing the “extreme anti-Israel policy of the Irish government.” Hezbollah and Hamas flags flew at a protest at Dublin on Sunday. One non-governmental organization that studies the representation of Jews in educational materials, IMPACT-se, has found that Irish textbooks “are often hostile towards Israel and include questions that imply Jewish values are not aligned with peace. Additionally, Judaism is portrayed as condoning violence to promote justice, contrasting with peaceful depictions of other religions.” Ireland stands out globally for its anti-Israel fervor. Mr. Higgins has previously accused Israel of seeking to settle Egypt and of leaking a warm letter he composed to Iran. Neither of those allegations is true. The president used his Holocaust memorial speech to, in the words of the Telegraph, “highlight the plight of Gazans.” That implies that the war against Hamas — which was begun by the jihadists — is akin to the genocidal reality of Ponar, Sobibor, Babyn Yar, and Auschwitz.The protest during Mr. Higgins’s speech was a silent one, with members of the audience merely standing and turning their backs. Security personnel manhandled the protesters, including one pregnant woman. Israel’s foreign minister called Mr. Higgins’s comments a “cheap, despicable provocation” and an Irish senator Gerard Craughwell, condemned the removal of the protesters. He wonders that “All they did was stand up and turn their back.”All of this is nothing less than tragic in the country that gave the world the Irish Jew Leopold Bloom, who traipses through James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” and where the grandfather of Israeli’s president, Isaac Herzog, once served as chief rabbi — and Sinn Féin’s rabbi. Now, Ireland is so possessed by anti-Israel animus that it joined the case against Israel for genocide at the International Criminal Court. Mr. Higgins called the Holocaust an “attempted genocide.”The problems with Holocaust commemoration, though, go beyond the Emerald Isle. A Polish official threatened that Prime Minister Netanyahu would be arrested — per a “warrant” from the International Criminal Court — on Polish soil should he come to Auschwitz to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the slave labor and death camp, a ceremony that transpired on Monday. That threat was retracted, but the sinister absurdity lingers.So on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Europe is being met with an antisemitic campaign. We are not suggesting that Jews stop commemorating the Holocaust. It’s a moment, though, to mark that the hatred that erupted in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s has not been staunched. The oldest hatred now parades to Gaza from Brooklyn to the city of Poldy Bloom — throwing into sharper relief than ever the logic of Zionism.

Ireland’s Shameful Commemoration

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