Outgoing Irish Leader, at White House, Marks Saint Patrick’s Day With a Call for Hamas Victory

The Taoiseach of Ireland, Leo Varadkar, fetched up at the White House on March 17 for a Saint Patrick’s Day celebration, and it somehow turned into a plea to President Biden to leave the Hamas terrorist group in charge of Gaza.Mr. Varadkar announced Wednesday that he would step down. In light of his comments at the White House, that’s a relief to all those who prefer an Ireland that doesn’t embarrass itself on the international stage.Mr. Varadkar told President Biden, “Mr. President, as you know, the Irish people are deeply troubled about the catastrophe that’s unfolding before our eyes in Gaza.” He faulted Israel. “Israel must reverse its precipitous decision to authorize a land incursion into Rafah,” Mr. Varadkar said.The Israeli government says four battalions of Hamas terrorists remain in Rafah, and that without going in there to defeat them it can’t achieve the war’s mission of dismantling Hamas so that it no longer poses a threat to Israel.The Irish leader also offered an explanation for why he was raising the issue. “When I travel the world, leaders often ask me why the Irish have such empathy for the Palestinian people. And the answer is simple: We see our history in their eyes — a story of displacement, of dispossession and national identity questioned and denied, forced emigration, discrimination, and now hunger,” he said.Mr. Biden stood by without correcting the Irish leader and without defending Israel’s war aims. The president of America was apparently willing to see a Saint Patrick’s Day event in the executive mansion transformed into a defense of anti-Israel terrorism.There’s another possible explanation for Mr. Vaaradkar’s “empathy” that the Taoiseach left unmentioned. That is that during the Cold War, Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization and Gerry Adams’s Sinn Fein, along with South Africa’s African National Congress, were all part of a loose network of Soviet-backed terrorist groups.As for that “forced emigration,” many of the Irish came to America voluntarily in search of opportunity. Likewise, some of the Palestinian Arab emigration from what is now Israel was by choice, not “forced,” as Mr. Varadkar claims.Mr. Varadkar allowed that he also saw parallels between Ireland’s history and Israel’s: “a diaspora whose heart never left home, no matter how many generations passed; a nation state that was reborn; and a language revived.” He might have acknowledged, with a bit more “empathy,” that Jews, too, have been hungry, displaced, dispossessed, and discriminated against, including by the Irish themselves. Ireland was neutral during World War II and, as Princeton’s Steven Strauss pointed out on social media, “took in almost no Jews fleeing the Holocaust and even after the Holocaust refused to take in Jewish refugees.” President Éamon de Valera went so far as to sign the official book of condolence on Hitler’s death on May 2, 1945, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under the Law notes.The most enduring image of Ireland and the current war probably came in February, when an Irish women’s basketball team refused a pregame handshake with an Israeli team in a stunning display of hatred and of poor sportsmanship. The Israeli team beat them 87 to 55. Why the Taoiseach deserved a White House invitation after that debacle is a question that pro-Israel voters might raise with the Biden presidential campaign.Mr. Varadkar had the chutzpah to quote, to Mr. Biden, President Kennedy’s address to the Irish Parliament, in which Kennedy mentioned America “from Cork to Congo, from Galway to the Gaza Strip.” Mr. Varadkar did not mention that at the time of the June 1963 address by Kennedy, Gaza was part of Egypt, formally known as the United Arab Republic, and led by Gamal Abdel Nasser.The more relevant part of Kennedy’s address came when the Democrat of Massachusetts said that Ireland “is not neutral between liberty and tyranny and never will be.”Kennedy was talking, aspirationally, about Ireland’s role in the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union. Yet in the current war between the West and Iran and its proxy Hamas, Ireland seems to have gone past neutral, all the way toward siding with the tyrants.Kennedy would have been disgusted.Mr. Biden described St. Patrick’s day as “a joyful occasion.” Yet Sunday’s event can only be a source of sadness for the many Irish Americans and Irish Israelis who understand, as President Kennedy did, that the Iran-backed Hamas terrorists are on the side of tyranny and the Israelis are on the side of liberty.

Outgoing Irish Leader, at White House, Marks Saint Patrick’s Day With a Call for Hamas Victory

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