When Irish Eyes are Glaring: Ireland, Israel, and the Arabs
The Current Prime Minister of Ireland Reminds me of Ireland’s Prime Minister in 1945, a Mr. Eamon De Valera, who conveyed condolences to Germany when Hitler died.
By
David Gottfried
On St. Patrick’s Day, the Irish Prime Minister, Mr. Leo Varadkar, met with President Biden and used his visit to Washington to bash Israel. He said the people of Ireland “have such empathy for the Palestinian people.”
Most people, by April and May of 1945, did not perceive Germany as a frolicking, rustic country where men wore Lederhosen, slapped their thighs, and looked like gigantic three-year-olds.
By April and May of 1945, most of the concentration camps and death camps had been liberated. If the world didn’t want to admit the truth when the Nuremberg Laws, the rough equivalent of Jim Crow, were enacted; if the world did not want to believe it when Kristallnacht occurred and in a single night thousands of synagogues, homes and persons were incinerated and slaughtered; if they did not know at the time of Anschluss, when the Germans marched into Vienna and made elderly Jews scrub the streets with toothbrushes; if the world thought it could still deny it when torrents of reports of mass slaughter reached the West, the World could no longer deny it by 1945, when our local movie theatres presented newsreels of huge piles of dead concentration camp victims being pushed into ditches by bulldozers.
But the Prime Minister of Ireland thought he could deny it. When Hitler died, Mr. De Valera, the Irish Prime Minister, went to the German embassy in Dublin and formally and publicly offered his condolences to Germany for the death of Hitler.
Now I realize that not all Germans were guilty of atrocities. For example, the Archbishop of Berlin went to a concentration camp, and died in a concentration camp, for condemning the genocidal policies of the Third Reich. Leftists, artists, free thinkers, non-conformists, Jehovah’s witnesses (the finest Christians on earth), the Roma people and Homosexuals were slaughtered.
Did De Valera think that Hitler was innocent of the Holocaust. What the fuck was Valera’s problem ? I suppose his problem was one that afflicted many Irish People: Since the Brits gave Ireland hell, I will ally myself with anyone who wants to bomb London, including the Roman soldiers who drove nails into the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth.
The Irish Prime Minister also accused the Israelis of being too filled with rage. Is he fucking serious ???
When I was growing up in heavily Irish Catholic Bay Ridge, a part of Brooklyn, New York, in the 1960’s, the old Irish farts in my apartment house were still telling us why the Titanic sunk: The old biddies said that the Evil British protestants wrote bad things about the pope in the engine room, and G-d unleashed his divine justice by planting an iceberg in its path.
Many of my Irish Catholic friends were in love with the IRA and celebrated when acts of terrorism were committed against the English. I had a friend who worked for the Archdiocese of New York. The biggest problem in his job were the constant flurries of hysterical, hateful calls from old Irish Priests, forever ranting and raving about British tyranny.
Indeed, Irish Americans and Germans Americans were the two constituencies, in this country, who most obstructed Franklyn Roosevelt’s effort to prepare this country for war against Nazi Germany.
My Mother told me that in her All-Girls high school, Bay Ridge High School in Brooklyn, New York, there was an “Aryan Club” for blond girls. It had plenty of German and Irish girls (And Scandinavian girls). They did not attack my Mother as they decided she was a "white Jew,” which meant she was not as bad as other Jews That piece of shit club shrunk away in silence when Pearl Harbor was attacked.
Finally, I don’t mean to knock the Irish people. In my childhood, I had enormous fun thanks to my Irish Catholic friends. They introduced me to what I call “Catholic School Horror Movies” such as “The Omen,” “The Exorcist,” and the entire, majestically haunted labyrinth of “Dark Shadows” movies and TV shows. I guess I loved the Manichean simplicity of the Parochial School Weltanschauung, or “world view.” There was absolute evil and absolute good and isn’t fun to have a grand ferocious battle to settle the issue once and for all.
We had tons of fun imagining plans and plots afoot everywhere.
For example, Thomas Fitzgerald and Steven Brady, and other Irish Catholic friends in my Brooklyn neighborhood, insisted that I join them in fighting the red peril. (Part of my family had semi-Bolshevik leanings, but at age 7, I didn’t realize that the anti communist work of my Irish friends conflicted with the socialist dream)
My Irish friends got me really excited as they taught me about, and got me ready to fight, the Communist threat. As an anti-communist, I learned to subscribe to the certitudes that were clear to any self-respecting seven-year-old. The Communist threat was explained perfectly by television: On the news shows, which indicated that the Soviet Union was poised to enslave the world; on the spy shows, such as “The Man From Uncle” and “Get Smart,” in which malevolent characters with Russian accents were always planning all sorts of espionage and mayhem; and on cartoons such as “Bullwinkle and Rocky,” which sported devilishly elegant Russian cartoon characters, like Natasha, a woman secret agent who was as deliciously slender, sleek and dark as a piece of A-one licorice from the very best candy stores in the neighborhood, and a stout, snarling Russian man, who seemed ready to start a thermonuclear explosion.
Convinced that the Commies were coming for us, we huddled in the gutter along 76th Street and readied ourselves against the Bolshevik storm. A long and luxurious car coursing down the street might secrete a Russian agent planning to explode bombs at the nearby military base, Fort Hamilton. And the gum wrappers discarded by those wicked motorists, onto our modest gutter, might contain secret writings and codes and inscriptions about all sorts of plans and plots emanating from Moscow. And a candy that did not taste quite right might really be poison sent by courier from Castro to kill our gang of valiant seven-year-olds.
Castro might as well have been the anti-Christ. All my Catholic friends knew this to be true. After all, he abolished Christmas in Cuba, and the recent Cuban missile crisis was constantly alluded to on TV. As a Jew, I couldn’t hate Castro that much for being against Christianity, but I knew he had something to do with the Bay of Pigs, and pigs were unkosher, and I imagined his naked, hairy body lolling around in a filthy, muddy watering hole playing with lots of filthy pigs. So I was sold on the idea that we had to be against Castro.
So, to my Irish Catholic friends, I love you, but your politics, with the exception of the Kennedy Brothers, makes me ill.
Concluding Notes:
1) For a succinct compendium of arguments proving the validity of the Israeli position, I refer you to a note I wrote on substack, https://substack.com/@davidgottfried/note/c-51535214?utm_source=activity_item
2) I should note that plenty of Irish people were not at all like their pro-Hitler Prime Minister, De Valera. When Israel fought its war of Independence against Britian, the IRA helped send guns to the Jewish underground.
The original "social justice warrior"?:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin