Dr Aiken: The vile,
endemic nature of anti-Semitism has been further demonstrated
across the island in the past week. While the public support for
terrorist groups such as Hezbollah on bridges in Dublin is bad
enough, two other incidents are perhaps equally troubling. First,
on 20 September, 'The Irish Times' published a cartoon that
members of our Jewish community rightly called a "malevolent
trope", redolent of the hideous use of the Jewish caricature that
has been part of the anti-Semitic imagery for centuries and Nazi
propaganda — not my words but those of the Jewish community.
Furthermore, 'The Irish Times', which calls itself a "paper of
record", would not publish a letter of complaint from Holocaust
Awareness Ireland against the cartoonist's anti-Semitic bile. We
then had the bizarre example of the Irish president, first,
writing to the new Iranian president congratulating him on his
election without even mentioning the malign influence that Iran
has in the Middle East and Sudan or, indeed, in its support for
Russia. Then, he complained in New York that a secret letter had
been leaked by the Israeli embassy, blaming Israel for the letter
he wrote and somehow implying that it had been stolen from his
office. That was despite the fact that it was welcomed and
published online by the Iranian embassy in Dublin.
All racism is bad, but anti-Semitism is the oldest and vilest
form of hate. That it is aided and abetted by cartoon tropes
redolent of 1930s Germany and a president who falsely maligns
Israel just shows how deeply rooted the scourge of anti-Semitism
has become on this island. It is well beyond time that that
racist behaviour is stopped, and, rest assured, all the
anti-Semites on this island, you will not win. Washington,
Brussels and other capitals around the world have now taken note
of how prevalent such hate speech has become on this island.
