Anthony McIntyre 
Another cold one but it will not prevent Drogheda Stands With Palestine from doing what it does every Saturday - standing with the Palestinians who have been subjected to genocide at the hands of Israel and its Western backers and arms suppliers for more than two years.
Another cold one but it will not prevent Drogheda Stands With Palestine from doing what it does every Saturday - standing with the Palestinians who have been subjected to genocide at the hands of Israel and its Western backers and arms suppliers for more than two years.Cold as it is today, it is no where near as cold as the heart of those who believe "there could be a million dead Palestinian children and I would still sleep well in the evening." Although the Israeli ambassador to the UN has denied making this statement her callousness towards the dead children of Gaza obscures any discernible significant difference between what she did say and what she denies saying. Same for the then Israeli Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked, who in 2014 called for genocide claiming “the entire Palestinian people is the enemy … including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.” She also called for Palestinian mothers to be killed as they gave birth to “little snakes.”
This is the type of racist supremacism that has endured within Israeli society since its bloody formation. It is why there is a genocide. The colonialist desire to erase Palestinian culture, identity, aspirations to statehood and nationhood have been latent within Israeli society since 1948, often bursting through in extreme violence with a particular focus on murdering children so that the genocidal message that in killing your children we are killing your future is transmitted to the people of Palestine.
With that type of backdrop the reception given by the Irish President to the visit by the Swedish human rights activist Greta Thunberg is to be greatly admired. Ms Thunberg was recently taken hostage by Israeli SS forces when she and others sought to break the Nazi-like siege of Gaza.
The meeting has predictably been met with howls of outrage by the Zionist lobby in Ireland. It zeroed in on Ms Thunberg calling for Palestinian activists to ‘mobilise and escalate’ shortly after the murderous antisemitic attack at Australia's Bondi Beach.The Irish Jewish Representative Council in a statement complained that:
The days since the antisemitic attack at Bondi Beach have been marked by deep concern within our community about safety, inclusion, and the future of Jewish life in Ireland. In this context, we are troubled by the decision of the President of Ireland, a role entrusted with representing the unity of all Irish people, to host a courtesy meeting with Greta Thunberg at Áras an Uachtaráin.Ms Thunberg’s recent public commentary urging people to “mobilise and escalate” which came not long after the antisemitic incident in Bondi Beach, without clear condemnation of the terror attack, is deeply unsettling for many in our community.
When has the The Irish Jewish Representative Council ever spoken out against the mass murder of Palestinians? The type of appalling attack in Australia has been a daily occurrence in Gaza since the onset of the genocide. The incident it resembles most is the IDF murder of Palestinian children playing soccer on a beach in July 2014. Activists should always be endeavouring to mobilise and escalate. It is mass murder they mobilise and escalate against.
The problem with the Zionists is that they seek to exploit every opportunity for advantage. They continually complain that Israel is judged by a different standard to other states who engage in serial human rights abuses. The outspoken condemnation by President Connolly of the Bondi Beach massacre was not enough for them. They want to obliterate any voice of opposition to the genocide.
Of course we should stand firm against antisemitism and attacks on Jewish people. At the same time we should never allow antisemitism to be a cloak of convenience with which to suffocate voices of conscience.
As activists we should congratulate both Greta Thunberg and President Catherine Connolly for the Aras meeting and for not giving into Zionist pressure to pull the stage from beneath their feet so that the world can only hear about one heinous massacre, that of Jewish people but not of another, that of Palestinian people. No quarter should be given to the Zionist sense of entitlement which allows them to claim that the murder of Jews is a crime worse than the murder of Palestinians.
In a brilliant letter in the Irish Times on the 17th of December Brian Ó Éigeartaigh rubbished Zioinst claims of being singled out
Sir, – In querying the “singling out of Israel for judgment by special standards that are not applied to other countries”, David Woods has – perhaps unintentionally – hit the nail on the head (Letters, December 17th).
Benefiting as it does from billions of dollars every year in US military aid, favourable access to EU markets via the Euro-Med Trade Agreement, and a US veto consistently deployed at the UN Security Council to shield it from accountability, the Israeli state is indeed “singled out” with “special standards that are not applied to other countries”.Unlike many of the nations that Mr Woods accuses of “similar or worse alleged deeds elsewhere”, the Israeli state has never been the subject of economic sanctions or even arms embargoes by the West, despite decades of human rights abuses against the Palestinian people, and despite the defiance of successive Israeli governments of numerous UN resolutions.
It is outrage at precisely this impunity that motivates ordinary people throughout the world – and especially in Ireland due to our historical experience of colonial oppression – to support the Palestinian people in their struggle for freedom, justice and equality.
On top of Greta Thunberg and Catherine Connolly, Brian Ó Éigeartaigh too is to be congratulated for having searingly and concisely identified the master race mentality.
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