|
Trending Topics
|
In Ireland, a Pavlovian Response to Conflict in Middle East Is to Visit Ire upon Jews
(Irish Times) Dr. Melanie Brown - Everyday reality when you are Jewish living in Ireland includes an existential threat that perpetually hangs over your head, especially whenever Israel is in the news, gnawing away at your sense of security, eroding and erasing your identity. The threat includes normalizing the politics of exclusion. Oh, and desecrating your grandparents' graves. Daubing Nazi-era graffiti on the gates of your places of worship. Generating tsunamis of filthy online vilification. There exists a sector of Irish society that includes people who attempt to cloak their anti-Semitism in a tissue of self-righteous justification. People whose Pavlovian response to conflict in the Middle East is to visit their ire upon Jews. Any Jews, anywhere. All Jews, everywhere. Always. Anti-Semitism is the ancient, visceral hatred that clings on and spreads within societies even when other forms of institutional racism are purged. The writer is a member of the Dublin City Interfaith Forum and the Holocaust Education Trust of Ireland.