by Richard Kay, Daily Mail (Photo: Wikimedia Creative Commons)
Anti-Semitic slurs spray-painted on an Irish highway. A heavily pregnant Jewish woman verbally abused by a doctor as she awaited an emergency Caesarian section. A young student beaten up in a nightclub because he was wearing the Star of David. And a mother of two dragged out of a Holocaust memorial event for daring to protest, silently, against a diatribe about Israeli actions in Gaza delivered on one of the holiest days in the Jewish year.
Significant events, you might think. Enough to prompt a prolonged bout of national heart-searching.
Instead, what preoccupied protesters outside the Irish parliament in Dublin this week – and triggered crazed online debate – was a row over the way a pendant in the colours of the Palestinian flag, adorning the neck of a contributor to a TV property show, had been edited out of the programme.
Such was the uproar that the state broadcaster RTE promised to review its impartiality guidelines and admitted to a ‘mistake’ in its edit of the programme, Cheap Irish Homes, while a complaint has been lodged with the broadcast regulator.
Meanwhile, the production company behind the show issued a grovelling apology to the individual concerned, an accountant who announced she would not have taken part in the filming if she knew the pendant would be edited out.
‘I am pro-Palestinian,’ said Claire Molloy, who has worked as a volunteer on the West Bank. ‘It is a huge part of my outfit. I am always wearing it.’
Welcome, or ‘Fáilte’ as they say in these parts, to an Ireland where a pathological loathing for Israel and similarly uncritical support for Palestine has exposed the Emerald Isle’s dark and sinister underbelly.
It has prompted the New York-based Anti-Defamation League, which campaigns against bigotry and racism, to warn that anti-Semitism in the country was a ‘disaster waiting to happen’. Its chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt told the Irish prime minister, or taoiseach, Micheal Martin that his government had to protect Ireland’s Jews before it is too late.