The former minister for justice Alan Shatter said that we are seeing “the third Reich on the streets of Dublin” in an address to a rally in support of the state of Israel in Dublin on Sunday.
The former Fine Gael TD said Ireland had been a “bystander” in the 1930s and 1940s when the Nazis killed six million Jews.
Irish politicians had no right to lecture Israel about how it went about protecting its citizens from rockets that were being fired by Hamas from sites that included schools, hospitals and homes, he said.
“Hamas, as should be clear to every person by now who lives on this island, is nothing more than a fundamentalist Islamic death cult dedicated to murdering Jews.”
Bar Clara Mendez McConnon spoke about how hard it was to live in Dublin as a Jewish mother with a young family when there was so much anti-Jewish feeling.
“Yesterday, we couldn’t even go into town because they were walking in the street, chanting for the destruction of our nation, but more than that they were going around with terrorist flags, with the PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] flags, organisations that have murdered hundreds of Jewish people around the world, they have attacked Jewish schools and embassies and airplanes and never stopped, and we have representatives in this very building [Leinster House] who will not condemn that publicly.”
The rally was organised by the Ireland Israel Alliance. Its founder, Jackie Goodall, said politicians and the media should have a “long hard think” about the people who trampled on flowers and cards outside the Israeli embassy during last Monday’s pro-Palestinian protest.
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“The actions of those individuals last Monday night had nothing to do with Palestinian lives. Those actions were motivated by pure unadulterated hate. Jew Hatred. Let’s call it what it really is.”
