Who's really committing genocide? Israel, or Ireland?
The Irish are committing genocide against themselves.
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This is a guest essay written by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The obsession of the Irish government with falsely accusing Israel of genocide is only equaled by its determination to commit an actual genocide against the Irish people.
The Irish government has called for watering down the definition of genocide to be able to apply it to the Jewish state.
But there is no need to water down the formal definition, the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” — to charge Ireland’s government with ‘self-genocide’ or ‘autogenocide’ against its own people.
In the last 20 years, Ireland, a small nation of millions, has been overwhelmed by a mass migration of 1.6 million people. In 2023, there were 54,678 births in the Republic of Ireland and 141,600 immigrants. Birth rates dropped 5 percent in 2023 (hovering at 1.5 births per woman well below replacement rate) but the number of immigrants grew by 31 percent. And will grow further.
The most popular name for boys was Jack, among Irish parents, while the most popular name among non-European immigrant parents was Mohammed.
Churches are closing across Ireland and mosques are opening in their place. There were only 400 Muslims in all of Ireland in 1991. That shot up to 19,000 in 2002 and 83,000 in 2023. Three percent of Ireland’s children are Muslim now and the numbers are increasing every year.
In November, an Algerian Arab began stabbing children outside a Catholic school in Dublin. A 5-year-old and 6-year-old girl suffered severe injuries. When a crowd gathered to protest, a ruthless police and media crackdown quickly ensued.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar scolded that the Irish protesters had “brought shame on Dublin, brought shame on Ireland and brought shame on their families and themselves.” No shame was brought on those who had allowed a legion of foreign invaders like him to occupy Ireland, slaughter and displace the native population.
Media accounts emphasized that the Algerian Muslim stabber, Bouchaker, who needed an Arabic translator in court, was really an “Irish citizen” and condemned bigotry against him.
No mention was made in the media that Gaelscoil Choláiste Mhuire, the Catholic school attended by the children, was four blocks away from the “Dublin Mosque” and the headquarters of the “Islamic Foundation of Ireland” which had formerly been the Donore Presbyterian Church.
And no questions were asked about what this proximity to the largest mosque in the city might have had to the attack. Such questions, according to the government, are “disinformation.” Bouchaker was only doing to Ireland’s children what the Dublin Mosque had done to a church.
One cannot fault the current Irish government for its jihad over Israel. It’s really treating the Jews no worse than it treats the Irish. And if it expects Israel to lie down and die rather than stand up to Islamic terrorists, that is the exact expectation that it (and not just it) has for Ireland.
Perhaps the Irish government is jealous that the Israelis refuse to follow in its footsteps.
The modern rebirths of Israel and Ireland were linked by common rebellions against British rule. Isaac Herzog, the President of Israel, is the grandson of the Chief Rabbi of Ireland. His father, Chaim Herzog, Israel’s sixth president, was born in Belfast. His grandfather, Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, was both an enthusiastic Irish nationalist and Zionist. Rabbi Herzog became known as the “Sinn Fein Rabbi” despite Sinn Fein being founded by Arthur Griffith, who hated the fairly small Jewish community in Ireland so much that he had cheered on the Limerick pogrom.1
The ideological heirs of those who prided themselves on driving the Jews out of Limerick have welcomed in Limerick’s multiple mosques. Muslims are now the second-largest religion in Limerick. And history shows it will only be a matter of time until the second will become the first.
Israel and Ireland as modern states arose from 19th-century nationalist movements seeking to restore the glorious past of diaspora peoples. Animated by writers, artists, linguists, and poets determined to revive what many saw as dead languages and the dead past, Zionism and Celtic nationalism seemed to have much in common. But the outcomes have been very different.
Half the Jewish Diaspora lives in Israel, while the vast majority of the Irish Diaspora still lives abroad. Israel is a technological pioneer, while Ireland serves as a Big Tech tax shelter. Israel has fought and won wars against Muslim invaders, while Ireland shamefully kneels to them.
The revival of Israel is an object of pride to Jews around the world, but Ireland remains little more than a tourist stop with little about its state to take pride in as a modern-day nation.
And most damningly, Israel’s birth rate is double that of the Irish birth rate.
Israel could very easily have ended up like Ireland: a kleptocracy run by crooked club socialists doling out just enough social welfare to keep the population voting for them, a cafe cultural establishment whose literary and linguistic experiments had soured into a club of worthless worthies, and plenty of history for scholars to look back on but no future to look forward to.
And if the Israelis hadn’t spent the last century fighting for their lives, maybe it would have.
If Israel had been living next door to some dying socialist republics with nothing to aspire to beyond wrangling about their share of European Union subsidies, maybe it would have also become a failed experiment with Labor2 and Likud3 as its Fianna Fáil4 and Fine Gael5, Amos Oz6 as its Joyce, and people who don’t bother with the national language, but just want to move to Europe.
Unfortunately (or fortunately), the Jews were cursed (or blessed) with their enemies. Mediocre decline was never an option for Israel. More than the Jews, it is their enemies who will not allow Zionism to die out. And so Israel is in yet another war for the Irish government to deplore. The Irish were allowed to stop fighting, while the Jews can never have any respite.
And so, paradoxically, they can also never die out.
The Jews and the Irish are both a little mad, self-destructive, and prone to endless infighting. We ought to understand each other better, but true to form we do not when we most need to. Israel is what the Irish nationalists once dreamed of before they became small petty men.
The poet warriors who go off to die for their homeland are not historical figures in Israel; they are friends and neighbors. Everyday life is a struggle for survival against enemies out to kill you. Each child born is a triumph. Keeping a shop going while serving in the war is heroic. And so everyone takes a break from the infighting and pulls together because life means something.
Ireland once had that. It no longer does. And by the time it does again, it may be too late. Where the Irish government allows Arab Muslim invaders to murder their children, the Israelis refuse. The Irish government calls this genocide; the Israelis call it survival. The Irish nationalists have sold out their homeland and their people, and resent those who won’t.
A generation hence, the Israelis will have sons in their homeland while the sons of Ireland will be everywhere but in Dublin, mourning a homeland lost once again to foreign invaders and traitors.
Ireland is facing its own genocide. And few dare to talk about it. In Ireland, hating the Jews is safe, but opposing Islamization is a crime. Israel is not Ireland’s problem; instead it ought to be Ireland’s model. And yet, if you accuse Israel of genocide you’re a national treasure; but if you accuse the Irish government of genocide, you’ll face smear campaigns and criminal charges.
There’s a genocide problem in Ireland. The blood of Irish children stains a nation. Israel’s worst enemies are outside it, but Ireland’s worst enemies are inside its own government.
An economic boycott waged against the small Jewish community in Limerick, Ireland, between 1904 and 1906, which was accompanied by assaults, stone throwing, and intimidation — causing many Jews to leave the city in western Ireland
A social democratic political party in Israel
A major right-wing political party in Israel
One of Ireland’s two major political parties (center-right) since 1933
One of Ireland’s two major political parties (center-right) since 1933
A famous Israeli writer and novelist
 | A guest post by
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The worst antisemitism I —and virtually all of my friends—encountered in the US was from Irish-Catholics. I think there is a religious based component to their hatred.
So, they fight a long war against the English, and they fight like hell, but when their existence is being snuffed, no person of credible substance says a word, no armed Irish resistance, no snipers, no bombs.