On April 2 I wrote a BLOG “Ethnicity, Ethics, Religion and Politics” because it is dangerous to believe that because a politician can be trusted because of their colour or family or declared faith they may be trusted to apply ethics to politics. Having a Catholic or Quaker, a White- skinned or Black-skinned Prime Minister or President gives no indication of how they will act. Most will have trimmed or zig-zagged their way to office, and some will never had principles, moral compasses or may think ethics is a county near London.
Anyone who knows how the humiliating Treaty of Versailles was forced, by pressure of starvation, on the Germans might imagine that the Germans would have forgiven the Germans for hating the British and French and seeking revenge on Britain and France.
The British and French insisted that tombstones over the German War Dead be black to denote sin and shame, in contrast to the white stones over the victors] graves.
I have seen the black stones , many of them embossed with the Star of David over Germans who had been proud of their loyalty to their Fatherland and the Kaiser, and at ease with their Jewish heritage.
The Nazis directed their hatred, not at Germany’s enemies, but at Jews who had served Germany and Europe well.
Hitler recognised how Britain had ruled India, whose population was many times that of Britain, by ruthless and cruel terror, and proposed that Germany employ the same methods in Russia. Both Hitler and Goebbels recognised the sheer mendacity of British propaganda and copied it.
I’m reminded of the Germans picking on people who never did them harm by a letter in THE IRISH TIMES (14 June) by the former Minister for Justice, Equalitymand Defence, Alan Shatter.
Shatter is a member of Ireland’s Jewish community, which, although tiny has contributed hugely to the culture, politics, industry of Ireland for well over a century.
Ireland’s First Chief Rabbi, Yitzhag Ha Levi Herzog, was known as the Sinn Fein Rabbi, and he sheltered Eamon de Valera in his house, when the Brits were in Dev’s pursuit. The rabbi’s son, Chaim Herzog, brought up in Dublin became Israel’s 6th President, and Chaim’s son, Isaac Herzog became the 11th President last year.
Alan Shatter’s letter takes issue with today’s Sinn Fein President Mary Lou MacDonald who describes Israel is an Apartheid State because of its treatment of Palestinian Arabs.
He says they deny self-determination to Jews in the land to which they are indigenous . Most of today’s Israeli Jews are either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants who came to Palestine after the First World War and whose families had had not been in Palestine for some 2,000 years, or at all. The Palestine Arabs had been in the land uninterruptedly all those thousands of years and had spoken Arabic, the world’s most spoken Semitic Language all that time. When Sinn Fein won a landslide election in 1918, I don’t think Zionists were shouting for a plebiscite in Palestine.
One Maurice Cohen in the Jerusalem Post describes Alan Shatter as Ireland’s Captain Dreyfus. Shatter was removed from ministerial office by a Taoiseach, a right accorded to all Prime Ministers so far as I know. He was not stripped of his epaulettes, nor had his sword broken on a barrack square nor was he shipped to Devil’s Island.
They say that if a bird waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck it’s safe to conclude that it is a duck.
Palestinians have suffered greatly from Zionists for over a century now with the encouragement of countries which have treated Jews abominably in the past. Ireland as a state has been well served by its Jewish community and, as a state has treated the community decently.
Alan Shatter seeks to portray Ireland as anti-Semitic. Israel treats Arabs as unter-menschen, and in doing so jettisons Judaism’s contribution to ethics.
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