Cryptic crossword addicts will know the sensation when a word leaps from a page demanding to be the answer to a clue that has not been given. One word in particular has been doing it for nearly two years now. Fidelia or Dominic might give this clue: Without the artist this state only has its deceits. The answer is Israel. (RA subtracted from Israel = lies).
The Israeli state has lied constantly throughout its ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza. Ireland cottoned on to the strategy early on. Being viciously branded Jew-haters in response to any criticism makes one wonder. When Ireland joined South Africa’s challenge in the International Court of Justice against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Binyamin Netanyahu’s government attributed the move to anti-Semitism.
It repeated the smear when Dublin announced it was recognising Palestinian statehood. For good measure, Israel shut its Irish embassy as its departing ambassador, Dana Erlich, fulminated about “pure hatred and obsession [being] directed to Israelis and the Jewish community”.
Telling lies is the Israeli state’s modus operandi. As the carpet-bombing, enforced starvation and pulverising of Gaza have ground on and at least 61,000 men, women and children have been wiped off the face of the earth, other countries have come to realise it too. The glaring exception is the only country with the power to stop it – the United States of America.
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Being pilloried by Israel is a high price to pay for condemning war crimes, but Ireland is discovering it is not the only price. Anti-Irishness is having a field day in Donald Trump’s America, which swallows Israel’s lies and disinformation without compunction. US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has mused: “Did the Irish fall into a vat of Guinness?” and he suggested we should “sober up” because of the Occupied Territories Bill. Secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick has dubbed this country his favourite “tax scam”.
Swapping Dana Erlich for Rosie O’Donnell has put a big target on the Emerald Isle’s back for the Maga swamp-life in Washington.
The power to green the White House was already waning before Trump moved back in, but his regime has accelerated the decline. He told the Taoiseach over the St Patrick’s shamrock bowl he loved Ireland and did not want “to do anything to hurt” it, before enumerating a list of reasons why he intended to do exactly that. Trump is seriously peeved about the €13.8bn Apple tax bill and Ireland’s lion’s share of US pharmaceutical and tech companies.
Days later, he invited Conor McGregor – found by a civil jury to have raped Nikita Hand – to use the Oval Office as a platform for a racist rant that “Ireland is at the cusp of potentially losing its Irishness” and that “the illegal immigration racket is running ravage”.
That was pop music to the ears of the Fox News power elite on Capitol Hill. (Newsweek has counted at least 23 of the illiberal broadcaster’s former presenters and employees ensconced in the Trump administration. Among them are Huckabee, defence secretary Pete Hegseth, transportation secretary Sean Duffy, the man nominated as UN ambassador Michael Waltz and Ukraine special envoy Keith Kellogg). During a discussion about immigration last week , the station’s Will Cain Show claimed Dublin was one of the most dangerous cities in Europe.
Is Dublin one of the most dangerous cities in Europe? No.
Now 16 Congress members have written to the treasury secretary urging him to add Ireland to a list of countries deemed to be boycotting Israel in their distorted interpretation of the Occupied Territories Bill.
If they get their way, US companies operating in Ireland will be exposed to US penalties. The group is led by Republican Claudia Tenney, who has introduced legislation to make Trump’s birthday a federal holiday and has equated the Occupied Territories Bill with support for Hamas by the Irish Government.
It is high time Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Harris called in US ambassador Edward Sharp Walsh, endorsed by Trump as a “champion golfer”. Sharp Walsh was sent here with an instruction from his Senate confirmation hearing to hold the Irish Government “accountable for disparaging a US ally”, namely Israel.
In fact, it is Washington that needs to be told some home truths about being a patsy for a state engaged in mass human slaughter. Harris needs to tell the Magacrats to wake up and smell the lies.
After Israeli forces killed 15 Red Crescent, UN and Palestinian civil defence aid workers in a targeted attack on their ambulance convoy in Rafah last March, Israel claimed the vehicles were unmarked and were suspected to be carrying weapons. It was a lie. One of the murdered medics, Rifat Radwan, bequeathed video footage of the attack on his phone. It showed the ambulance lights flashing and no evidence of weapons. Some of the victims had execution-style bullet holes in their heads and chests.
In February 2024, Israeli soldiers opened fire on people seeking food from aid trucks in Gaza City, killing 118 Palestinians and injuring 760 in what has become known as the Flour Massacre. Israel said its soldiers fired warning shots in fear for their safety and that most of the deaths were caused by a stampede. That was a lie, too.
Three hospitals reported treating “dozens” of people with gunshot wounds, as confirmed by the UN. In hindsight, the massacre was a precursor of the almost daily killings of starving people in the vicinity of the grotesquely named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
After this week’s murder of six journalistic workers in their tent, Israel did what it always does. It smeared the dead. A military spokesman claimed the most prominent victim, Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif, was on Hamas’s payroll, a claim he rejected in his lifetime and that Al Jazeera also rejects.
Trump continues to parrot Netanyahu’s canard that Hamas is systematically misappropriating food aid. It takes one to know one. Trump’s lying is so instinctive that he has falsely claimed to have been to Gaza, on which he has designs to build the Med of the Middle East.
Next stop the apartheid-ridden West Bank, where illegal settlers, not Israel, are the focus of the Occupied Territories Bill. Washington’s denouncers need to have this explained to them because, it seems, they have not read the Bill.
If they have, their moral degeneracy is disgusting.
