 When it comes to the ranks of Irish politicians who rag on and hate on Israel, there's really a pretty wide and plentiful selection on offer. Yesterday Ireland's Prime Minister told a woman who called Israel a terrorist state while working for an Israeli software company that she should pursue an unfair dismissal case. Not too long ago, there was that Sinn Fein politician who once compared a Jewish Irish politician to Goebbels, the notorious Nazi propaganda minister, and accusing Israel of conducting war crimes in the Irish legislative chamber is just about as surprising to anybody as, well, taking a breath. But even in this cesspool of Israel hatred, there is a leaderboard. On top of that leaderboard currently, Ireland's fiercest and most outspoken critic of Israel is a politician named Richard Boyd Barrett. Just yesterday, Barrett got up in front of a microphone and essentially blamed Israel for the massacre of its civilians on October 7th, saying that the killings flowed from a long litany of crimes which he accused Israel of committing against the Palestinians. Those accusations included ethnic cleansing, unspecified war crimes, practicing apartheid, etc. He also called for the holding of another debate about Israel in the Irish parliament because clearly they haven't been hating enough on Israel recently. But only a debate that would have the foregone conclusion of expelling the Israeli embassy and Ireland imposing sanctions upon the world's only Jewish state. Here's 20 seconds out of an 18 minute clip of Richard Boyd Barrett ranting against how terrible Israel is. On the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, of the establishment of an apartheid system, of the day in, day out ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, theft of Palestinian land, illegal occupation, denial of the most basic rights to the Palestinians and ongoing war crimes, crimes against humanity and violations of international law. Boyd Barrett's Twitter slash X feed at the moment is a long list of accusations against Israel. At the time of making this video, the last 26 ex posts which Boyd Barrett uploaded to the network were all, you guessed it, about Israel. I'm not really sure how you manage us to fit domestic work into this packed schedule of Israel hatred. For those who were curious to observe the dark fascination with and hatred of Israel on the part of many Irish politicians, including Boyd Barrett, his background and place on the political spectrum may be instructive and of interest. Barrett is a TD associated with the People Before Profit Party, a TD is a member of parliament. People Before Profit take the acronym P.B.P. and recently came out with a post that essentially condoned Hamas's massacre against Israeli civilians. So although Boyd Barrett and his party might enjoy the veneer of respectability you'd expect from a legitimately elected representative in a democracy, he's also associated with a party that condones violence against Israeli civilians. According to a blog post which the party recently published, referring to the October 7th massacre, the ongoing occupation is the root cause of the violence. According to this perverse line of logic, if Israel simply stopped committing war crimes against the Palestinians, Hamas would no longer be committed to its destruction or engage in mass acts of civilian slaughter. Pigs might also fly and tomorrow we may wake up to discover that the sky is purple rather than blue. People Before Profit currently have five seats in Ireland's principal legislative chamber, Dull Aaron. The party is actually an electoral alliance that over the years has subsumed two socialist parties and one party formerly known as the Anti-Osterity Alliance. Besides Israel, he's also been critical of the US invasion of Iraq, accusing the Irish government of complicity in the killing of civilians through allowing American air forces to make use of Shannon Airport. Boyd Barrett appears to be a rather angry man, especially now. When he started hating on Israel isn't immediately clear. He's mentioned in a few speeches that he spent some time on an Israeli kebut and has claimed that while here in Israel, he witnessed the apartheid that he now regularly levels as an accusation against the state. While Boyd Barrett's shocking statements blaming Israelis for their own deaths might seem flabbergasting, as does the fact that they seem to have attracted little attention in Ireland, the Dublin politician has a long history of courting controversy for his remarks about the country. In 2022, Irish-Jewish politician and former Justice Minister Alan Shatter accused Boyd Barrett of delivering a disgraceful and historically ignorant anti-Semitic rant at a Palestinian festival the latter attended in London. At that event, Boyd Barrett compared Israel's treatment of Palestinians to the suffering endured by Jews under Nazi Germany. In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA, drafted a working definition of anti-Semitism that explicitly included, as managed for stations of anti-Semitism, any comparisons drawn between Israel and Nazi Germany. So according to this important international definition, Boyd Barrett is, without question, an anti-Semite. Just last week, Boyd Barrett went on yet another rant against Israel, claiming that Israel is a terrorist state and a apartheid state and a committer of war crimes. But this time, he went a little bit further, falsely claiming that Gaza is the most densely populated part of the world. After starting on this particular rant, Irish Prime Minister Leo Radker asked the politician to clarify that Boyd Barrett would affirm his support for Israel's right to at least exist. I hope you'll agree and I hope you'll say that in your follow-up response. And in response, Boyd Barrett had this to say. Putting the pieces together here isn't really that difficult. Boyd Barrett constantly charges that Israel is operating in a apartheid regime, and he said explicitly that he believes that no apartheid regime has the right to exist. So by very simple extension of those facts, he denies that Israel has any right to exist. So who is Richard Boyd Barrett? Well, in my view at least, he's an Irish parliamentarian who wears his anti-Semitism as a badge of honour. He unashamedly denies Israel the right to exist as a free state, and his rants and diatribes are sadly tolerated and accepted in the Irish parliament.