 Hello friends, subscribers and anyone who's picking this up, welcome back to the Daniel Rossell podcast after what? It's only been probably a few years of a hiatus. This podcast is kind of in a permanent state of neglect because I've been focusing on operating a YouTube channel for the past number of years. Before that I was doing writing. I mean, I love creativity and I love all these creative outlets, but I've kind of focused on video and have been sticking really with that. But I did think for all time's sake and as I'm currently nice and tucked away in my pajamas on a cold wintery night that it would be fun to do a podcast because not everyone has a YouTube premium subscription, which I have to just kind of give a quick recommendation for. I don't make any money by recommending this even though I do make money from being a YouTube creator, but I think YouTube premium is just such a good investment. If you're watching YouTube for hours per day and I'm probably in that category, you can get a background play without having to install workarounds and hacks and all this kind of stuff. It just works and you don't get ads. It makes the process of watching YouTube vastly more enjoyable and I think it's really good value for money. I barely watch Netflix. I just pretty much watch YouTube and I keep that subscription going. Anyway, I wanted to talk today about the Ireland-Israel stuff. I think I'll call this podcast maybe Why Is Ireland So Anti-Israel to try perhaps a little bit shamelessly right on the back of all that chatter that's been going on. There have been articles written. There have been YouTube videos and everyone's got their ideas and the reason I think my voice might be useful is that I'm an Irish Jew and as I've remarked previously, really aren't that many of us in the world in the first place. In the second place, a lot of those Irish Jews who are out there just like to keep their head down and not make too much of a fuss or a noise. I totally understand the rationale for doing that, knowing how vitriolic the Irish left gets when their views and their echo chambers are broken into by us nasty Zionists and pro-Israel people. So regarding Ireland being anti-Israel, so I've had this kind of same back and forth a few times now on my YouTube comments section and people are like, hey, you can't call Ireland anti-Israel. I'm Irish and I stand with Israel and there definitely are people like that. There is a pro-Israel community in Ireland. I know that firstly because I'm interacting with those people at the moment on Twitter, X and also because back in the day I founded a pro-Israel organization called Irish for Israel. A very nice guy called Barry Williams then took that over and now there is a separate group called the Ireland-Israel Alliance run by a lady called Jackie and he's doing really tremendous work. I was going to add say thankless work. I can imagine it's really, really tough. Just mentally getting involved in all that stuff I find is a real. It's not good for your mental health this world of Israel advocacy. I hate to say that but it's my belief. I find myself needing to periodically just step back from it because it's just too much dealing with all the toxicity out there on the net and I think for people who care about their mental health and everyone should care about their mental health, if you're doing Israel advocacy please just keep that in mind and take breaks if you need to take breaks. Step away from it because if you have a nervous breakdown on the back of being exposed to so much hatred the other side has won. So don't give them that. Don't give them that victory. Take a hasper average treat if you need to. So there is a pro-Israel community in Ireland but I still when I say Ireland is anti-Israel what I usually mean is the government. I don't mean like necessarily the sum of the people but I'm talking about stuff like Ireland being kind of the first country in the EU to call unconditionally for a ceasefire while the EU was backing it. The Prime Minister of Ireland saying a week ago that Israel is approaching conducting revenge. Another government minister said it's conducting a war on children and these are the Fina Gale politicians who are considered like the more pro-Israel part of the parliament and even they're pretty damn anti. So I struggle to really see any way fair way other to categorize Ireland's approach to Israel other than very very antithetical. And then you have of course the delightful Richard Boyd Barrett RBB who is the kind of pin-up Israel hater and I think that that guy is a flat-out anti-Semite because he's just cross he's compared Israel to the Nazis and as I say in my videos I support the IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism and one of its instances of anti-Semitism is that comparing Israel to the Nazis is a manifestation of anti-Semitism. So it's not anti-Semitism is not a charge I level about easily or quickly or flippantly. I wouldn't say that about Lee Overadker for sure. I wouldn't say that about Mihal Martin in the Irish government but I would say that about Richard Boyd Barrett because not just sort of the because of that sort of very cut and dry definition just because of the manic ferocious hatred he has for Israel and the continuous lies he says about war crimes, ethnic cleansing, blah blah blah I mean it's just kind of he hates Israel with the fiery passion that is all consuming and it's kind of scary it's a little bit scary to watch someone said on Twitter the last day I think it was a lady called Teresa who's a pro-israel advocate in Ireland she said is it just me or does he sound crazy I'm like it's not just you I'm surprised you're asking that he sounds absolutely insane and it really is reminiscent of we don't like to say his name certain German leader who was at the helm of Nazism and it just the it's just the body language and the you know and the vocal language it just is as a Jewish person it gives me kind of makes me scared and that's why speaking of Richard Boyd Barrett I know it probably seems to people like you know this guy is just a people before profit fringe guy right they have like two seats in dull air and and you know he's just a nut job or whatever but he people like him I think are very dangerous right now he might say he's a small following but he's very quickly and very aggressively radicalizing and canvassing a following on the kind of disaffected margins of Irish society with his populism and this is where you know words leads words lead to actions and someone like Richard Boyd Barrett is the perfect example of an ideologue who can inspire physical manifestations of anti-Semitism so that's why I've been documenting his hate rhetoric online even though trust me I do have better things to do than listening to his bloody odious rants about Israel and putting them up on YouTube but I think that someone has to do it and as a professional video editor I'm just kind of well positioned to be able to do that so I've been doing that but why is Ireland so anti-Israel so I would say that there's a few things that are out there the first is this false parallel to British colonialism that people draw and it's so so entrenched in Irish society that people just reflexively say if you ask them why do you support Palestine they'll say the British did this to us and Israel is doing that to the Palestinians so if you kind of go deep into that I think what is really there is ignorance because I've you know I did a video about how Ireland Israel Israel Palestine it's not British Ireland it's not the same thing at all and the reason for that is because the Jewish people have been in the land of Israel that's where Judaism started there was a Jewish temple the Jewish people were exiled and then now the Jewish people are returning and that is called Zionism and there have been studies where you know the DNA of Jews including folks like me we all look kind of similar and Middle Eastern and it's not like that for no reason we are related distantly through the generations to this people now that doesn't condone all of Israel's actions since 1948 there were people in the land since after the Jews were kicked out by the Romans you know there were people there although Jews always have lived in Israel that's something that a lot of people don't know that there's always been a continuous Jewish presence in the land of Israel at times very small but there's always been one so we are we the Jews are indigenous to Israel and we were coming back and it's not the same at all as the British just you know using Ireland as a colony and brutalizing the Irish it's just not a comparable set of historical circumstances because the British were not and never were native to Ireland so the narrative is this cast in Ireland that there were these native Palestinian people and there was no Palestinian state ever basically including now I would argue so you know it's basically based on falsehoods that's this false idea that the Jews sort of dispossessed this ancient this non-existent civilization so again I'm not saying that Israel doesn't what it's been what what it's been doing in the West Bank is 100 right I may not agree with it but I think the Irish parallel to colonialism is a lot of crap it's false and I think people either don't really understand Jewish history because the only way you can really make it make that argument is to just dismiss all of Jewish history so they either are ignorant of that or they're being willfully ignorant so that's the kind of colonialism and the underdog thing and something very interesting that Jackie from the Irish-Israel alliance said in a video is that there was actually this kind of switch in the 1930s the there was a time when Ireland supported Israel it's so wacky for people of my vintage board in 1989 to think I've only ever known Ireland to be so hostile to Israel and that was not why I moved to Israel I moved to Israel because I wanted to live in Israel and because they believe in Zionism but it was a big factor in making Ireland uncomfortable for me as a Jewish person the extent of the hostility so that's all I've ever personally known I was never alive when Ireland was pro-Israel but I trust that that was the case in the 1930s and it was just this basically underdog thing that the Jews were viewed as the underdogs so the Irish liked the underdogs because they see themselves as the underdogs and downtrodden and whatever and then in 1948 Israel sort of became the overdogs if you will and so that's another kind of explanation and I don't know what to say about that I don't think I think we sort of in the in the scheme of global history we have become a power but we sort of are still in a sense underdogs even though we have a big military I'm talking about in on the global sphere but I don't that's kind of a strange reason to support or not support someone I would if there was another conflict I was looking at I would think of who's in the right and who's in the wrong not necessarily who's the underdog and the final sort of contributor contributory factor I think to Irish antipathy to Israel is anti-Semitism and I grew up in a family and I hate to sort of badmouth my own family on a podcast this is not the intention here but they would agree to this I was sort of the person saying there is quite pervasive anti-Semitism here in Ireland and I was basing that based on my personal experience based on but based also on what I was seeing on the internet on places like thejournal.ie before they deleted their talk back section I saw a lot of very anti-Semitic comments on news articles related to Israel as well as politics.ie and just Twitter way back before I was in Twitter myself I was monitoring Twitter and so I've been saying this for years my family been kind of saying don't be so extreme it's not really like that they just don't understand or they just support the Palestinians and I said no there's quite a strong current of anti-Semitism here and yes it could be under fringes of society but I'm talking now that you have people like Richard Boyd Barrett who are I think openly anti-Semitic denying the Jewish connection to Israel comparing Israel to the Nazis you see that there at least is anti-Semitism that's kind of open people's eyes and the Irish have this strange not all of the Irish of course but a lot of Irish people have this strange insistence on claiming that there is no anti-Semitism in Ireland and firstly it's wrong there absolutely is but secondly of course there is because there is anti-Irae sentiment in Israel to some extent and there's anti-Jamaican sentiment in Denmark and so on and so forth there are some level of hatred among all people it's just an unfortunate fact of the human condition so when people categorically deny that there isn't any anti-Semitism I think that's a very bizarre claim there is there is a politician called a comedian in big quote marks called Tai Kiki who did a skit recently denying that there was rape on October 7th which is just an absolutely unbelievably unbelievable scurrilous claim he made also a parody basically sort of mocking Jews for making talking about the the Holocaust too much so look there is anti-Semitism and I don't know why people make that claim that there is none whatsoever because it's illogical but they I've been told that so many times and I've told those people so many times I am an Irish Jew I literally grew up in Ireland until I was 25 and I experienced quite a bit of anti-Semitism so please do not contradict my lived experience and tell me that you know every every all of this is imaginary because it's not so yeah there is definitely that out there but I think it's probably on the margins that's my hopeful feeling that most people a lot of people are neutral some people are pro and they don't want to publicly identify as pro because doing so will attract the ire of the radical left in Ireland who are very nasty I received death threats and a lot of very very nasty messages since I've become vocal about this these things on Twitter and YouTube so they're nasty people a lot of them and you know people don't want to bring that upon themselves and I can kind of understand that as well so that's really what I sort of think is is there you know I do I actually really don't see if you asked me am I optimistic or pessimistic about Ireland and Israel I would say I'm extraordinarily pessimistic the reason for that is that according to the projections Sinn Fein recently fetid the Palestinian ambassador to Ireland at their Ardash who will not condemn the October 7th massacre and they embrace this woman on stage and gave her a standing ovation and this party is really just a fraction behind people before profit in terms of their hatred of Israel and they are very much they're they're a much more serious group because they're much bigger they're much more seats in parliament and the projections are that they may have a big win in the next election in Ireland and if the climate is currently so anti-Israel you can only imagine you know that these motions to expel the Israeli ambassador that are currently failing could succeed and I think that Ireland's Ireland's politicians I think Ireland is standing on the wrong side of history it's going down a dark path of uh at Israel's time of need of aligning itself with the Palestinian world and I would personally support I uh not the the I wouldn't say I'm not I'm not sure I would say I would support but I wouldn't be saddened to put it like that to see the cessation of diplomatic relations if uh Ireland were to kick out the Israeli ambassador and we had to break off ties as well I wouldn't be too sad because it's just been a very one-sided relationship characterized by extreme hostility from Ireland who strangely seems to still think it can be like a neutral mediator but a lot of that's based on them thinking that their experience in northern Ireland is way more applicable than it actually is in reality uh so that's uh today's podcast uh might be the first one first the last one for quite a while uh but this will be on the various podcasting platforms like Spotify and what have you and if you do want to write in or encourage me to do more or just get in contact with me uh my email is uh public at danielrosil.com 2Ls in Rosil and that address will get to me and we can uh you know chat or give me an idea for something else to talk about on a podcast if this format still resonates with people until next time thank you for listening