 Hi friends and subscribers, welcome back to my youtube channel, this is Daniel Rosel and we're continuing today with our ongoing foray into Ireland-Israel relations. Overall relations between the two countries are continuing to deteriorate at what I might describe as a surprisingly rapid pace. Today a far right minister in the Israeli government was rebuked by Prime Minister Netanyahu for suggesting that Israel should nuke the Gaza Strip. Of course this was a wild and unacceptable remark by a very fringe voice in parliament the true widespread condemnation. But his remark that the population of would-be displaced Gazans should quote, go to Ireland or deserts was pretty telling of the way that many Israelis are currently feeling about the not-so-friendly posture from the Emerald Isle. Those feelings were probably not endeared very much by the signature of a letter last Thursday by more than 600 Irish academics calling for the complete cessation of academic relations between their institutions and their Israeli counterparts. The full text to the letter was published in Ireland's newspaper of record the Irish Times yesterday. It contains the spurious claim that Israel's actions in Gaza amount to quote, a campaign of ethnic cleansing and according to many experts, genocidal violence, unquote. It describes the October 7th massacre perpetrated by Hamas as quote, an incursion by armed groups unquote, which included what they deem quote, criminal attacks against civilians unquote. I mean that's one way of describing burning people alive in ovens and beheading infants. The letter continues with the statement that under no circumstances does international law permit the systemic bombardment and collective punishment of civilians in a besieged occupied territory. The letter further adds that quote, leading Jewish and Israeli scholars of Holocaust and genocide studies have called this a textbook case of genocide. By drawing a close parallel between Israel's current actions in Gaza and the extermination of the Jews perpetrated under Nazi Germany, this cohort of more than 600 academics in Irish universities are once more making shameful comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany, an action with the IHRA deems to be a manifestation of anti-Semitism. The letter ends with a call on all universities in Ireland to immediately sever any existing institutional partnership or affiliation with Israeli institutions. Signatories include faculty members from University College Dublin, Maynooth University, Walter University, the University of Galway, University College Cork, Trinity College Dublin, and Queen's University Belfast, which is another word just about all major Irish third-level teaching institutions on both sides of the island.