 Hi friends and subscribers. Very warm welcome back to my YouTube channel. Daniel Roseli here bringing this video today from the wonderful city of Jerusalem in Israel at the start of another week. I will eventually do a video about the peculiar work week in Israel where one of relatively few countries worldwide, although not the only one that operates on a Sunday to Thursday work week, which means of course on the plus side that every Friday is officially a day off and on the downside that every Sunday is the start of another work week and people go into the office and I'm just checking my emails and sort of gradually getting out of first gear. So I was woken up today by a few WhatsApps from friends who were enraged and appalled and incensed by comments from the Irish Prime Minister commenting upon the release of Emily Hand, who was an Irish Israeli girl who was held captive in Gaza since the atrocities committed on October 7th and she was released last night at the second tranche of hostages to go out of the Gaza Strip. The first was on Friday night and there's supposed to be a third group of hostages going out of Gaza and these are relatively small groups. It's important to note that Israel is exchanging for convicted Palestinian terrorists. So Israel is both agreeing to a temporary pause in the fighting and allowing more aid to go into Gaza and also exchanging convicted Palestinian terrorists. Some of whom I saw on Twitter today have already affirmed their intention to resume violent struggle against Israel. So really dangerous people are being put back on the streets, not just of Israel generally, but also of the Jerusalem where I live, which is a little bit frightening to say the least, but that's the deal Israel's done. So when this Irish Israeli girl went free last night, the Irish Prime Minister, Leo Veradkar, used an unusual choice of words on a post on Twitter that really upset a lot of people. He said, this is a day of enormous joy and relief for Emily Hand and her family. An innocent child who was lost has now been found and returned and we breathe a massive sigh of relief. Our prayers have been answered. So basically the issue with this tweet, which was very, very quickly spotted and drew a lot of very inflammatory comments was describing Emily Hand as being lost when she was an actual fact taken into Gaza by a violent terror organization, i.e. Hamas and she wasn't found. She was rescued and well brought back to Israel through the pressure exerted for her release by the IDF and presumably the Irish government also had some role in this today. The Israeli Foreign Minister jumped in with the response here. Ali Kohn saying that it seems you have lost your moral compass and need a reality check. Emily Hand was not lost. She was kidnapped by a terror organization worse than ISIS that murdered her stepmother. And there's some other reaction on Twitter and similar vein. This one's a little bit too vulgar for me to read out because I generally try to keep vulgarity out of this YouTube channel. This guy is an interesting commentator. I like often his very direct and somewhat abrasive style, but I think in this case, it's just a little bit premature. I'll get to why in a second. This is a more normal reaction. An innocent child was lost and now found. You mean kidnapped by murderous Hamas terrorists? To what end are you sanitizing the story as if she was lost in the woods? So I got a response back and this is just the first one I happened to see from one of my Twitter, Twitter slash X friends and followers, Mark Bennett. He says for context and definitely lost was the lack of nuance on Twitter slash X. He's paraphrasing the Gospel of Luke for this, my son was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is now found. Emily was declared dead and was then found. So this girl Emily Hand was actually believed to be dead and her family was like in a grieving process, essentially. So it was kind of a miraculous turnabout of events. So I looked up this verse and not that I doubted this, but just to give its exact reference, it's Luke chapter 15, verse 24. So the issue is that this verse is from the New Testament and is not familiar to a Jewish audience. So it was a very, very unusual, poor, I would say choice of words for the Irish Prime Minister to put out there in a tweet. And this is the actual statement coming from Mihal Martin, who's Ireland's deputy Prime Minister, Minister for Foreign Affairs, and who recently conducted a visit to Israel and Egypt in order to help to put pressure in order to get her included on the list of releases. And just to just to be fair, because that tweets drawn so much attention, I thought it would be important to read out the statement as well. I'm delighted that Emily Hand, a bright and beautiful young girl, has been released and will be reunited with her family after weeks of trauma. This is precious and deeply moving moment for the Hand family, etc. And people did give Mihal Martin credit. I want to give him credit as well. There's no moral equivalency drawn here as has been the case in many Irish statements about the conflict where they try to kind of keep everybody on the same keel. They say, well, just as it was bad for Israel to do this, we ought to express our, you know, our horror at whatever. On the other side, but there wasn't that here. And he says, I want to acknowledge the role played by the US Qatar, Egypt and others. Qatar has been mediating in these hostage exchanges. And so has Egypt to some extent. All this is happening behind the scenes. No one really knows, you know, who's done what exactly, but I just want to say for Radker, because there's been, there's so much legitimate criticism to make about Ireland's reaction to what's been happening in Israel. And I've made some of it myself on this YouTube channel. For one, we have the reprehensible statements of Richard Boyd Barrett that have not, have gone completely unchallenged in parliament. We've heard a statement from someone saying that Israel is conducting a war in children, war on children. And we've also heard Leo Radker, the Prime Minister, saying, stating that Israel has gone beyond self-defense and is conducting revenge, as well as the same aforementioned Richard Boyd Barrett saying, and this was really, really shocking, I think that Israel has no right to defend itself. So there's been plenty, abundantly plenty of things to criticize. But I think in this case, I refer to Hanlon's razor, which says, never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. I think in this particular case, the Irish Prime Minister chose, it was a very poor choice of words that probably wasn't him personally sending the tweet. It was probably a staffer. But you would think if you're sending a short tweet to summarize a statement and you were going for a metaphor, you would go for one that would be, you know, you'd understand that this tweet was going to be seen by an international audience and an Israeli and a Jewish audience. And by choosing this quote from the New Testament, that is not well known and understood at all in Israel and among Jews, because it's not part of our religious corpus. It basically has seemed like he was trying to sanitize. And I really don't think that that was the intention. As I said, I think it was just poor communication. I would hope that the Irish Taoiseach will maybe retract or clarify that he wasn't intending to sanitize Hamas's, as to use that word in one of the tweets, Hamas's apparent actions in holding this little girl captive in Gaza. But I think the more important takeaway from this is firstly, of course, that she's been released. And secondly, that for those who have been arguing for kicking out the Israeli ambassador from from Ireland, like PBP ancient fame, that this this little incident has proved that keeping channels of communication and diplomacy open has some benefits. That's all I have to say really about this little incident. I think it'll blow over soon. But I think that while there is plenty of opportunities and times where Ireland's approach to Israel can be criticized, I think this is probably just a really unfortunate choice of words that has really blown up all over the Twitter sphere. Thanks for watching today's video. If you want to get more videos from me about Jerusalem and Israel, do consider subscribing to this YouTube channel.