The following letter was received recently by Rebel Voice, and is from a submission by a supporter that was sent to the Nationalist, and Catholic-led, daily newspaper, The Irish News. The paper is the largest selling such publication in the Occupied Six Counties of Ireland. It has consistently adopted a pro-Israeli position in its editorial content, going so far as to publish inaccurate and/or incomplete reports from Palestine.

This unfortunate approach proceeds in blatant opposition to the feelings of its readership. We can only speculate as to the reasons for this, but the position of the Catholic Church, which has a strong influence upon the Irish News, and its fear of losing access to the religious sites of the Holy Land may play some role, in addition to the inherent distrust that pervades some specious ‘Christian’ communities with respect to the communities of Islam. The Irish News rarely, if ever, publishes criticisms of its editorial content.

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– Reading the Irish News (Sat 18th March, 2017), I noted how the flimsy mask of impartiality that the paper wears, regarding matters concerning Israel, slipped off.

In the editorial, a graffiti attack on a Belfast mural to ‘an Irish Zionist’ was described as ‘anti-Semitic’. This echoed the comments in an article of the same issue (page 13) in which Michael Black, ‘chairman of the Belfast Jewish Community’ also used the same term to label said graffiti. One could be forgiven for thinking that Mr Black dictated that piece of the Irish News editorial.

As the graffiti shown displayed the word ‘scum’, which was sprayed over an information section dedicated to the UVF, and the word ‘Nazis’, sprayed over a section dedicated to the Zionist state of Israel (an Israeli soldier could be seen in the picture), I would like to ask both Mr Black and the Irish News editorial staff to please explain exactly how the graffiti could be regarded as ‘anti-Semitic’?

Do either Mr Black or the Irish News staff know who the Semites are? Do they realize that opposition to the Israeli state is not anti-Semitic?

The tendency by Zionists to bandy the term ‘anti-Semitic’ about willy-nilly is incredibly disrespectful to all those Semites who have suffered because of their ethnicity. Repeated and inaccurate use of said term serves only to desensitize the public, and demeans the import of such an emotive designation.

In England, moves are today underway to try to redefine ‘anti-Semitism’. Rabid Zionists are determined to equate it with anti-Zionism. If successful, this would lead to an eventual ban on any criticism of not only the existence of the Israeli state, but also of actions of the Israeli state, which includes ethnic cleansing, the wholesale slaughter of Palestinian civilians, oppression, and the implementation of apartheid-type policies, as noted recently by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) who accused Israel of creating ‘an apartheid regime that oppresses and dominates the Palestinian people as a whole’.

Such Zionist machinations cannot be allowed to succeed, and it is unfortunate that the Irish News appears determined to toe a Zionist line. It is also unusual, because the paper has previously published a letter from this author in which I clearly compared Israel to Nazi Germany. Is the Irish News now accusing me of being anti-Semitic? Why the apparent contradiction in the paper’s approach?

Finally, I have one further question for both Mr Black and his colleagues in the Irish News. Given that Palestinians are mostly Semites and, as the Israeli state is documented as having brutalized and discriminated against the Palestinians, as well as having ethnically cleansed the indigenous Palestinians during the Nakba, and is continuing to ethnically cleanse the Semitic Palestinians today, I wish to ask, can Israel therefore be described as ‘anti-Semitic’?

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