Only one day after Irish Times journalist Kitty Holland’s outrageous tweet that she was “Not interacting with Zionists anymore,” Holland’s father, prominent anti-Israel ideologue Eamonn McCann (pictured above), has launched his own assault. Clearly with Holland, the apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree.
McCann is well-known to HonestReporting. He has a history of demonizing Israel in the Irish media. In January 2014 he launched a vicious assault on the Jewish religion in an attack on Ariel Sharon. Prior to that, he wrote of Israel’s “downfall in the end.” In response to criticism he accuses pro-Israel activists of shutting down the conversation by making false claims of anti-Semitism. In June 2014 he addressed the kidnapping of three Israeli teens by accusing Israel of pursuing a systematic campaign against Palestinian children.
Now, writing in the Irish Times, McCann has turned his attention to the ongoing tension between Israel and the U.S. and Benjamin Netanyahu’s call for Jews, in the aftermath of terror attacks in Europe, to move to Israel.
Referring to this appeal, McCann states:
Herein lies the ideological overlap between Zionism and anti-Semitism. Both believe that Jews and Gentiles cannot live together.
There is no “ideological overlap.” Zionism came about as a response to anti-Semitism but is certainly not an ideology of prejudice or racism against others. Israel’s own Declaration of Independence states:
THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations. …
WE APPEAL – in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months – to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.
McCann’s linkage between Zionism and anti-Semitism is a canard commonly found on neo-Nazi and radical leftist websites. It merely reinforces McCann’s known associations with the radical Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party, which exists on the very fringes of politics and whose anti-Zionism regularly crosses into anti-Semitism while endorsing Palestinian terrorism. It is a charge similar in nature to the Zionism=Nazism one employed by extreme leftists in order to portray Zionists as beyond the pale.
McCann continues:
Zionism holds that the Jewish state is not confined to the 1967 borders but extends across Eretz Yisrael, defined to include Gaza and Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) gifted by God to his chosen people. To blitz Palestinian children, then, is perfectly permissible. Neatly and scarily enough, Islamic State leader Abu Omar al-Baghdadi holds that Allah gave the whole of Arabia to Muslims, now duty-bound to rid it of infidels.
Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) is indeed a biblical concept and the idea of a Greater Israel certainly exists in some streams of Zionism. McCann’s description, however, is a narrow one meant to inaccurately portray Israel as a religiously-driven expansionist state. To this, McCann implies that Israel is also genocidal with his appalling charge that Zionism holds that to “blitz” Palestinian children is “perfectly permissible.” Nowhere does Zionism advocate genocide.
And to further stick the knife in, McCann compares Zionism to the extremist ideology of the Islamic State and its atrocities.
The hyperbole continues:
Half a million Jewish settlers bristling with guns now live on Palestinian land. Plans to consolidate the occupation are well advanced.
The territories in question are not “Palestinian land” but are disputed. Those Jews living in these territories are certainly not “bristling with guns,” which is a description meant to demonize the vast majority of Jewish residents who are, in fact, ordinary people who neither own nor use firearms.
McCann leaves us with the bizarre suggestion:
Netanyahu has not baulked at suggesting Israel is the natural homeland of all the world’s Jews, which would make him a sort of King of the Jews.
Israel is the natural homeland for the Jewish people but this does not make any Israeli political leader any “sort of King of the Jews,” nor does anyone claim to be.
Yet again, Eamonn McCann has demonstrated his deep and pathological hatred of Israel and Zionism.
[sc:graybox ]You can send your considered comments to the Irish Times – [email protected] – remembering to include your full name, postal address and telephone numbers (day and evening) to ensure eligibility for publication.
