Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar recently announced the closure of the country’s embassy in Ireland, citing “extreme anti-Israel policies” including Ireland’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state and its support for South Africa’s legal action against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ). In response, Justine McCarthy at The Irish Times penned an opinion piece defending her country against Sa’ar’s “abominable” accusation that Ireland is antisemitic.
In the process, she hurls the usual progressive smears at Israel for “their government’s protracted killing spree in Gaza and the illegal settlements in the West Bank,” and she uncritically accepts the illegitimate ICJ’s false claim that half a million Jews live in illegal settlements on land “expropriated from Palestinians.” Compared to Israel’s purported abuses against Palestinians, such as “the mass killings and orphaning of children,” she asserts that her own government’s anti-Israel policies are merely “gentle nudges towards a peaceful two-state resolution.”
Apart from the fact that a two-state resolution will be anything but peaceful, and that the Palestinians themselves have repeatedly rejected offers of a two-state solution anyway, at the core of McCarthy’s article is the argument that religion historically has been and continues to be the source of untold human misery.
A mere few days away from Christmas at the time of publication, McCarthy had the gall to muse on how much more smoothly and peacefully history would have proceeded if the Christ Child had been slaughtered by King Herod in his infamous Massacre of the Innocents:
Next Wednesday, Christians and many others around the world will celebrate the birth of a child who became one of the greatest influencers of all time. On that night roughly 2,000 years ago, shepherds and wise men gathered at a stable in wondrous joy at the virgin birth while yonder in Bethlehem, or so St Matthew’s unsubstantiated gospel goes, soldiers butchered scores of infant boys. Had the baby Jesus been among the massacred innocents, might history have turned out to be less hellish for humanity? The Spanish Inquisition might not have happened, nor the Crusades, the French Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years’ War, or the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Aside from her dismissive reference to Jesus as a great “influencer” – as if he were merely the first-century equivalent of an Instagram model, did you catch how McCarthy calls the Massacre of the Innocents “unsubstantiated”? It is no more “unsubstantiated” than countless other events in antiquity for which we do not have independent confirmation but plenty of circumstantial evidence. The slaughter of all male toddlers in Bethlehem and its environs to prevent a foretold King of the Jews from threatening his rule is perfectly consistent with Herod’s cruel and paranoid character, for which there is plenty of evidence. But because the Massacre is referenced only in the Bible (the gospel of Matthew, to be precise), McCarthy can’t resist sideswiping it. […]
— Read More: www.frontpagemag.com
