Do you recall when Patrick Kielty boldly claimed that The Late Late Show guests could speak their minds without restraint? The absurdity of such a notion was highlighted in last Friday’s episode, where it became evident that this freedom didn’t extend to voicing support for the Jewish community.
Among the guests was Boy George, and even by the show’s typically cautious standards, the recent controversy surrounding him couldn’t be brushed aside. Coincidentally, Boy George found himself in Golders Green on a day when two Jewish men were randomly attacked near a synagogue. The alleged assailant is a Somali Muslim man with a violent past.
Following the incident, George took to social media to offer his condolences to the victims and their community, stating, “They are an integral part of the fabric of this city.” He further expressed, “Our Jewish community brings us so much… we need to let them know we support them.” When Kielty brought up the topic, George shared that he’d received “a lot of abuse online for my support of my Jewish friends,” emphasizing, “I have numerous beautiful Jewish friends from my upbringing, and being asked to turn against an entire race of people is unacceptable to me.”
And rightly so, as Conor Cruise O’Brien once noted, “antisemitism is a light sleeper,” and the resurgence of such sentiments globally is alarming.
However, Kielty seemed unable to acknowledge this without referencing “the backdrop of the horrors in Gaza,” as if to rationalize the attacks, mumbling that “this is a complex thing.”
Are we to believe that innocent Jewish Londoners, simply going about their daily lives, deserve to be assaulted because of the Israeli prime minister’s actions in a distant land? Would anyone dare to justify a similar assault on London’s Russian community by citing “the backdrop of the horrors in Ukraine”? If American citizens were targeted in Dublin or London, would Kielty suggest it was linked to conflicts involving Iran?
Patrick Kielty and Boy George on the Late Late Show
Funny, isn’t it, how President Putin is generally held personally liable for the invasion of Ukraine, and the Middle Eastern conflict is invariably referred to as ‘Trump’s illegal war’? And yet when it comes to accountability for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to the Hamas invasion of October 7, the country of Israel and the entire Jewish race throughout the world are collectively blamed.
Nobody ever talks about ‘Netanyahu’s genocide’, it’s always Israel and, by extension, Jewish people everywhere who are to be demonised, sanctioned, boycotted and punished.
And when President Connolly – sorry, but that still jars as much as ‘President Trump’ – used a recent speech in the University of Galway to mount her favourite hobby horse, it was Israel, rather than its bellicose prime minister, that she blamed. Staff and students in the university, she said, ‘have raised serious concerns over ties between the university and educational institutions in Israel’. Would she seriously suggest that American students be boycotted and punished for the US attack on Iran?
Yet she has no problem holding civilian institutions, Jewish colleges and universities, responsible for the war in Gaza and demanding they be isolated, boycotted and sanctioned for a war over which they have no control.
Many of the young victims Hamas raped, tortured, kidnapped and slaughtered, when it breached a ceasefire to carry out the worst genocidal attack on the Jewish race since the Holocaust, would have been students of the same ‘educational institutions’ of which Catherine Connolly speaks with such disgust.
The young people who were dancing and singing at the Supernova festival in Israel when Hamas savages paraglided in on October 7 would have included students from many different schools and colleges in Israel.
But because they are Israelis, they are guilty by association for their government’s actions, and deserving of collective punishment, with their places of education to be denied the benefit of academic co-operation and solidarity and their own futures compromised as a result. And this is the shower who boast of their compassion and command the rest of us to ‘be kind’?
In the UK, there are moves to ban pro-Palestinian marches because of their blatant antisemitism, with chants of ‘Globalise the Intifada’ and ‘From the River to the Sea’ – calls for worldwide attacks on Jews and the destruction of the state of Israel – leaving little doubt about their motivation.
At the weekend, Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch declared that these marches were clearly designed to terrorise and intimidate Britain’s Jewish population, and said the stabbings of those Jewish men, the antisemitic graffiti on a Jewish bakery and the burning of ambulances owned by a Jewish charity were proof that anti-Jewish hatred was being normalised and accepted in the UK.
You will not find a mainstream politician in this country with the guts to condemn the poisonous sentiment that has singled us out as one of the most antisemitic nations in the world. Fortunately, nobody’s going to notice our little antisemitic tantrum in boycotting the Eurovision, since that contest has effectively been boycotting us for years, but the sheer intensity of Irish anti-Jewish rhetoric and activism, such as the ongoing bid to purge a Jewish name from a Dublin park, has made international headlines.
In the UK, Badenoch says, Jewish schools had been forced to hire private security, such is the threat level.
When Boy George asked the Late Late Show audience if any of them knew Jews, he was astonished by the silence that followed. Given the deliberate conflation of the Jewish people with the actions of Israel’s warmongering leader by so many politicians and public figures in this country, I suspect it is only because the Jewish population here is so small that they have been spared a similar level of threat.
At least, so far.
Three decades later, I still can’t make sense of Veronica’s death
Veronica Guerin
I CAN still see the headline, 30 years on. The evening papers were sold on the streets in 1996, with the main headline on a poster by the stall. Strolling along Henry Street that sunny June afternoon, I passed a vendor’s pitch. In large black letters, the headline said ‘Veronica Guerin Shot Dead’.
And I guess this is how shock works – I walked on. I didn’t stop or buy the paper, because the headline didn’t make sense. Veronica, a friend since we worked together in the Sunday Tribune, had been shot before, but she’d been fine, sitting up giving interviews in her hospital bed. I could just about get my head around ‘Veronica Guerin Shot’, grotesque though it was, but the ‘Dead’ bit didn’t make sense.
As her family plan a commemorative evening, ‘Truth and Transparency’, to mark her 30th anniversary on June 26, it still doesn’t.
The horrors of rural Ireland…
Brad Pitt and Dublin actress Eve Hewson
BRAD Pitt arrived in Cork last Friday to begin filming a thriller, One For All, set in the south of the country. He plays Fred Scully, whose wife goes missing on her way to join him in the farmhouse he’s bought.
It sounds a little like Taken, but with a backdrop of rolling Irish countryside rather than grimy Parisian slums. And there’s no doubt rural Ireland is having a moment in Hollywood’s horror and thriller genre right now, with the aptly named Hokum getting rave reviews.
There’s a sense of antiquity, folklore and ancient secrets that a US setting can’t match, and we’re famously blasé about celebrities in our midst, so Brad is guaranteed a peaceful stay.
As Matt Damon found, he can go to the beach with his togs in a SuperValu bag and no one will give him a second glance.
It’s a fair cop!
BE honest – are you a thief? Before you take offence at the suggestion, consider if you’ve ever been guilty of what’s termed ‘microlooting’. Did you ever keep an item delivered to you by mistake, for example, or something you realised you’d forgotten to scan at the self-service checkout?
Microlooting is a product of the modern retail world where human interaction is rare, it seems more hassle to return an extra item or an erroneous delivery, and, anyway, Jeff Bezos can take the hit, right?
Several years ago, I bought a small item of jewellery online, and when it didn’t arrive for ages, I got a refund and forgot about it. Months later, it turned up, but I’d long since mislaid the vendor’s details, and anyway it was only about a tenner… Caught red-handed, I’m a microlooter. Still, at least I’m up to speed on one current trend, for a change.
