Fun fact: It’s only a few weeks ago since I stayed in the Herbert Park Hotel. And of course, every time you stay in a hotel, google is on to you asking for a review. I didn’t write one.
But for the record: Grand. The rooms are smaller than you’d expect for a prestige Dublin Hotel, the breakfast is distinctly “meh”, and the lifts are small and slow. The price of course is absurd, but that’s basically every Irish hotel since half of them have been turned into migrant residences.
On the upside, the underground car-park is very handy and there’s a lot you’d put up with to be staying smack bang in the middle of Ballsbridge if you are attending an event, as I was.
Tell you who won’t be attending an event at the Herbert Park Hotel, of course: Jews.
My good friend David Quinn got the scoop:
Note here that “Jews” is the correct formulation. The event was not hosting the hated Israelis, but instead a bunch of (predominantly) Jews from around Europe, who wanted to hold some sort of a forum on discussing anti-semitism. Reportedly – and the Hotel certainly hasn’t denied it – somebody from the hotel asked the organisers if there was any connection to the IDF, which is absurd but sort of standard these days in Ireland.
The line of thinking here is not hard to follow. It almost certainly went from “conference on anti-semitism” to “that’s about Jews” to “Jews live in Israel” to “Israel is bad we cannot host this”.
A great many more people think this way than you would think. And almost all of them would be horrified to be called antisemitic for it.
They make little mental shortcuts that they don’t even notice themselves making. And because they don’t notice them being made, they are outraged that somebody could ever think that they – very good people, after all – might be engaged in a form of racialism.
One of the things the Irish Government does, and certainly cannot be blamed for, is to regularly assert that the country does not have an antisemitism problem. Since five minutes on social media would disabuse them of that notion, and since they are all on social media, we can call this what it is: A patriotic lie in the national interest.
Ireland most certainly does have an antisemitism problem. But there are levels to these things: I think it highly unlikely that Jewish people would ever be rounded up and deported, not least since the Irish State seems barely capable of deporting anybody. But also because that would require a conscious, active antisemitism. Which is not what infects the majority of the country.
What infects Ireland instead is a kind of provincial, passive antisemitism. The kind that associates the word “Jew” with “Israel” and then on to “Palestine” and then on to “very bad”. The kind that doesn’t hate Jews for their religion, in most cases (a few old-style Catholics and immigrant Muslims excepted) but hates them for their perceived opinions. This is why the most prized asset of the Palestinianist is the anti-Zionist Jew. See, they cry: This one’s alright.
What happened in the Herbert Park Hotel – in my opinion, at least – was just an extension of what happened with the blessed football matches which sent our poor Sports Journos absolutely crackers. Palestinianism is an identity, more than it is anything else. And identities need to be expressed.
Everybody with a functioning brain knows full well that the policy of the Netanyahu Government will not be shifted over who and where the Israeli soccer team plays. Or over who gets to stay in a hotel. So the actions at issue are not about affecting policy, or even about helping the poor blighted Gazans. They’re about self-expression. They’re about “we’re on the right side of history”.
That’s the funny thing about evil: The people doing it are almost always convinced they are doing righteous things. And right now the righteous thing is to “stand with Palestine”.
If that means that a hotel must, as in 1930’s Germany, become Judenfrei, then so be it. Other Palestinianists will know that you are on the right side – after all, what is antisemitism, compared to literal genocide™?
You’d like to think, I suppose, that we’ll snap out of this as a country at some stage and wake up feeling a bit hungover and embarrassed. And, just like we did with the Covid Lockdowns, we probably will.
But there’ll never be a reckoning for it. It will just not be mentioned again, like the lockdowns. Because our identity, more than anything else, is that Ireland is a good country and we are good people.
And that, as the Government well knows, cannot be challenged by facts. People would rather be sustained by the lie.
JMG
My prediction is, when it's proven beyond all doubt that the war in Gaza isn't a genocide, Irish GazaHamas supporters will claim it would have been a genocide if it wasn't for their activism. They probably have the "We prevented a genocide" tee shirts printed already.
John, I'd throw in a very vocal anti-Englishness into the mix in terms of what people have grown comfortable with in recent years. It's not the fact that it wasn't there, there were always idiots in pubs or children using it amongst themselves (as they didn't know any better), but rather media or public personalities (even certain music groups we all know).
Its always been distasteful, but it is its casual acceptance with the way its thrown around. 800 years and all that. If its a joke, I'm really not too sure what is so funny about it today. I was at a comedy gig a month ago and the entire joke for the evening seemed to be "we all hate English people". Derry Girls, which can be funny, had that re-occurring joke, and it wasn't that funny in that context either.
Many a true word is spoken in jest - my question and maybe you can explore, similar to Irelands antisemitism issue - is do we also have an anti-Englishness problem?