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.
She goes on to claim falsely that The Great Big Book of Horrible Things by Matthew White cites religion as the primary cause of 100 of the world’s deadliest atrocities. In fact, White concludes from his rough estimates that belief in a god is responsible for only about 10% of the “multicides” on his list, and the number of victims he ascribes to religion throughout all history – 47 million – is still 20 million fewer than those he ascribes to godless communism in the 20th century alone (and his estimate of deaths under communism is on the conservative side). Nonetheless, McCarthy proclaims vaguely that religion’s “abuse has killed legions of human beings down through the centuries” and that its “consequences can be cataclysmic.”
This notion that religion has only made the world more violent and hateful is a common bigoted position held by smug atheists like comedian Bill Maher who never acknowledge two key points: 1) the immeasurable good wrought by religion and 2) the bottomless human misery wrought by godlessness. McCarthy obliviously and ironically cites, for example, Karl Marx’s oft-repeated dismissal of religion as “the opiate of the masses” yet makes no mention of the fact that Marx (another one of “the greatest influencers of all time”?) is the architect of, at a minimum, tens of millions of deaths and worldwide misery and suffering attributable to his utopian dream of a collectivist, irreligious society in which the State replaces God.
As another example of the evil she believes religion has spawned, McCarthy inexplicably refers to Adolf Hitler, who “despised the Jews so much that he and his collaborators had six million of Europe’s 11 million Jews murdered by death squads and in concentration camp gas chambers.” Anyone who has been to a Holocaust museum, she says, “needs no instruction in the barbarity that religious hatred can cause.”
Huh? Is she claiming that Hitler’s targeting of Jews is an example of religious hatred? Wouldn’t it be an example of godless hatred directed at a religious group?
In any case, the fact that The Irish Times would publish this offensive nonsense on the cusp of Christmas is a sad commentary on the continuing freefall of what used to be known as Christendom. Ireland was one of the earliest centers of the flourishing of Christianity in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire. Indeed, the late scholar Thomas Cahill even wrote a book arguing that the Irish “saved civilization.” Monasticism was introduced into Ireland by St. Patrick in the 5th century; by the year 600 the Church in Ireland had become the most monastic in all Christendom. Monasteries there (as elsewhere on the continent) were centers of learning and of the preservation of classical works by monks copying manuscripts such as the illuminated Book of Kells. Pictured above, for example, is the 6th-century Clonmacnoise Monastery on the banks of the River Shannon. The monastery was a great seat of learning that drew students from all over Europe. Its ruins, which now tragically symbolize a moribund Christian civilization, include a cathedral, nine churches and over 700 early Christian gravestones.
But today we inhabit a post-Christian world. According to the 2022 census, 69% of the residents of the Republic of Ireland described themselves as Catholics. That is down from 79% in 2016, 84% in 2011, and over 90% in the 2006 census. The number of people describing themselves as having “no religion” in tiny Ireland is up by 284,269 since 2016. Only 27% of the population attended weekly Mass in 2020 – down from 91% in 1975.
In a recent article at FrontPage Mag, my Freedom Center colleague Daniel Greenfield points out that Ireland is in the process of committing autogenocide through demography:
In the last 20 years, Ireland, a small nation of millions, has been overwhelmed by a mass migration of 1.6 million people. In 2023, there were 54,678 births in the Republic of Ireland and 141,600 immigrants. Birth rates dropped 5% in 2023… but the number of immigrants grew by 31%. And will grow further.
The most popular name for boys was Jack, among Irish parents, while the most popular name among non-European immigrant parents was ‘Mohammed’.
Greenfield continues:
Churches are closing across Ireland and mosques are opening in their place. There were only 400 Muslims in all of Ireland in 1991. That shot up to 19,000 in 2002 and 83,000 in 2023. 3% of Ireland’s children are Muslim now and the numbers are increasing every year.
The collapse of Christian Ireland is such that The Irish Times and Justine McCarthy are perfectly comfortable insulting – at Christmastime, no less – the diminishing Christian population and defending a Palestinian people whose Muslim brethren are well on their way to Islamizing Ireland. Then they will find out that religions are not all the same.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/irish-times-op-ed-christianity-is-a-hate-crime/
