Sir, – I join Alan Shatter (Letters, January 31st) in welcoming Dáil Éireann's honouring of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and in recommending the Holocaust Awareness Ireland's moving The Objects of Love exhibition at Dublin Castle.
However, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitism is another matter. In once again promoting the IHRA definition, Mr Shatter neglects to mention its controversial accompanying examples, the majority (seven out of 11) of which focus on discussion of the Israeli state.
The definition’s seventh and most problematic example, “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, eg, by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour”, demonises Palestinians simply for speaking the truth of their own dispossession, subjugation and exclusion, based on their ethnicity, at the hands of the Israeli state since its very foundation.
The seventh example, too, could see Israel’s leading human rights organisation B’Tselem, and the global bodies Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International branded as anti-Semitic for their recent reports which conclude that the Israeli state practises apartheid and persecution against the Palestinian people.
When supporters of the Israeli state, in the name of fighting anti-Semitism, promote a definition which could label the Israeli state’s foremost human rights organisation as anti-Semitic, things have surely taken a turn for the absurd. – Yours, etc,
BRIAN Ó ÉIGEARTAIGH,
Donnybrook,
Dublin 4.