Criticising the IDF’s actions is not hate-speech — we shouldn’t be bullied

But it really feels like things are turning.

Over the years I have noticed how any defence of free speech has to go through a far more rigorous investigation than any attack on it.

You get labelled very quickly; misogynist, anti-semitic, transphobic, etc without too much analysis of what that label means. And it is because you have uttered an opinion that differs from someone else.

One of the most dangerous things you can do as a writer or public person is rattle the bush of the modern zeitgeist, because you could find yourself reduced to one of those labels.

It could so rapidly become the whole of you as a person. It is designed to silence discourse. People have become fearful to voice their opinion, and when that happens you have an attack on free speech.

We all must take responsibility for what we say, but we should be able to say it.

President Obama, said to this metastasizing trend, ‘laudable efforts to restrict speech can become a tool to silence critics, or oppress minorities. The strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression, it is more speech’.

We are living in an age of rabid censoriousness, where speech is being weaponised, and it has been creeping in for many years. I could see the seeds of this when, as a country, we discussed hate speech legislation.

Of course, any free-thinking and reasonable minded person, wants the eradication of hate speech or hate in general.

I want to live in an Ireland where people can safely walk down the street, free to express themselves and love who they want without fear of being attacked or having something terrible said to them about who they love, their gender or religious devotion. I think the majority of us want that.

But I also want to live in an Ireland where we can hear difference, and voice our objection without shutting others down.

In the debate about hate speech legislation, the big question we need to resolve is, who gets to decide what qualifies as hate speech. That’s a complicated question to resolve.

Last week on Newstalk, we witnessed why this is such an important question to consider.

Ireland is now being labelled as anti-semitic because of its criticism of how Israel is handling their response to the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas.

The recent interview with Alan Dershowitz – a New York lawyer – on Newstalk breakfast with Ciara Kelly illuminated just how dangerous labels are and how they are designed to shut down free thinking, intelligent people.

Dershowitz was invited on to give his insights into the recent judgment on the Sean “Diddy” Combs case.

As the interview was concluding Dershowitz asked, ‘let me ask you a question; why is it that Ireland itself, as a country, has become the most anti-Zionist, the most anti-Israel, the most anti-semitic, country in all of Europe?’

Dershowitz voiced what many of us have felt; Ireland is being viewed as harbouring some deep hatred towards Jewish people because of its criticism of the destruction of Gaza and the Palestinian people.

Dershowitz went further and said, ‘remember too, Ireland is the only country in Europe, western country, that did not support the British and American war against Nazism’.

He continued on his attack and said, ‘Ireland made a horrible, bigoted, anti-semitic choice in the Second World War that continued from 1939 until the day before Gaza’. We are quite simply being told to shut up or we will be labelled as Nazi sympathisers.

When you analyse what is being said to us, it is shocking. He was suggesting that our criticism of Israel’s relentless destruction of Gaza puts us in league with Nazi Germany.

The glaring inaccuracies in his diatribe, the conflating of the horrors of Hitler’s ‘final solution’ and the fires of Auschwitz and many more death camps with critique of Israel’s policy, denigrated all those innocent Jewish people who were systemically targeted and destroyed for some terrible ideology.

We are far too educated as a people to let Dershowitz and others like him shut us up.

Our Constitution of 1937 recognised the special place of the Jewish congregation in Irish life, that was not the trend throughout Europe at that time. Someone like Dershowitz doesn’t get to tell us who we are as a people or rewrite our history.

We have a long tradition in this country of artists, painters and singers who bravely uttered their condemnation of how power was wielded by the powerful – Sinead O’Connor, James Joyce, Yeats, Bono, who told Israelis to free themselves from Netanyahu, and in recent times Kneecap.

Our artists have always spoken against the injustices they see in the world, whether that was the power of the Catholic church, a colonial power, the wealthy merchant class, or Israel’s response to the incomprehensible carnage of October 7 terror attacks.

We have always spoken what we feel and not what we ought to say. But we are being told to be quiet and know your place.

But we won’t be silenced.

To criticise the IDF’s attack on innocent aid workers, how they murdered them and subsequently buried their bodies to hide the atrocity, to criticise that does not have anything to do with their religion – it has to do with their actions and wilful denial of human rights.

To conflate that with Nazism is chilling and should be denounced by everyone in this country and abroad.