Podcast: Play in new window
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Dr Kirill Bumin is Associate Dean of Metropolitan College of Boston University and Dr Mordechai Inbari is Professor of Religion at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.
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That’s the diminutive Justin Barrett, formerly of Youth Defence and a string of other far-right organisations, Litler himself, talking to a commentator with the Canadian YouTube channel Rebel News, itself very much part of the Alt-Right, but he showed up in Dublin for the anti-immigration march, and I suppose he expected the crowd there to be a bit more on-message.
Anyway, I use that clip because it shows both sides of what I always thought were a couple of pretty small niches of anti-Semitic people in Ireland – one the knuckleheaded morons who fancied themselves as edgy neonazis and, two, a strand of conservative Catholics who mixed their bigotry with a conspiratorial reading of theology.
In that clip, Litler manages to lay claim to be in both of those camps, but in reality my impression was always that antisemitism in Ireland was never really an issue. That’s not because Ireland is particularly virtuous, but because there was never a very large Jewish community to be antisemitic against, and any of the typical conspiratorial complaints against Jews on the continent, that they exploited the population, that idea was clearly rebutted by the reality of exploitation of our colonial masters. Another factor is that Ireland didn’t take part in World War II, censorship was so strict that Irish people had little idea what was going on, so the debate – if you can call it that – about the role of Jews in society that you get in most continental countries, doesn’t really exist in Ireland.
You can’t have missed the slew of accusations of Ireland being antisemitic, massively prejudiced against Israel since the attack by Hamas on Israel on 7 October 2023, and the ensuing massive assault, blockade, and attacks on the civilian population of Gaza by Israeli forces.
To me these attacks seem like fairly cack-handed attempts by Israeli authorities and their supporters to undermine the reputation of their critics, easy to see through, not believable by anyone who approaches the topic with a modicum critical thought. One example was the piece written by Lisa Liel on the Times of Israel, the biggest Israeli news website. She wrote:
… most Christians today have become civilized …
But says that there is one exception to that trend:
The sectarian warfare between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland has resulted in the societal retardation of their culture when it comes to religion. They still feel their ancient Christianity in their bones. And as a result, their views of Jews are closer to those of medieval Christians than those of modern ones.
I was aware of this, so when I was pitched an interview with two academics who had researched antisemitism in Ireland I thought that would an interesting topic to include the podcast. I read their research, and I was pretty surprised, they hired a polling company to test public opinion in Ireland, and essentially their findings were that Irish people are far more likely to express antisemitic opinions than other countries that the researchers have studied, such as the US and the UK.
I have to say that I was sceptical of this finding, for two reasons. First, I want to say that the methodology of the poll – that is to say how they measured the opinions of their sample – seems to be very professional and follow statistical best practices.
But who the sample is, that’s a different question. First, the authors, Kirill Bumin and Mordechai Inbari said that they were measuring the attitudes not of Irish people, but of Irish Christians, and they said that they did this because this was consistent with research they had done in other countries, and that people self-identified as Christians. I’m not sure about this because the meaning of someone identifying as a Christian in Ireland could mean something different to the same phrasing in the US, for example.
Also, in their data, they identified that in their sample, 11.7 per cent of respondents were members of the Church of Ireland, that’s far more than 4.7 per cent in the census, and 14 per cent of the sample said they were of some other Protestant or Orthodox denomination compared to 4 per cent in the census.
So that means that non-Catholic Christians are more than 25 per cent of their sample, despite being less than seven per cent of the population. It’s difficult to know what to make of that, other than to say that it’s not really clear that the sampling was representative.
I should say that there was a problem with the start of the recording, a portion at the beginning was lost, so you don’t hear the introduction of Dr Mordechai Inbari, Professor of Religion at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, Kirill Bumin, the Associate Dean of Metropolitan College of Boston University, but before I go to that I want to say thanks to all of the patrons Patreon, I really appreciate everyone who donates on Patreon. It’s a great morale boost every time we get a new patron on Patreon, it lets us know that there are people out there who listen and appreciate the podcast. We make a big effort to cover things that are under-covered in Irish media. You are more than welcome to listen for free, but so if you think that you could do the same as the other donors, and throw in the price of a cup of coffee once or twice a month, there’s details how to do that on the website, and at the end of the show.
Anyway, to the interview with Mordechai Inbari, and first you hear speaking Kirill Bumin.
