On Tuesday, for the eleventh time in recent years, antisemitic graffiti was scrawled across a road in the Louth-Meath area. The word "Jew." The word "rats." Stars of David. Another word that the media censored. Painted in broad strokes on the L5600 at Bigstown, two hundred metres from a school. The eleventh time. I want to sit with that number for a moment. Because at some point between the first time and the eleventh time, something happened that is worse than the graffiti itself: it became routine. A councillor makes a call. The council sends a crew. The graffiti is removed. And then, weeks or months later, someone drives out under cover of darkness and does it again. And we absorb it. We metabolise it. We move on. Councillor Paddy Meade, who has been almost entirely alone in raising the alarm on these incidents, put it plainly after the ninth occurrence: "Does anyone mind?" He noted that CCTV footage had previously been passed on to the Gardaí. He asked whether we should even bother investigating this anymore. The question wasn't rhetorical. It was exhausted. This is what Ireland has become. Not overnight, and not because of any single moment, but by slow accretion, by the steady compounding of things left unsaid, undone, unconfronted. Several weeks ago, the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland published its first ever Antisemitic Incident Report. It documented 143 incidents in just six months, affecting a tiny community of around 2,300 people. Verbal abuse. Vandalism. Threats. Exclusion and discrimination. People afraid to wear a Star of David to work. A young person in school receiving images of swastikas and told that "the classroom will turn into a modern-day gas chamber." A pub with a sign reading "All Zionists Are Barred." Thirty percent of the incidents were triggered simply by cues of Jewish identity, an accent, a symbol, a few words of Hebrew. And here is the detail that should haunt every person who cares about this country: Ireland has no official mechanism for recording antisemitic incidents. None. The JRCI had to build the reporting system and compile the statistics themselves. The same Irish state that has made the Palestinian cause a defining feature of its international identity has not troubled itself to count the ways an Irish minority group is being systematically harassed, threatened, and dehumanised at home. Holocaust Awareness Ireland called the graffiti a "bellwether of national sentiment." That phrase should chill us. The graffiti is not an aberration. It is a crude expression of something that has been permitted to take root in our culture more broadly. The comparison of Jews to vermin was, as HAI noted, a cornerstone of Goebbels' own propaganda apparatus, the rhetorical precondition for extermination. The German word for the murder of Jews and the German word for pest control were, by design, the same: vernichten. And now Jews are compared to rats on a country road in Meath, a few hundred metres from where children go to school, and the dominant national response is a procedural shrug. I keep returning to something Maurice Cohen, chair of the JRCI, said when asked whether the incidents were merely a response to events in Gaza: "Framing hostility against Irish Jews as an understandable consequence of events elsewhere is victim blaming." He's right. And the fact that the question was even posed (by a journalist, in the pages of the Irish Times) tells you everything about how deeply the rationalisation has embedded itself. There is always a reason. There is always a context. There is always some geopolitical frame that renders the suffering of Irish Jews comprehensible, and therefore tolerable, and therefore ignorable. Yoni Wieder, the Chief Rabbi of Ireland, put it with a gentleness that I find almost unbearable, saying that antisemitism in Ireland "surfaces often enough, and in ordinary enough settings, that it cannot be dismissed as rare or confined to the margins of society. This means that for many, Jewish belonging in Ireland feels more fragile than it should." "More fragile than it should." What a careful, aching phrase to describe the experience of looking at the country in which you live and wondering whether it still wants you. Nine percent of Irish adults believe the Holocaust is a myth. Another seventeen percent believe the number of deaths has been greatly exaggerated. Half of all Irish adults do not know that six million Jews were killed. This is not ignorance at the margins. This is a catastrophic failure of education, of memory, of conscience. And yet Ireland routinely presents itself to the world as a moral authority on questions of oppression and justice. We speak with great passion about colonialism, about solidarity, about the universality of human rights. We have built an entire diplomatic identity around the idea that Ireland, having suffered, understands the suffering of others. But suffering has not made us empathetic. It has made us selective. We have learned to see certain kinds of pain with clarity but to look through others as though they were not there. The eleventh time. Someone will scrub the road clean again. By today, the paint may already be gone. And then, in a few more weeks or months, it will happen again, for the twelfth time, and we will perform the same rituals of procedural condemnation and bureaucratic cleanup. But nothing will change, because the problem is not the paint. The problem is us. The problem is a country that has allowed antisemitism to become ambient and has decided, collectively and by default, that this is acceptable. That this is just how things are now. That this is us being on the "right side of history." Councillor Meade asked the right question. Does anyone mind? I mind. But I am starting to wonder whether that matters.

NOW OUT ON FIRSTVIEW!! Torture’s Bureaucracy & the “Legitimacy Effect” By Hagar Kotef & @MeravAmir buff.ly/41bYbo7

💥Thousands in Tel Aviv (Tally Melamed)

אלפים מביאים את האור והתקווה באירוע שלום ענק בהיכל מנורה! אנחנו דורשים בטחון, שוויון, ושלום לכולםן 🕊️💡

גאה להשתתף יחד עם אלפי ישראלים וישראליות בארוע הענק בתל-אביב למען החזרת חטופים ושלום. יש תקווה, רק התחלנו. כבוד ל@maozinon המדהים, לנשים עושות שלום ולעשרות ארגונים שוחרי שלום ושינוי שהריצו את הארוע החשוב.

Thousands gather in Tel Aviv for the anti war, pro peace conference. It is expected to start with a the poem Revenge by Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali, read by an Israeli whose parents was murdered on 7.10 lithub.com/revenge-a-poem-by…

עכשיו בהיכל מנורה, מחנה השלום מתעורר וקורא בכל הכוח לעצור את המלחמה מיד

We are here, thousands of Jews and Arabs, sharing a vision where both the Israelis and Palestinians have security, equality, and peace. We will turn this vision into reality ✊ Watch live here: youtube.com/live/nW8kFyft54s…

Maybe Jews wouldn’t have been so keen on supporting Zionism if they felt they had somewhere else to go when fleeing genocide

Would you like to explore the meaning of hope in the face of darkness and hatred? Here is the definition of hope: Six thousand Palestinians and Israelis came together in Tel Aviv, from all ages, backgrounds, and faiths, to say ‘Enough’ to the war. The time for peace has come.

For all of the reporting coming out of the region you’d think this couldn’t have been missed, but you’d never see this on your newsfeed. Us killings each other attracts viewers and clicks, you don’t get that when it’s Jews and Palestinians coming together to call for peace

Our statement regarding the misrepresentation in @thetimes article published on June 7th, 2024, With @OritSulitzeanu and Sarai Aharoni linkedin.com/posts/ruth-halp…

Has @thetimes retracted the article and apologized yet? So disgusting, so low.

As a Palestinian student in the United States, I wish the message had been written as: "Students will go back home when this war ends, and the children of Gaza will feel safe, and the hostages back to their families." Instead of a message that doesn't benefit anyone but only fuels hatred against Jews and demonizes the legitimate protests of students supporting Palestine in American universities.

After Hersh Goldberg-Polin was taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7, his mother hadn't heard his voice or seen video that proved he was alive for more than 200 days. But that changed this week, when Hamas released a propaganda video showing Hersh – an Israeli-American – alive with his left arm amputated. CBS News' @Debora_Patta sat down with his mother, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, to ask about the "overwhelming and emotional" moment she saw that video and how she hopes all parties involved can reach a compromise to end the suffering. "I think that everyone has to decide to care about their people and love their people more than they hate their enemies," Goldberg-Polin told CBS News. "Let's be human. Let's figure it out, and let's end this."

An Israeli Arab from the Bedouin community spoke to us about the people from his community who were kidnapped and killed by Hamas-including women in hijab. He also told us about the Bedouin Arabs who went to save victims at Nova. The app got confused with two languages so the subtitles are not great- so sound on please Translation by @_AhmedQuraishi #BringThemHome🎗️

You need to be really quite indifferent to Palestinians to tweet this tanky bullshit after last night - considering Palestinians are in the fire zone and have far less protection than Israelis But even more importantly...

ויהי בוקר ויהי ערב היום ה174. 175 176 אוקטובר לא מרפה. ביבי, שחרר אותן. שחרר אותם. שחרר אותנו כבר.

I couldn’t agree more w/ everything Gary has said here re: sexual violence. “Just bc hasbara efforts take advantage of accounts such as that of Amit Soussana, it absolutely doesn't mean she isn't telling the truth or that we can dismiss what she is saying about her ordeal.”