Irish Jews were forcibly removed from a Holocaust commemoration on Monday after silently protesting the country’s president for politicizing the event by launching a tirade against Israel’s war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas — a move the country’s chief rabbi later told The Algemeiner was “a disgrace.”

Irish President Michael D. Higgins’s remarks at the National Holocaust Memorial in Dublin appeared to draw parallels between Israel’s war in Gaza and the genocide of Jews during the Holocaust and were met with immediate backlash.

Ireland’s Chief Rabbi Yoni Wieder lambasted Higgins for using the memorial to single out Israel.

“Ireland’s National Holocaust Memorial ought to be a time to remember those who suffered unspeakable horrors at the hands of the Nazis. It is deeply disheartening that President Higgins opted to politicize it by singling out this war and taking issue with Israel’s response to the atrocities of Oct. 7,” Wieder told The Algemeiner, referring to Hamas’s 2023 invasion of southern Israel. The brutal onslaught, which started the Gaza war, was the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Tensions flared on Monday when several attendees protested Higgins’s speech by either walking out or turning their backs on him, only to be removed by security. In one instance a woman was seen being dragged out of the event.

It’s disturbing that the president of Ireland, @PresidentIRL who already has a documented history of antisemitic comments, was invited to address a Holocaust memorial event at all. Despite the Jewish community in Ireland specifically requesting that he not do so, he went ahead… pic.twitter.com/j9A95jHvcK

— יוסף חדאד – Yoseph Haddad (@YosephHaddad) January 26, 2025

Wieder condemned the response, saying, “It’s no surprise that some in attendance chose to show their disagreement with his speech. They did so in silence, and they were not disrupting the event. The fact that anyone was manhandled and dragged out of the room by force is a disgrace. It was completely unjustified.”

Representatives of the Irish Jewish community had previously expressed their opposition to the decision for Higgins to deliver the main address at the Holocaust Day ceremony, which also coincided with the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the largest and most infamous of all the Nazi concentration camps.

Wieder contrasted the removal of the protesters with Dublin’s permissiveness toward openly hostile demonstrations against Israel: “Masked protesters parade Hamas and Hezbollah flags freely in the streets of Dublin and call for Tel Aviv to be bombed, as happened this weekend. It’s a glaring, embarrassing contradiction.”

Higgins’s remarks, which included calls for an end to civilian casualties in Gaza and an increase in humanitarian aid, were criticized for equating Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis with Israel’s military efforts to dismantle the terror organization.

“The grief caused to families by the horrific acts of Oct. 7, and the response to them, is unimaginable. The loss of civilian lives, the displacement of people, the destruction of homes and institutions — all are beyond comprehension,” he said.

The Irish president went on to to say that the “long overdue ceasefire” that came into effect last week has been welcomed by “those in Israel who mourn their loved ones, those who have been waiting for the release of the hostages,” as well as the “thousands searching for relatives in the rubble” of Gaza.

Israel’s Foreign Minister, Gideon Sa’ar, denounced Higgins’s comments as a “despicable provocation,” accusing him of using International Holocaust Remembrance Day to “echo Hamas’s antisemitic propaganda, leading Jews, descendants of Holocaust survivors, to walk out of the event.”

Higgins had “failed to rise above himself and resorted to cheap and despicable provocation,” Sa’ar wrote on X.

Referencing Ireland’s sordid history during the Holocaust, Sa’ar said world leaders should be made “acutely aware” of the “complicit actions of silence or the averted gaze of those who, by their indifference, allowed the Holocaust to be planned, prepared and to occur.”

This incident came against a backdrop of strained Irish-Israeli relations, exacerbated by Ireland’s decision last year to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state as a state as well as join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and its support for redefining genocide in order to secure a conviction against Jerusalem. The move, along with Higgins’s consistent criticism of Israeli policies, has solidified Ireland’s reputation as one of the most openly anti-Israel countries in Europe.

Last month, Israel announced it was shuttering its embassy in Dublin, accusing the Irish government of undermining Israel at international forums and promoting “extreme anti-Israel policies.”

Ireland has “crossed all the red lines,” Sa’ar told reporters at the time, calling the Irish government’s actions “unilateral hostility and persecution” rather than mere criticism.

The announcement came after then-Irish Prime Minister Simon Harris condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza, accusing the country of “the starvation of children” and “the killing of civilians” — remarks that Sa’ar slammed as “antisemitic” and historically insensitive. Sa’ar also noted how “when Jewish children died of starvation in the Holocaust, Ireland was at best neutral in the war against Nazi Germany.”

Those comments followed the Irish parliament in November passed a non-binding motion saying that “genocide is being perpetrated before our eyes by Israel in Gaza.”

In May, Ireland officially recognized a Palestinian state, prompting outrage in Israel, which described the move as a “reward for terrorism.” Israel’s Ambassador in Dublin Dana Erlich said at the time of Ireland’s recognition of “Palestine” that Ireland was “not an honest broker” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

More recently, Harris in October called on the European Union to “review its trade relations” with Israel after the Israeli parliament passed legislation banning the activities in the country of UNRWA, the United Nations agency responsible for Palestinian refugees, because of its ties to Hamas.

Meanwhile, the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (Impact-se), an Israeli education watchdog group, recently released a report revealing Irish school textbooks have been filled with negative stereotypes and distortions of Israel, Judaism, and Jewish history. The findings showed that the textbooks help foster antisemitism by downplaying the Holocaust, portraying Judaism as a violent religion, and distorting the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to make Israel out to be a villain.

In one example uncovered by Impact-se, a history textbook for eleventh graders describes Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi concentration camp in Poland where 1 million Jews were murdered during World War II, as a “prisoner of war camp” rather than an “extermination,” “concentration,” or “death camp.” In other textbooks — including Inspire – Wisdom of the World, a religious studies book distributed to students as young as 12 years old — Judaism is described as a war mongering religion which “believes that violence and war are sometimes necessary to promote justice.”

Irish curricula is perhaps most aggressive in discussing Israel and the Palestinians, according to Impact-se. Citing Inspire again, the report revealed that the textbook’s authors chose to propagate the misleading claim that Jesus Christ lived in “Palestine,” a piece of disinformation that has been trafficked by anti-Zionist activists both to diminish Jesus’s Jewish heritage and deny the existence of a Jewish state in antiquity.

“Historical references to Jesus living in ‘Palestine’ without appropriate context can contribute to narratives that challenge Israel’s legitimacy and undermine the Jewish historical connection to the land,” wrote Impact-se, which also noted that a textbook for younger children on the story of Jesus included a comic strip with the words, “Some people did not like Jesus.” The people shown  in the comic are visibly Jewish, wearing religious clothing such as a kippah.

“This portrayal aligns with antisemitic stereotypes that have wrongly blamed Jews collectively for the death of Jesus,” the group stated.

In recent weeks, the Catholic religious establishment in Ireland has come under scrutiny for targeting Israel. In a New Year’s message by Archbishop Eamon Martin, the most senior Catholic figure in Ireland lambasted Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as “merciless” and a “disproportionate” response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks.

Martin was not the first prominent Irish cleric to use his platform to castigate Israel in recent days.

In November, Reverend Canon David Oxley came under fire for delivering an antisemitic memorial sermon in which he suggested that Israelis and Jews see themselves as a “master race” that justifies “eliminating” other groups “because they don’t count.”

Oxley delivered the sermon at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin during a Remembrance Sunday service attended by Irish Higgins and other high-ranking dignitaries.

Regarding Higgins’s latest address, Wieder accused the president of “neglecting even to acknowledge the scourge of contemporary antisemitism in Ireland, let alone do anything to address it.”

“It is so important that Irish politicians and public figures come together to honor the memory of victims of the Holocaust. Yet the awful irony is that many of them are turning a blind eye to a troubling increase in anti-Jewish hatred in Ireland today.”

The post Ireland’s Chief Rabbi Blasts President for Conduct, Anti-Israel Tirade During National Holocaust Memorial first appeared on Algemeiner.com.