Senior Irish clergyman said Israelis embrace ‘blasphemies of a Master Race’

November 1944 was a defining month in the history of the Holocaust. It began with the last-ever selection of victims to be gassed and their corpses burnt at Auschwitz, while the month ended with orders from Heinrich Himmler that all evidence of the real purpose of Auschwitz be destroyed. Over one million human beings had been gassed or worked to death in this vast complex of murder and industry, their flesh and bones turned into easily-disposable ash and wind-dispersed gases, as if these people, most of them Jews, had never existed. The Final Solution then began gathering its Final Harvest, as the process of Jew-elimination moved westward, away from advancing Soviet forces, to death-factories such as Mauthausen and Belsen, where torture, toil and typhus would replace the lethal fumes of Zyklon B.

Eighty years later, in November 2024, at a religious service on Remembrance Sunday in Dublin – supposedly to honour the Irish dead of the two world wars – no mention was made of the Nazis’ Final Solution. Instead, the gathering – which included the President of Ireland, Michael Higgins, and members of the Irish Government – was told at length by the presiding Protestant clergyman, Dean David Oxley, that events in Gaza were the work of people who believed in the blasphemies of a Master Race. “This takes different forms in different times and places, but it is the same horrible idea, that one group of people is intrinsically more valuable than any other. Once that is accepted, then the elimination of others follows as a matter of course – because they don’t count.”

He spoke of the Israeli policy “of targeting schools and hospitals and mosques; the starvation and the constant need to move elsewhere; going back again and again to bomb people who have already been deprived of home and happiness and everything else  – is such cruelty necessary?…. The unending mantra of the IDF: ‘This is the fault of Hamas.’ But it is your hands that have pulled the trigger, that have dropped the bomb that took that child’s legs, that woman’s life, that family’s home.”

He made no mention of the 100 Jewish hostages still held in the 700 kilometres of underground tunnels in Gaza that Hamas had constructed in preparation for their war-to-the-death against Israel. Of October 7, 2023, in which 1,200 Jews were murdered, including many women after being raped, Oxley declared: “No–one can deny that the October 7 attack by Hamas was deliberate cruelty for which no excuse could be made and which caused trauma and deliberate hurt to many innocent Israelis.”

Mass-rape and four-figure wholesale-butchery were sanitised and concealed as “deliberate cruelty”, “trauma” and “deliberate hurt”, just as eighty years earlier, the real purpose of Auschwitz had been concealed, when the gas-chambers were blown up and the human ashes ploughed into the soil while thousands of living corpses were sent on their final death-march westward. 

For many years, the Irish state – which was neutral in the Second World War – refused to acknowledge the Remembrance Sunday service in the Protestant St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, because it was seen as being too “British”. Following a long campaign, in which this columnist played a modest part, in 1990, the then President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, for the first time attended the service, a precedent that was followed by her successors. This columnist was honoured in 2011 with an invitation to make the Remembrance Sunday sermon.

Such sermons follow a well-established tradition of considering the Irishmen and women who died in the two world wars, and this year – being the 80th anniversary of the Normandy Landings, the battle of Monte Cassino and the allied drive through France, Belgium and Holland – was tragically endowed with much material to contemplate. Although Ireland was neutral, many Irish families were not, and over 1,400 Irishmen – all of them volunteers in the war for Europe’s freedom – were killed in action with the British Army in 1944 alone. Yet none of these men was mentioned during Oxley’s unbroken discourse about the Jewish Master Race. It was too much for this columnist: half-way through the sermon, he slipped out of his pew and departed. One other person did likewise.

In any other country in Europe, such an incendiary sermon would have caused headlines and an outcry. In Ireland, there was neither. Though The Irish Times had a reporter at the service, either he did not file a story about this extraordinary address, or if he did, the newspaper saw no reason to carry it. The entire event was treated as if it had not occurred, despite the presence of the president.

Ireland’s small Jewish community were both incredulous and shocked. How could the term “The Master Race”, which had been mockingly used about the Jews of Europe by the Nazi anti-Semitic rag “Der Sturmer” to justify the Final Solution, eighty years later resurface in Ireland and be legitimised to describe the Israeli descendants of the Holocaust survivors? 

That same weekend, four Israeli soldiers were killed in action in Gaza, and six in Lebanon. In both states, Israel was fighting against different genocidal armies, each supported by the might of Iran. In Gaza, with the zealous educational assistance of UNWRA, the permanent government of Hamas has created a suicide cult during its unbroken and unmandated twenty years in power. This is twice as long as Hitler’s reign over Germany had lasted when allied forces began the liberation of mainland Europe in 1943.  

Neither the Irish Government nor President Higgins subsequently chose to distance themselves from Oxley’s sentiments or his language. In the absence of any media coverage of the sermon, it took several days for the Israeli Embassy in Dublin to realise the enormous gravity of Oxley’s remarks. In London, The Jewish Chronicle exploded in anger, though this was barely noticed in Ireland, and was certainly not reported. 

It is as if Ireland and its people have been vaccinated against having any sensitivity concerning Israel and the Jewish people. There were various genocides in the 20th century, but just one Holocaust, in which around two million Jews were gassed and their corpses immolated, alongside the murders of millions more Jews by einstazenkommando units that mercilessly moved through Ukraine and Belorussia, the Crimea and the Baltic states, endlessly, endlessly, endlessly shooting men, women and children. It was the most merciless programme of open-air slaughter in European history, yet Oxley mentioned it but briefly in an almost impenetrable aside about ”the abused becoming the abuser”. Thus, The Final Solution that changed Europe for ever, and irreversibly for the worse, became a mere act of “abuse”. 

This Irish immunity to the ordinary sensibilities of the Jewish people is accompanied by a perfect certainty that the Irish people are fully aware of how the Jewish people feel – both in Israel and in Ireland. Yet the Irish Republic, regardless of the policies and the feelings of most EU countries, and certainly of Israel, has recognised the state of “Palestine”, though no such state exists, since this entity has no definable boundaries and no accountable government. But in spirit nonetheless, the Irish government has rewarded the authors of the massacre of 1,200 Jews and the rape and murder of countless Jewish women by conferring an entirely imaginary statehood on the two Palestinian entities, with even an exchange of ambassadors.  

Neither of these entities pretends to be democratic. On the West bank, the hopelessly corrupt and incompetent Palestinian Authority has not sought electoral re-endorsement for fifteen years. After some twenty years of Hamas rule, Gaza now resembles what Berlin would probably have become if after Hitler’s suicide, power had passed to the death-cult of a messianic Hitler Youth. 

That is supposition: what is not is that after Hitler took his own life, the Irish prime minister, de Valera, donned a frock-coat and top hat and visited the German legate Hempel to offer his condolences. No Dublin government has ever apologised for this scandalous refutation of all civilised values. Likewise, no elected politician today challenges Ireland’s attitude to Israel. Indeed, the Irish people are overwhelmingly proud of their stance on Palestine, not least because it is seemingly without consequence. 

They are similarly proud of what is in essence a parasitic neutrality, since the Irish state cannot protect itself, its assets, its skies, its seas or its citizens. So, it depends on the much-despised British and the slightly less-despised Americans to guard its waters and its airspace. It even rejected an American offer to equip the Irish Air Corps with Blackhawk helicopters, free of charge, because the possession of such equipment would be too “warlike”. Yet even while President Higgins was being regaled with horror stories about the evil Israelis, a Russian spy-ship was butting through Irish waters, its surveillance drones unmolestedly penetrating Irish airspace at their leisure. 

However, a new world order with a new Zeitgeist has arrived. Trump’s election to the White House probably means that the US will no longer tolerate American companies engaging in what is multi-billion-dollar tax-fraud though their often semi-bogus Irish subsidiaries. The days of the US and EU endlessly indulging Irish whimsy are over. Ireland is going to have to grow up and learn that policies always bear consequences, often unexpected ones. Last weekend, a young foreign student was cornered by three men in the toilet of a Dublin pub and asked if he was Jewish. He said yes. He was then savagely assaulted. Words do not kill, but the emotions they can arouse too easily do. And that too depends on the Zeitgeist, which, like Zyklon, is a German word.

Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.