UNPUBLISHED LETTER SENT TO VARIOUS IRISH NEWSPAPERS, 28 January 2025
Sir,
There is nothing more incongruous on the 80th anniversary of the Soviet army’s liberation of Auschwitz, than seeing the pictures of tens of thousands of brutalised but defiant Gazans, walk back along the Mediterranean coastal road to their pulverised homes in North Gaza.
Dehumanised, forcefully displaced, collectively punished by claimed descendants of the Holocaust and forsaken by complicit world governments, they have survived apocalyptic slaughter for the last 15 months.
All this while the main speaker at the Auschwitz memorial, Israeli President Isaac Herzog, continued his portrayal of all Palestinians as being responsible for the 7th October Hamas-led attack, presenting them ultimately as akin to Nazis. Like so many Israeli leaders, he weaponises the horrific crime of the Holocaust to justify Israel’s colonial-type slaughter in what Israeli historian Raf Segal has termed “a genocide-generating world of lies”.
Our own President Higgins got the tone right in his sensitive, thoughtful speech on Sunday. It is a shame that the Irish Government does not understand that ‘never again’, means never again for everyone.
Yours etc.
JIM ROCHE, PRO Steering Committee, Irish Anti-War Movement,
PO Box 9260,
Dublin 1.
