DUBLIN, Jan 19: An Irish politician refused on Monday to apologise after a Jewish rights group expressed outrage over his comments comparing a Jewish colleague to a Nazi propagandist.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre urged Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen “to publicly condemn” a remark by Aengus O’Snodaigh and to apologise to fellow lawmaker Alan Shatter, who is Jewish, on behalf of the Irish government.
At a parliamentary committee hearing Wednesday, O’Snodaigh attacked Shatter and Israel’s ambassador to Ireland for trying to justify the Israeli offensive on Gaza.
O’Snodaigh, Sinn Fein’s international affairs spokesman, compared their defence of the Israeli campaign with the arguments of Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister.
“Perhaps it is no coincidence that ... Shatter is the only Jewish member of the Irish parliament,” said the Paris-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre in a public letter to the Irish premier.
“This incident is in clear violation of Irish commitments to anti-racism and the Holocaust banalisation provisions of the Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe,” concluded the letter.
Shatter and Ambassador Zion Evrony had argued that the Gaza war would not have happened if the Palestinian enclave’s Islamist rulers Hamas had not fired rockets at Israeli civilians.
O’Snodaigh said “Goebbels would have been proud of the twisted logic and half-truths” of the two men’s arguments.
Reacting to the Weisenthal Centre letter, O’Snodaigh said that he would not apologise for comments which he said were not anti-Semitic and were not aimed at Jews.
“I know Jews around the world who would be quite outraged at the propaganda of the Israelis in recent times and their action in Gaza.
“Anti-Semitism is wrong and I would never condone it. One of the highlights of my job in Sinn Fein is to promote anti-racism. It was wrong in any era.” But he said: “My point was quite specific. If you try to justify the unjustifiable through propaganda then the master of propaganda was Josef Goebbels because he succeeded for a number of years in pulling the wool over peoples’ eyes regarding the Holocaust.” He said the point he was trying to make was that this was what was being done in regard to Gaza.
“I wasn’t saying they (the Israelis) were Nazis, I wasn’t saying they were exterminating Palestinians. I wasn’t the one making the equation between the Gaza Strip and concentration camps — others have done that before me.—AFP