On Monday, King Charles represented our nation at Auschwitz with all the dignity and compassion that we have come to expect from a man who has consistently demonstrated his understanding of the Shoah and his belief in the importance of commemoration.
The previous day, the president of Ireland, Michael Higgins, did the very opposite, using his speech to that country’s formal Holocaust remembrance ceremony – a speech he had been asked by Ireland’s Jewish community not to make – to lambast Israel, turning what should have been a solemn, serious and apolitical event into a nasty and wholly inappropriate demonstration of his obsession with the world’s only Jewish state.
Higgins is typical of a particular type of public figure whose hatred of Israel is dressed up in the spurious conviction of virtue, and which becomes so all consuming that they end losing all moral compass, leading to the grotesque spectacle of a Holocaust memorial ceremony being marked by security guards dragging Jews along the ground to remove them because they took issue with the hatred being spouted by their country’s president.
Ireland’s governing class has taken a dark turn since October 7, embracing some of the worst themes pushed by Jew haters across the world. But even by those standards – and by his own previous outrages – Higgins’ behaviour this week was simply contemptible, and shamed his nation on Holocaust Memorial Day.
