A video to promote the fifth edition of [confessional magazine] Guts, called Do As I Say Not As I Do, top, ahead of its launch at Thirty Four, Portobello, Dublin 8 this Saturday at 1pm.
By Steve O’Connor, Roisin Agnew, and Steve McCarthy.
Previously: Guts And Glory
Thanks Ciaran
Richard tweetz:
Damn Smarch weather. Freak hailstorm in Cork this afternoon. Brrrrr.
Meanwhile, also in Cork…
Damien Mulley tweetz:
Some line of hailstones/slush…
UPDATE:
A heavy shower of hailstones has led to a number of road crashes in Co Cork, including one involving 14 cars. Injuries described as minor.
— RTÉ News (@rtenews) March 29, 2016
The first Irish Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Herzog
On the first day of the Easter Rising, 14th April 1914, a Jewish Volunteer, Mr A Weeks was killed outside the GPO in Dublin on the first day of action. Days before he had been laying the Foundation stone of the Adelaide Road synagogue. This was the first Jewish Irish nationalist who died for the cause though he was far from being the acceptation that proved the rule.
In the main, Dublin and Cork Jews were nationalists and republicans whilst many of Belfast’s Jews were loyalist or pro-British. Notable amongst the revolutionaries were Robert Briscoe, an IRA Captain and the first Jewish member of the Dail Eirann (the Irish Parliament) and Michael Noyk who worked closely with the revolutionary leader Michael Collins. My own great-aunts, Fanny and Molly Goldberg joined the revolutionary Cumann na mBan and did everything but shoot: hiding IRA soldiers, nursing and marching.
…Despite negativity and occasional antisemitism, Irish nationalists such as Parnell were philosemites. His intervention in the Cork dockers strike of the 1880s to take a stand against anti-Jewish sentiments there won over many including my own great-grandfather who would apparently read to his children from the Jewish newspapers, the parashat hashvua and the writings of Parnell every Friday morning. No wonder his daughters joined the uprising.
And Zionism? The dream of self-determination rubbed off on a generation of Irish Jews. In the midst of the chaos, the Dublin Jews convinced the young Rabbi of Belfast, Yitzhak Herzog to come and become the first Irish Chief Rabbi. He turned out to be a rabbi and politician: his experience in Dublin was again put into effect when he became the first Chief Rabbi of Israel. He was not alone in transforming his Irish nationalism to the Zionist cause.
Indeed the Irish supported Zionist causes: they trained and armed Jewish fighters in Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s. True, some supported Revisionist Zionists and others Socialist Zionists but a small community of no more than 4000-5000 that had put itself front of house building an Irish State would boast a future Chief Rabbi, President, one of the founders of the Israeli Air Force and so much more. The Easter Rising was a precursor for the creation of State of Israel: the Irish State a model of what could be.
The Jewish role in the Easter Rising (Alexander Goldberg, Jewish news)
Alternatively…
Patrick Pearse, the rising’s leader, who proclaimed the republic outside the General Post Office, suffered from what Yeats called “the vertigo of self-sacrifice”. He had a homoerotic vision of the macaomh, the beautiful young scholar warrior who would die for his country – half the Irish mythical hero Cuchullain, half Jesus. The night before he was shot by a British firing squad, Pearse wrote a mawkish poem comparing the Virgin Mary’s loss of her son to his own death.
A century later, this distasteful confusion of political fanaticism with faith is even more in fashion, but nowadays in Islam, not Christianity. Among those rebels executed by the British shortly after Pearse was his devoted brother, Willie. In Brussels last week, a pair of brothers, Ibrahim and Khalid al-Bakraoui, detonated two of the three bombs which killed 31 people.
Islamic State and the Easter Rising (Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph)
Pic: Getty
Friday April 1: Choice Cuts: King & Purple Rain Screening @ The Sugar Club. Leeson Street, Dublin 2 (€12.50)
Nialler9 writes:
The American R&B trio King were chosen by none other than Prince to open for him a few of years back.
Their R&B music, as heard on their self-titled debut album in January is dreamy and soulful of soft synthesizer tones, drum pads, smudged horn sounds, handclap cloudy chords, digital bass and the girls’ lulling tones.
In a nod to the man who helped the band, there is a screening of Purple Rain (1984) beforehand.
Yesterday.
Jonathan writes:
Dublin musicians Billy Treacy, Jonathan Foley and Anna Mary Donaghy were bemused yesterday afternoon during the Easter Monday celebrations when Father Neil Horan paid them a visit in O’Shea’s Hotel on Talbot Street to dance a merry jig.
Not as dangerous as running out on a Grand Prix track, but the audience seemed to enjoy it with some of them even wolf whistling at his revealing garb.
Easter Sunday morning.
The great, the good and others on the viewing platform for the Easter Rising commemoration opposite the GPO, O’Connell Street, Dublin 1.
*throws cabbage*
Pics: Emily
Imelda May during last night’s Centenary show wearing a Grace Cuff by Maria Parsons of new jewellery brand Terrible Beauty
You may have spotted Imelda May’s alluringly ornate wrist clasp last night on the telly?
Charmaine Kenny at The Irish Workshop, writes:
When you think of Irish jewellery that is inspired by something intrinsically Irish, images of Celtic swirls, St. Brigid crosses and harp emblems probably spring to mind. But we’ve discovered a jewellery collection that is Irish to the core yet about as far removed from such clichés as you can get. Introducing Terrible Beauty, a new Irish jewellery brand – the work of award winning jewelry designer Maria Parsons.
Maria’s first collection under the Terrible Beauty brand is inspired by the events of 1916, and each of the three series in the collection are named after women of the Rising – Constance Markievicz, Grace Gifford and Maud Gonne.
One of Maria’s grandfathers worked in the GPO in 1916, while the other worked in Boland’s Mill – so this collection is close to Maria’s heart. We were excited to spot on last night’s Centenary programme that Imelda May (above) is a fan of Terrible Beauty’s Grace Cuff too.
Terrible Beauty (The Irish Workshop)
Irish-made stuff to broadsheet@broadsheet.ie marked ‘Irish-made stuff’
This afternoon.
Garry McNulty writes:
Sad day on Liffey Street, Dublin 1, today.
Anyone?
I notice that The Irish Times Saturday edition cost me an extra 20 cent at my local newsagent. An Easter rising indeed!
Norman Lowther,
Raheny,
Dublin 5.
Anyone?
From top: Chair Of The Irish Muslim Peace and Intergration Council Shaykh Dr Umar Al Qadri addressing an Anti-racism rally at the GPO last year; Dr Julien Mercille
It’s time reach out to Muslims in constructive and peaceful ways to counteract ISIS propaganda.
Dr Julien Mercille writes:
And here we go again. Another terrorist attack on Europe claimed by the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), on Brussels this time. This post explains the strategy that ISIS employs and two types of reactions in the media and commentary.
The first, and dominant, response puts oil on the fire. It is xenophobic and Islamophobic. And in fact, it plays into the hands of ISIS because it is exactly what the terrorists want: a divided people.
The second type of response, in a minority unfortunately, is to react by rejecting the black and white view that ISIS seeks to propagate and to reach out to Muslims.
The strategy employed by ISIS is simple:
1. Create chaos where there is calm (for example, by hitting unsuspecting targets in cities like Paris and Brussels).
2. Use vicious methods to polarise populations. Most Muslims live happily in secular societies. They live in what ISIS calls the “grey zone”. The objective is to drive them toward extremism either by attracting them through displays of power or by instilling fear in them or by scaring non-Muslims into taking revenge on them: in short, the “grey zone” needs to be transformed into a black and white world of “Good” versus “Evil”.
We can react in two ways to ISIS attacks and propaganda: either we support their Machiavellian plans, or we counteract them.
The first option is to fall into their trap and put more oil on the fire and thereby help ISIS spread chaos and boost their recruiting drive.
That’s what politicians like Donald Trump are doing by claiming that there is some sort of divide between the “fanatical Muslim world” and the “reasonable Western world”.
In the wake of the Brussels bombings, Trump said: “I would close up our borders” to prevent dangerous Muslims from getting into the US. Previously, after the Paris attacks, he had called for a temporary ban on all Muslims who wish to enter the US. He also promised to use waterboarding and even go beyond that when interrogating terrorists.
Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister who was a strong ally of George W. Bush in the invasion of Iraq, is also of that mindset.
He wrote an article this weekend in which he declared that. “We are at war with Islamist extremism” and need to be, “preparing for a conflict that is longer than anything we have seen in modern times”.
Because what we face are extremist Muslims of which there are, “many millions… across the globe”.
Blair says that we need to be ready to send Western military troops on the ground in the Middle East. In short, we must “rediscover our muscularity”.
And we must also use our allies.
But who are they?
Blair says: “Saudi Arabia is our ally” and “Israel is also our ally”.
The fact that Israel and Saudi Arabia are two extremist forces spreading chaos in the Middle East is irrelevant for Blair.
In Ireland, some commentators seem also to have fallen into ISIS’s trap.
For example, Carol Hunt, who is running for the Seanad for the NUI panel, wrote in the Sunday Independent that we shouldn’t be scared of criticising Islam and all its problems.
After all, we have “to protect Western values” of openness and plurality against the bad Muslims. She asks suggestively: “Can we be unambiguous in our belief that some cultures are indeed superior to others”?
And: “Can we admit that a culture which espouses universal human rights is indeed superior to one which treats some individuals as lesser beings because of gender, sexual orientation or religious belief?”
In short, Western culture is superior to Muslim culture.
However, this assertion works only if you remove the part that there is a big culture of militarism in the West in which a lot of people are cheering on their militaries to invade other countries; and if you remove the fact that Western governments don’t care about “universal human rights”; etc.
But there is a second option: reach out to Muslims in constructive and peaceful ways to counteract ISIS propaganda.
For example, Juan Cole, the professor of history who specialises in religion and Islam, wrote an excellent piece in which he made the following remarks on how to react to the tragedy in Brussels:
1. “Stop suggesting that there is something wrong with Muslims that they keep producing terrorists. All the major world faiths produce violent people. In the Rwanda genocide of the 1990s, Christian Hutus murdered between 500,000 and 1 million other people, and the Christian churches were deeply involved in enabling this slaughter.”
2. “Muslims are a sixth of humankind and hail from all sorts of backgrounds, ethnicities, and languages. There are 40 million Chinese Muslims. There are 23 million Russian ones. Ethiopian Muslims and Senegalese Muslims have little in common despite being African, and neither has much in common with Bangladeshi Muslims. To tag all of them with the actions of some violent Brussels slum-dwellers of North African heritage is weird. It is exactly like assuming that all American Christians want to kill Tutsis, just because Hutu Christians did.”
3. “Show your Muslim neighbour some love. ISIS does these horrible things to get people of Christian heritage to be beastly to the Muslims in their midst, spreading hatred and anger and a sense of victimization. ISIS is hoping to use *you* to drive other Muslims into their arms. They want to make you a recruitment officer. They want you to hate and they want you to fear. There is only one way to combat this tactic of sharpening contradictions. Refuse to hate and refuse to be afraid. Bend over backwards to be nice to Muslims.”
So we must choose: Do we want to be on the side of ISIS by supporting Islamophobia and throwing oil on the fire?
Or are we ready not to fall into their trap and reject their ridiculous black and white view of the world?
Julien Mercille specialises in US foreign policy and terrorism and is a lecturer at University College Dublin. Follow him on Twitter: @JulienMercille
