An Anglican cleric “hijacked” a Remembrance event attended by the Irish president to deliver an anti-Israel diatribe in which he also suggested that Israelis saw themselves as a “master race” that was more valuable than “other” groups.
Reverend Canon David Oxley delivered the sermon at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin with President Michael Higgins, the Lord Mayor of Dublin, frontbench politicians, veterans and senior servicemen and women in attendance.
Israel had committed the “horrible blasphemy of the master race in action”, he said. “The elimination of others follows as a matter of course because they don’t count.”
His comments were met with outrage and dismay by the Jewish community in Ireland.
A spokesperson for the Israeli embassy in Ireland said Oxley’s comments were a “libel against the state of Israel” and accused him of “hijacking” the solemn memorial service.
The spokesperson said that the rant was “divorced from reality” and “wilfully ignored the complexities of the Middle East”.
The Jewish Representative Council of Ireland (JRCI) called for the church to distance itself from Oxley’s “inflammatory rhetoric”.
JRCI chair Maurice Cohen told the JC: “It is profoundly distressing to our Irish Jewish community to see such a hateful sermon be delivered.”
Oxley suggested Israelis and Jews have “a supremacist ideology”, according to Cohen, which the Jewish leader said was “a dangerous and harmful generalisation that promotes age-old antisemitic stereotypes”.
Cohen said the canon’s language “dehumanises the Jewish community, falsely portraying them as inherently oppressive and cruel, without regard for the complexities of the region’s ongoing conflict or the defensive measures taken by Israel.
“Honouring the fallen should be a time for unity and reflection, not for fostering division.”
