A Statement of Conscience on October 7 I will not start by saying ‘as a Muslim’ or ‘as an imam’, but as a human being. On October 7, over 1,200 innocent people were killed in a single day. Families were shot in their homes. Young people out dancing were hunted across open fields. Over 250 people, including children and the elderly, were dragged into Gaza as hostages. I think of a mother hiding in a safe room with her baby’s mouth covered. I think of a father listening as the line went quiet. I think of families who waited month after month for someone to come home, only to receive a coffin. I didn’t need my faith to recognize the evil of what happened. My heart told me first. But I’m a Muslim and an imam, and I owe the world one honest sentence: what was done that day was a crime against God. God teaches that whoever kills one innocent soul, it is as if he had killed all humanity. This day has an author: Yahya Sinwar. He planned it, ordered it, and knew what would follow. Every death of that day and war he started rests on him and Hamas leaders who sat in tunnels and foreign hotels and called slaughter a victory. It rests on every Palestinian leader who cheered, excused, handed out sweets, or said nothing. They chose this. They own it. But Sinwar did not invent himself. He was the fruit of a tree planted almost a century ago by the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas named itself in its founding charter as the Brotherhood’s branch in Palestine. The Brotherhood’s poison is slow. It arrives through study circles, youth camps, charity boxes, and kind words to lonely young men. Drop by drop, it teaches him that his religion is a political party, his neighbour is his enemy, the Jew is the cause of his sorrow, and God is pleased by rage. By the time the gun arrives, the soul is already taken. I have seen this poison in mosques where sermons became rallies and young men could recite slogans but not sit still for a verse on mercy. Every people that let the Brotherhood in has paid in blood and ruined generations. It has never built anything it did not first set on fire. Behind Hamas stands another hand: the IRGC. It was the IRGC’s money, weapons, and training that turned a hateful idea into an army. One calls itself Sunni and the other Shia, and they may curse each other’s creeds, but they are united in what they worship. It is not God. It is power. The same IRGC that armed the killers of October 7 shoots Iranian girls for showing their hair, hangs young men for asking to be free, and has left graves from Tehran to Damascus to Beirut. They speak in God’s name. So did Pharaoh speak in the name of heaven. So let me say this clearly. Hamas and the IRGC are not merely enemies of Islam. That would be too small a charge, as if their crime were only against us. They are enemies of God. God is the Giver of life, yet they deal in death. God calls Himself the Most Merciful, yet they have made cruelty a sacrament. God honoured the children of Adam, yet they look at a child and see a target or a shield. To murder what God created and sign His name to it is the oldest blasphemy. And we Muslims have been too quiet. Some of us were afraid. Some told ourselves it was not our business. Some, God forgive them, felt something other than horror that morning and never confessed it. Silence was the soil this poison grew in. I will not add to it. So on this anniversary, let us say plainly what our scripture already says. The Jews are not our enemies. They are our cousins in Abraham, and their dead were created by the same God who created us. Today belongs to them: the murdered, the hostages, and families who still set a place at the table. To them I say: I am sorry for what was done to you by men who used the words of my prayers. You’re not alone in your grief or remembrance. The enemies of God are those who murder in His name. We know their names. It is time we said them from our own pulpits, in our own voices, before they speak for us again. Imam Tawhidi

As the third anniversary of the Hamas-led attacks on Israel approaches, countless pro-Palestine events have been planned across the West. In Sydney, a sit-in is being promoted under the line "Don’t let Israel steal the date." The group Intifada Hannover has announced a march in Hanover, while in Berlin, a march is planned under the slogan "Until Total Liberation." German authorities are considering a possible ban and have warned against participation, citing the event's messaging and the involvement of suspected extremist groups. In London, the University of London Coalition has planned a march through the centre. The Met Police has asked organisers to move it to another day, citing the impact on Jewish students and the wider community. Here in Ireland, the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign calendar listed thirteen events on Sunday, some explicitly described as vigils. This year, that civil date fell on Simchat Torah, the Jewish festival on which the October 7 attack took place in 2023. A further sixteen events are listed for tomorrow, October 7, alongside dozens of other events over the coming week and a national march on Saturday. Apart from former Justice Minister Alan Shatter, no prominent Irish figure appears to have called for either day to be set aside as a day of respect for the Irish Jewish community. Acknowledging the immense suffering experienced by Palestinians during the subsequent war does not require deliberately choosing these dates to recast how October 7 is remembered. That day belongs first and foremost to those who were killed, those who were taken hostage and the communities whose lives were shattered in Israel. It should not be erased or rhetorically reclaimed at the expense of those who were its victims. Kim Damti 🕯️ Dor Hanan Shafir 🕯️ Emily Hand ❤️

The Ireland–Israel fixtures are finally over. Ireland won the "away" leg 3–0 in Hungary, and the "home" leg ended with a 1–1 draw last night, behind closed doors, in an empty stadium in Serbia. Before both games, the Irish players wore black armbands, declined to shake hands, and bowed their heads during the Israeli national anthem. For months, the FAI, the players, and the staff were subjected to a vicious and relentless "Stop the Game" campaign that tried to have the fixtures cancelled entirely. The campaign collapsed rather spectacularly when a mere 15 protesters turned out to meet the Irish team bus at the Aviva Stadium on Thursday. In the end, the Irish public rejected the agitators and refused to brand their own national team as traitors. Both matches went ahead, albeit contentiously, and post-match allegations of racist abuse, spitting, and intimidation of journalists continue to be investigated and debated. That makes it all the more worthwhile to pause on a piece of writing that cuts through the din of accusation and counter-accusation. Published in the Irish Times on the eve of the second match, it reads like a post-mortem, and it is among the most perceptive and lucid we are likely to get. It comes not from a politician, pundit, or sports journalist, but from Yoni Wieder, the Chief Rabbi of Ireland. There is an irony in that. Those whose job it is to make sense of football and politics spent a whole seven months doing little else but stoking antagonism. A religious leader shows us how to think differently. Wieder says that when the draw was made, he pictured thousands of Israelis in Dublin, meeting Irish people the way strangers do, over football, work, and family. Such encounters, he says, reveal the tensions and sympathies that headlines cannot: an Israeli dad who dreads his children's military service yet knows Israel needs an army to keep his family safe; the position of Finn Azaz, half-Israeli but proud to play for Ireland; that Palestinian citizens of Israel play in the Israeli squad, a fact Irish reporters scarcely mentioned. Only by talking with people who see the world differently, he writes, do we find "something deeper, more nuanced and more human behind the label." His prescription is disarmingly simple: "Meet Israelis. Talk to them. Listen to them." Challenge them, too, if you like, about Gaza or the IDF, but be willing to hear their perspective. Agreement is not the point. Even if both sides walk away holding the views they arrived with, something human has passed between them. But instead, the home fixture was moved abroad and played in an empty stadium, and with it went what he calls "the possibility of encounter." His final image is the one that should stay with us: "the door was shut long before a ball was even kicked." I would add one thing to the Chief Rabbi's argument. Ireland's Jewish population numbers only a couple of thousand, and many Irish people have never knowingly met a Jew, let alone an Israeli. My own experience is different. Having lived in the USA and studied at the University of Pennsylvania, I came to know many Jews and Israelis, and they remain my friends and colleagues. So I know, from experience, that they are not the evil, genocidal baby-killers of the caricature that has taken hold in our public conversation. Caricatures can survive only where no actual person exists to contradict them, which is why encounter matters. Now that the fixtures are over, we need to take a longer view, and this applies not only to the conflict between Ireland and Israel but to the standoff between nationalists and loyalists on the Garvaghy Road as well. The aim cannot finally be to win the argument, to stop the game, or stop the march. If it is, we will keep lurching from one short-term pitched battle to another. The longer view has to be reconciliation: between Irish people and Israelis, between Israelis and Palestinians, and among the bitterly divided camps at home as well. That should be everyone's long-term goal, and in a season of frantic noise, the Chief Rabbi has laid it out more clearly than anyone. irishtimes.com/opinion/2026/…

Greens celebrate passing of Zionism is racism motion at conference

🚨BREAKING: The Green Party has voted to adopt a motion declaring that "Zionism is racism" The result was 1,022 in favour and 813 against

So these scumbags are fat shaming now. Fuck Israel. And if their little legion of fiver an hour pussies find fault, man up you losers. What's a colony of scum.