The Misplaced Minister: Ireland and Israel’s Alan Shatter

For the past two years Ireland’s immigration policy has been in the hands of Alan Shatter, a Jew and an outspoken partisan of Israel. Alan Shatter, born and bred in Dublin of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, has made it Irish policy to increase Third World immigration to the Emerald Isle. As Minister of Justice, Equality, and Defence, Shatter is exerting his considerable clout to skew the Republic’s Middle East policy, formerly supportive of the Palestinians and critical of Israel, toward Zionist aims. 

Before Shatter, the Irish government had taken steps to reduce non-European immigration, including abolishing automatic citizenship for children born to foreigners in Ireland and drastically reducing the admission of asylum seekers. Since taking office in early 2011, after his Fine Gael party ousted the ruling Fianna Fail amid Ireland’s continuing economic woes, Shatter has busied himself with increasing the numbers of Africans and Asians resident in Ireland.

Immigration to Ireland from outside Europe during 2011 was twice that of the previous year. Last year, the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service granted visas to 91 percent of the 88,000 non-Europeans who applied for them (citizens of the twenty-six other member states of the European Union can travel to Ireland without having to obtain a visa). An additional 115,000 migrants from outside Europe were given permission to remain in Ireland in 2012, with India, China, Nigeria, Turkey, and the Philippines among the top six countries of origin. To be sure, the number of permits to non-Europeans to reside in Ireland has declined over the previous two years—but only because Shatter’s ministry has been granting them citizenship, at several times the rate of the preceding years.

Shatter is aggressively promoting new measures to further increase non-European immigration, including making immigration easier for investors and entrepreneurs and their families. More ominously still, he is working industriously to replace existing Irish legislation on foreign immigration, including applications for asylum, with a bill that will, according to Shatter’s stated priorities for the current year, will “radically reform and modernize” Irish immigration law. 

Shatter has attempted to veil his immigration policies under the subterfuge of streamlining administrative procedures. After all, while exposed to the same globalist propaganda and pressures as America, the Republic of Ireland is a small and still largely homogeneous nation. It is also a land in which cant about “a nation of immigrants” won’t sell: until only a couple of decades ago, Ireland was a nation of emigrants. And today, Irish unemployment continues to hover at around 15 percent, twice the stated rate in the U.S.

What was Shatter to do? Why play the Holocaust trump card, of course!  

Now, Ireland has not been known for its role in World War II anti-Jewish measures. Like most countries at the time, however, including Germany’s fiercest opponents, Ireland was reluctant to accept large numbers of Jewish immigrants.

So, last fall, in a speech in honor of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish businessman who traveled to Hungary at American instigation in 1944 to impede deportation of Jews to German concentration camps, Ireland’s Jewish immigration czar attempted to justify flooding his homeland with Third World immigrants by attacking Ireland’s World War II immigration policy:

There were many who did nothing in the face of the industrialised genocide and the destruction of European Jewish civilisation. Indeed the Irish Government of the day sat on its hands. And even after the death camps were liberated, the Irish Government denied Jews refuge in Ireland.

It won’t surprise TOO readers to learn that, for all his efforts to pass as a champion of universalist ethics (“It is not enough to bear witness. We must also honor our fundamental moral obligation to protect our common humanity against inhumanity.”), Shatter has been anything but a protector of the Palestinians’ humanity. What may surprise is that, in a nation virtually devoid of Jews, and one which has been more supportive of the Palestinians than most Western countries, the extent to which Shatter has been a strident voice in defense of Israel’s ruthless policies, in the Gaza Strip or on the West Bank.

As a member of the Irish legislature, Shatter defended Israel’s brutal 2009 invasion of Gaza. He opposed the “freedom flotillas” organized in 2010 and 2011 to breach the Israeli blockade of the already impoverished Gaza strip, although each of the aid expeditions included a ship from Ireland (although Shatter did a brief turnabout after Israeli commandos killed nine men aboard a ship in the first flotilla). He has opposed visas for members of organizations hostile to Israeli policies, and resoundingly condemned calls for the Irish to boycott performances in Israel as “cultural fascism.”

It would be interesting to know what Ireland’s minister of justice thinks of Israel’s recent strict measures to control and to curtail Third World immigration—but he seems to have maintained a prudent silence in that regard.

Shatter has not merely parroted Israel’s justifications for oppressive policies aimed at preserving Israel as a Jewish state for a Jewish people, he has in effect served as a second Israeli ambassador to Ireland, functioning without the diplomatic constraints of the former. 

We may take it, then, that Ireland’s Jewish minister of justice is moved by something other than an abstract sense of fairness that, however misguidedly, invites the world’s “wretched refuse” (as a very influential tribune of indiscriminate immigration once called it) to Ireland’s shores. Seen in the light of his dedication to a dogma that the United Nations General Assembly once declared racist, Shatter’s promotion of Third World immigration, as well as his long career as a lawyer promoting birth control, abortion, and gay marriage—takes on a more sinister hue, as do such recent initiatives as his condemning Ireland’s national television network for failing to depict today’s “intercultural Ireland” rather than the homogeneous Irish people of decades past.

In other words, Shatter has at best dual loyalties—but his double standard on Israel and Ireland would seem to indicate that his loyalty is primarily, if not exclusively, to the Zionist state rather than the Emerald Isle. What factor his Jewish loyalties play in promoting an immigration that is at most minimally Jewish, yet increasingly non-White, to the land of his birth remains an unanswered, though provocative, question. Nevertheless, Shatter’s attitudes are entirely in sync with those of the organized Jewish diaspora communities throughout the West. As often noted in TOO (see also here, p. 241ff), Jewish attitudes on immigration in the West are best explained as Jewish ethnic strategizing motivated by hostility toward the traditional people and culture of the West because of historical anti-Semitism (e.g., Shatter’s construction of Ireland’s role in the Holocaust) combined with fear that ethnically homogeneous populations may eventually rise up against Jews.

As noted, Alan Shatter is also Ireland’s minister of defence. In that role, he has announced that Ireland will continue to buy arms from Israel. As one of his critics has observed, “It is not unusual for a Defence Minister to be steeped in nationalism, but for the ‘nation’ in question to be a foreign state, and a rogue state at that, must be unprecedented.”

It’s hard to imagine the mirror image of Alan Shatter in Israel. Just imagine one Alan O’Slattery, devoted to promoting non-Jewish immigration to the Zionist state and putting the military and diplomatic needs of Ireland above those of the nation he serves, wielding comparable power in Israel!

But it’s not so difficult to imagine Alan Shatter finding a ministerial role in yet another country. In the eyes of John McCain and Lindsay Graham, Shatter might well be eminently more qualified to serve as U.S. Secretary of Defense than Chuck Hagel. After all, Hagel has the wrong loyalties, and Shatter has the right ones.