Ireland has been consumed by hatred of Israel
A new religion blights the Republic of Ireland. Catholicism has been supplanted by a far more cultish creed. Its doctrines are declared with great fervour, its icons scar every town and village. You will struggle to find one person who has not converted to this strange and all-consuming faith. Its name? Israelophobia.
I knew Ireland was hostile to Israel but I had no idea how bad things had got. It's suffocating. Wherever you go, whether city or bog, you'll see it and hear it – that swirling animus for the Jewish State. The political class speaks of little else. The media are feverishly obsessed. From every political party, every TV set, every soapbox, the cry goes out: Israel is evil!
It's inescapable. It's all over Dublin, of course, long a hotbed of leftish activism. You won't walk five metres there without seeing a youth wearing a keffiyeh and a look of smug self-satisfaction.
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New Statesman
4 hours ago
- New Statesman
Why do right-wing 'transvestigators' believe Michelle Obama is a man?
Photo by Charly Triballeau/AFP A new fetish has evolved. For a long time, it was easy to predict the archetypal sexist vitriol spewed by anonymous, vaguely Nordic X accounts whenever a woman came close to the highest seats of political power. But lately, their fascination with female authority has deepened – and twisted. Welcome to the world of the transvestigators: the West is falling, family values are under attack, and Michelle Obama is secretly a man. The objective of this conspiracy among far-right internet sleuths is to use phrenology to 'prove' that cisgender celebrities – namely the wives of political figures – are secretly transgender (or 'inverted,' as they are typically referred to). These detectives scrutinise the physical features of these women – from their height and voices to their jaws or 'energy'– in search of supposed deviations from arbitrary beauty standards. While it began with posts about the former First Lady and Angela Merkel, transvestigation has now proliferated throughout the online far-right ecosystem, where each new day brings another avalanche of outlandish claims and AI transvestigation sludge. The most recent swell came when Meghan Markle shared footage – in her uber-cheery, classically cringey Instagram mode – of herself and Prince Harry dancing in a hospital. The choreography in the video was allegedly a labour-inducing ritual and, also allegedly, a successful one: Rachel from Suits and the Spare made the post to celebrate four years since Lilibet's birth. The far-right saw through all that: 'At first, I didn't buy into the rumours', an X post began. But 'there's no denying this: Meghan Markle is a fraud'. Markle's great swindle? Trying to convince the world that she gave birth to her children. Anyone with two eyes and a lot of free time could see the truth. That was no baby bump – that's a scrunched-up 'puffer jacket,' a balled-up 'blanket,' or, as one user astutely proposed, a rumpled 'hotel sheet.' The ruse confirmed what they had always known: Prince Harry had married a woman who was unwilling to carry her own child, so insisted on having Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet via surrogate. Transvestigation is part of a broader 'emasculation fetish' within the online right. That sense of emasculation was formed by the twin pressures of two perceived threats: the woke left's crusade against traditional masculine values and an influx of 'fast-breeding alien immigrants'. The persecuted and surrounded envisioned a new image of virtue – then stuck it in the White House. This new model was the fertile patriarch: Donald Trump. He was Christian (sort of), nationalist, strong, with a perfect (mute) Mar-a-Lago-faced wife and a legion of grinning, preferably white, children. J.D. Vance said, 'I want more babies in the United States of America'. In an essay explaining his conversion to Catholicism, Vance remembered 'the achievement that mattered most to me for so much of my life: a happy, thriving family.' With the new pride came a new fall. The most disgraceful shame, now, was to lose control over your woman and her womb. And with the emergence of transgenderism, 'cuck' (from cuckold), the old insult, metastasised into a still more fearful peril for dominated husbands. Your wife could secretly be a man. Thus a new ignominy was mapped out, where the children weren't children, the wives weren't wives and, above all, the men weren't men. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe It was only a week before the Markle video that the world had stopped to watch Emmanuel Macron pushed in the face by his wife, Brigitte, as they deplaned during a state visit to Vietnam. Here was a head of state reduced to a trembling 'man-child' – emasculated and humiliated by a wife who groomed him as his teacher. X and Reddit filled with AI memes of a black-eyed, arm-slung Macron cowering beside his wife. But in 2025, scenes that we once might have called 'unfortunate' now supply more complex implications. Right-wing talking-head Candace Owens was willing to stake her considerable professional reputation on this one. Owens told listeners of her multi-part series Becoming Brigitte to 'stop everything': she had unravelled 'likely the biggest scandal that has ever happened in politics in human history'. The French president's wife was a man. This she was a he, the femme was a homme, and there were prehistoric, grainy zoom-ins on Brigitte's crotch to prove it. In this world, few passions are more dearly cherished than the transvestigation. Even while interviewing Renaud Camus, the originator of the 'Great Replacement' theory, the key online right guru Curtis Yarvin could not resist questions about Brigitte's sex. A baffled Camus protested, 'We are dealing with the most important thing in the history of the Continent,' referring to the rise of nonwhite immigration to Europe. 'What does it matter if Mrs. Macron is a man or a woman?' But to some, it very much does matter. And the 'Brigitte = Jean-Michel' hypothesis has but a fraction of the traction of 'Michelle = Michael'. This is the idea that Michelle Obama, whose husband has long been a hate figure for the American right, is Michael LaVaughn Robinson. It's absurd, sometimes even laughable. But emasculating non-compliant figures like Prince Harry, Macron and Obama – while deploying the triumvirate of far-right insults: racism, sexism, and transphobia against their wives – has generated an almost guaranteed formula for viral outrage, meme fodder, and reinforcement of reactionary gender norms. It's a wider endorsement of traditional general roles that promote the restriction of women to domestic roles, while offline, a broad backlash against feminism has led to legislative changes that reduce women's bodily autonomy. Most irritating, if not most serious, is the unavoidable suspicion that all this noise has rather more to do with the accusers than the accused. Seeing anonymous crotch-zoomers lamenting the downfall of Western civilisation on X, I remember Christopher Hitchens: 'Whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner, rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed on.' As it happens, a 2022 lawsuit unearthed a Republican enthusiasm for transgender porn. Texas, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, and Kansas – five valiant defenders of Bible, bullet and boot – came out on top of the charts. The new beau idéal of the right-wing family is a familiar one. In fact, the idea beneath it is very nearly a cliché: that behind every successful man is, well, another man. [See also: Is Thomas Skinner the future of the right?] Related
The Independent
04-06-2025
- The Independent
The rare version of Christianity heading toward extinction
On this small island in rural Nagasaki, Japan, a community of Hidden Christians gathers to worship what they call the Closet God. In a special room, barely larger than a tatami mat, hangs a scroll painting of a kimono-clad Asian woman. She may resemble a Buddhist Bodhisattva holding a baby, but for the faithful, this is a concealed version of Mary and the baby Jesus. Another scroll shows a man wearing a kimono covered with camellias, an allusion to John the Baptist's beheading and martyrdom. Among the other objects of worship are relics from an era when Christians in Japan were forced to conceal their faith to avoid vicious persecution, including a ceramic bottle of holy water from Nakaenoshima, an island where Hidden Christians were martyred in the 1620s. Little about the icons in the tiny, easy-to-miss room can be linked directly to Christianity - and that's the point. After emerging from cloistered isolation in 1865, following more than 200 years of violent harassment by Japan's insular warlord rulers, many of the formerly underground Christians converted to mainstream Catholicism. Some, however, continued to practice not the religion that 16th-century foreign missionaries originally taught them, but the idiosyncratic, difficult to detect version they'd nurtured during centuries of clandestine cat-and-mouse with a brutal regime. On Ikitsuki and other remote sections of Nagasaki prefecture, Hidden Christians still pray to these disguised objects. They still chant in a Latin that hasn't been widely used in centuries. And they still cherish a religion that directly links them to a time of samurai, shoguns and martyred missionaries and believers. Now, though, the Hidden Christians are dying out, and there is growing certainty that their unique version of Christianity will die with them. Almost all are now elderly, and as the young move away to cities or turn their backs on the faith, those remaining are desperate to preserve evidence of this offshoot of Christianity - and convey to the world what its loss will mean. 'At this point, I'm afraid we are going to be the last ones,' said Masatsugu Tanimoto, 68, one of the few who can still recite the Latin chants that his ancestors learned 400 years ago. 'It is sad to see this tradition end with our generation.' Hidden Christians cling to a unique version of the religion Christianity spread rapidly in 16th century Japan when Jesuit priests had spectacular success converting warlords and peasants alike, most especially on the southern main island of Kyushu, where the foreigners established trading ports in Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands, by some estimates, embraced the religion. That changed after the shoguns began to see Christianity as a threat. The crackdown that followed in the early 17th century was fierce, with thousands killed and the remaining believers chased underground. As Japan opened up to foreign influence, a dozen Hidden Christians clad in kimonos cautiously declared their faith and their remarkable perseverance to a French Catholic priest in March 1865 in Nagasaki city. Many became Catholics after Japan formally lifted the ban on Christianity in 1873. But others chose to stay Kakure Kirishitan (Hidden Christians), continuing to practice what their ancestors preserved during their days underground. Their rituals provide a direct link to a vanished Japan In new interviews, Hidden Christians spoke of a deep communal bond stemming from a time when a lapse could doom a practitioner or their neighbours. Hidden Christians were forced to hide all visible signs of their religion after the 1614 ban on Christianity and the expulsion of foreign missionaries. Households took turns hiding precious ritual objects and hosting the secret services that celebrated both faith and persistence. This still happens today, with the observance of rituals unchanged since the 16th century. The group leader in the Ikitsuki area is called Oji, which means father or elderly man in Japanese. Members take turns in the role, presiding over baptisms, funerals and ceremonies for New Year, Christmas and local festivals. Different communities worship different icons and have different ways of performing the rituals. In Sotome, for instance, people prayed to a statue of what they called Maria Kannon, a genderless Bodhisattva of mercy, as a substitute for Mary. In Ibaragi, where about 18,000 residents embraced Christianity in the 1580s, a lacquer bowl with a cross painted on it, a statue of the crucified Christ and an ivory statue of Mary were found hidden in what was called 'a box not to be opened'. Their worship revolves around reverence for ancestors Many Hidden Christians rejected Catholicism after the persecution ended because Catholic priests refused to recognise them as real Christians unless they agreed to be rebaptised and abandon the Buddhist altars that their ancestors used. 'They are very proud of what they and their ancestors have believed in' for hundreds of years, even at the risk of their lives, said Emi Mase-Hasegawa, a religion studies professor at J.F. Oberlin University in Tokyo. Tanimoto believes his ancestors continued the Hidden Christian traditions because becoming Catholic meant rejecting Buddhism and Shintoism, which had become a strong part of their daily lives underground. 'I'm not a Christian,' Tanimoto said. Even though some of their Latin chants focus on the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ, their prayers are also meant to 'ask our ancestors to protect us, to protect our daily lives,' he said. 'We are not doing this to worship Jesus or Mary. … Our responsibility is to faithfully carry on the way our ancestors had practised.' Archaic Latin chants are an important part of the religion Hidden Christians' ceremonies often include the recitation of Latin chants, called Orasho. The Orasho comes from the original Latin or Portuguese prayers brought to Japan by 16th-century missionaries. Recently, on Ikitsuki, three men performed a rare Orasho. All wore dark formal kimonos and solemnly made the sign of the cross in front of their faces before starting their prayers - a mix of archaic Japanese and Latin. Tanimoto, a farmer, is the youngest of only four men who can recite Orasho in his community. As a child, he regularly saw men performing Orasho on tatami mats before an altar when neighbours gathered for funerals and memorials. About 40 years ago, in his mid-20s, he took Orasho lessons from his uncle so he could pray to the Closet God that his family has kept for generations. Tanimoto still has a weathered copy of a prayer his grandfather wrote with a brush and ink, like the ones his ancestors had diligently copied from older generations. As he carefully turned the pages of the Orasho book, Tanimoto said he mostly understands the Japanese but not the Latin. It's difficult, he said, but 'we just memorise the whole thing'. Today, because funerals are no longer held at homes and younger people are leaving the island, Orasho is only performed two or three times a year. Researchers and believers acknowledge that the tradition is dying There are few studies of Hidden Christians, so it's not clear how many still exist. There were an estimated 30,000 in Nagasaki, including about 10,000 in Ikitsuki, in the 1940s, according to government figures. But the last confirmed baptism ritual was in 1994, and some estimates say there are fewer than 100 Hidden Christians left on Ikitsuki. Hidden Christianity is linked to the communal ties that formed when Japan was a largely agricultural society. Those ties crumbled as the country modernised after WWII, with recent developments revolutionising people's lives, even in rural Japan. The accompanying decline in the population of farmers and young people, along with women increasingly working outside of the home, has made it difficult to maintain the tight networks that nurtured Hidden Christianity. 'In a society of growing individualism, it is difficult to keep Hidden Christianity as it is,' said Shigeo Nakazono, the head of a local folklore museum who has researched and interviewed Hidden Christians for 30 years. Hidden Christianity has a structural weakness, he said, because there are no professional religious leaders tasked with teaching doctrine and adapting the religion to environmental changes. Nakazono has started collecting artefacts and archiving video interviews he's done with Hidden Christians since the 1990s, seeking to preserve a record of the endangered religion. Mase-Hasegawa agreed that Hidden Christianity is on its way to extinction. 'As a researcher, it will be a huge loss,' she said. Masashi Funabara, 63, a retired town hall official, said most of the nearby groups have disbanded over the last two decades. His group, which now has only two families, is the only one left, down from nine in his district. They meet only a few times a year. 'The amount of time we are responsible for these holy icons is only about 20 to 30 years, compared to the long history when our ancestors kept their faith in fear of persecution. When I imagined their suffering, I felt that I should not easily give up,' Funabara said. Just as his father did when memorising the Orasho, Funabara has written down passages in notebooks; he hopes his son, who works for the local government, will one day agree to be his successor. Tanimoto also wants his son to keep the tradition alive. 'Hidden Christianity itself will go extinct sooner or later, and that is inevitable, but I hope it will go on at least in my family,' he said. 'That's my tiny glimmer of hope.'
Spectator
02-06-2025
- Spectator
Ireland has been consumed by hatred of Israel
A new religion blights the Republic of Ireland. Catholicism has been supplanted by a far more cultish creed. Its doctrines are declared with great fervour, its icons scar every town and village. You will struggle to find one person who has not converted to this strange and all-consuming faith. Its name? Israelophobia. I knew Ireland was hostile to Israel but I had no idea how bad things had got. It's suffocating. Wherever you go, whether city or bog, you'll see it and hear it – that swirling animus for the Jewish State. The political class speaks of little else. The media are feverishly obsessed. From every political party, every TV set, every soapbox, the cry goes out: Israel is evil! It's inescapable. It's all over Dublin, of course, long a hotbed of leftish activism. You won't walk five metres there without seeing a youth wearing a keffiyeh and a look of smug self-satisfaction.
