What America’s Reaction to Irish Peacekeepers in Lebanon Reveals About Deep-Rooted Irish Stereotypes

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On October 1st, Israel declared that its troops had crossed their border and into southern Lebanon, to target, so they claim, Hezbollah insurgents that maintain a foothold in the region. One wonders why a full military invasion is required at all if they are able to covertly detonate pager and walkie-talkie bombs from the comfort of Tel Aviv, or raze hospitals (such as the Al-Aqsa Martyrs massacre earlier this week) with a few thousand American-provided missiles. It’s in their imperialistic bones. But then, Israel did not pick those ideals up off the street.

For those of us following Israel’s genocidal campaign in Palestine, now spilling over into Iran, Beirut, and Lebanon (in a video from the official funeral of Sergeant Major Ronny Ganizate of the Israeli army’s 5030th Battalion, 228th Brigade, posted on X, the following was stated during his eulogy: “Lebanon is ours and Gaza is ours, and we must expel them”), we are unsurprised by the monstrous violations of human rights continuously carried out by Netanyahu and his military, haunted as we are by images on social media of children torn to shreds, IDF soldiers sexually violating civilians, and injured Palestinians burned to death in their hospital beds. Remember when Netanyahu received a standing ovation from the US Congress in July? Memories of Charles Lindbergh shaking hands with Adolf Hitler abound. The Plot Against America? Philip Roth would have enough for a sequel. Moreover, it would be non-fiction.

What did come as a surprise was an outrageous call for violence from an American ex-political advisor against the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil), particularly targeting Irish peacekeepers that have refused to leave their positions in southern Lebanon despite Israel’s demands that they vacate the area. Matthew RJ Brodsky, former advisor to Donald Trump and current advisor to Republican congressional candidates Al-Aquidi and John Nagel, posted on X that the Irish peacekeepers should have been “carpet bombed” and had Napalm dropped on them by Israel. Interesting choice of weapon. It worked on the Vietcong, I suppose—why not use it on soldiers from another small, inconsequential country that refuses to step out of a colonialist’s path?

Although this social media post saw Mr Brodsky forced to resign from his current role as advisor for Al-Aquidi on October 10th (and delete his social media accounts), we must remember this calibre of man served on Trump’s Middle East peace team and the White House’s Palestinian-Israeli peace team. This flash-in-the-pan moment of rage may stem from Brodsky’s personal views, but it reflects a much more insidious undercurrent in the American historical social consciousness—one that isn’t much discussed outside of academic circles, or even fathomed by many Americans.

Racism in America (although found in its most despicable and rampant forms when aimed at POC by whites and incomparable in its vileness to any other) goes further than skin colour. Sociologist Jean C. Griffith, in her essay How the West Was Whitened, has suggested that the United States’ division of racial difference goes beyond black and white, into a “greater refinement of racial divisions [including] a separation of Europeans into superior and inferior white races.” These we can see, not always but quite often, split along the lines of conquering and conquered nations. The English, French, Dutch, these were seen as “clean” white races but the Irish, Finnish, Polish—we were the “dirty” ones. We were the poor labouring classes, stereotyped as uneducated, cheap, drunkards. Fit for manual labour and not much else. In My Ántonia, a book by the 19th century American novelist Willa Cather, there’s a song called “Weevily Wheat” used to tease the titular character, an Eastern European immigrant, by the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) main character. It’s a fitting metaphor for this kind of division and, tellingly, the song itself preceded the novel. These “inferior” whites that Griffith speaks of are represented as infested wheat or barley (there’s that alcoholic label again) rejected by the singer for their infested impurities, choosing instead the “pure white flour.” A finer white than us.

I studied at San Diego State University in 2017-18. While there, my French roommate and I attended a house party with students from many racial backgrounds—WASPs, Latinx, African Americans, and other international students as well. Southern California has been a hotbed of casual and hostile xenophobia towards Latinx people since the beginning of Trump’s first election campaign due to the state’s border with and proximity to Tijuana. At this party, we fell in with a group of lads, all Latinos. When they heard where she was from, they gave my French friend dog’s abuse, colonizer this and that. But when it came to me, they told me I was like them, or close enough. One of the colonized. What tied us together was not the colour of our skin but that our people had been put down in that country and trodden upon historically by the ruling classes. We were the colonized, not the colonizer. In that moment, I was happy not to be white in Trump’s America—or at least not a “clean” one.

One single piece of media served to turn us in the American mindset from inferior immigrants to the potato-munching, quick-to-temper, craic-having, fiddley-dee leprechaun stereotypes they still see us as today: Walt Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People. Compounding the fictitious concept of us as backwards rural peasants, this piece of pure technicolour slander was built on W.B. Yeats’ visions of Ireland, a mythologized landscape of fairies, wildness, and pagan beliefs that did not, in fact, exist. Connery’s dodgy Irish accent aside, it’s beloved by many, in the States and abroad. That vision of us hasn’t changed much in their mind, or at least in their pictures. There’s the horrible attempts in the past decade at Irish accents, from Matthew Goode in Leap Year, with a Cork brogue that couldn’t float, to Austin Falk’s mangled, high-pitched squawking in Two Broke Girls. If you want an Irish accent, hire an Irish actor.

But being Irish has become fashionable and is heavily sought after stateside. To have the whisper of a rumour of Irish DNA is to have a claim to that imaginary land of clover-covered hills and toora-loora-laaing. How many more Americans claim Irish heritage than there are of us in Ireland? About 9.5% of their population claim Irishness. That’s beating the Irish Catholic family stereotype to death. Biden loves to talk about his Irishness. I recall after his inauguration he refused an interview with the BBC, claiming, “I’m Irish,” while a bagpipe player welcomed him to the White House. Now he gives ballistic arms, paid for with his taxpayers’ money, to bomb a country we Irish feel a deep cultural connection to. His invite to the family reunion might get lost this year, I think.

Stereotypes change in every national consciousness, often defined by that country’s relation to their history and media. Take the French in English media, for example. What comes to mind? Allo, Allo’s cowardly, promiscuous René, John Cleese as the nonsensical French Taunter in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, or this infamous quote from Blackadder: Back and Forth, none other than an English-written Napoleon delivering it: “They think we French are sissies! They call us weeds and whoopsies and big girl’s blouses!” The Duke of Wellington was Irish, by the way, but I digress. Those stereotypes, like Israel’s dehumanizing, like America’s racism, did not get picked up off the street. They are implemented and compounded by individuals in positions of power with an axe to grind or money to make. Call the Irish barbaric, simian-like, and superstitious (as British publications like Punch magazine did well into the 1970s), and the public will believe that we cannot govern ourselves, that we require a colonial shepherd to herd us drunken, uneducated peasants into modernity. It might even infect, plague-ship-like, the New World like so much weevily wheat, keeping us from boarding houses (“No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish”) or employment (“No Irish need apply”). I often worry about living up to the Irish stereotypes perpetrated by the American and British media or adding to the Stage Irish depictions you see from Hollywood to Hollyoaks. I’m a rural-living, red-headed Guinness drinker. Am I just as bad existing as Darby O’Gill is for the image of the Irish abroad? I won’t get threatened with Napalm for this article saying otherwise like some of my kinsmen have.

Despite the quaint, regressive stereotypes that persist across the pond, Brodsky’s remarks make it clear that the initial prejudice remains, insidiously lurking beneath the surface. Our national identity is just something to pin on their social media biographies—harmless to claim, like Hufflepuff or ENFJ, something to spice up the mayonnaise. They don’t need to live by our cultural values or our history beyond their shores. But when it comes to the Irish standing in the way of their ally’s colonial plans? Well, a fifth Peacekeeper in Lebanon found out last week that Disneyfied stereotype fondness doesn’t stand for much more than a “Kiss me I’m Irish” Paddy’s Day shirt in Walmart. But they love the Irish in the US, don’t they? Didn’t they elect JFK? Yes. They also shot him.

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