A senior faculty member at Ireland’s University of Limerick allegedly assaulted a student on Saturday who was holding an Israeli flag at a lecture off campus.
Ger Downes, whom the University of Limerick website identifies as its Postgraduate Research Development Manager, was filmed clutching the flag and then forcefully gripping the student, Jamie O’Mahony.
The incident took place at The Gaff events venue during a lecture by Ilan Pappé, an anti-Israel historian.
Israel’s Cabinet minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, called for the university to address the incident.
“It’s not every day that you see how antisemitism turns even a ‘respected professor’ into a violent thug who loses self-control at the sight of a proudly brandished Star of David,” Chikli told JNS. “I’d like to hope that this institution, which platformed one of the world’s greatest antisemites, would at least draw a red line when it comes to violence by faculty,” he added.
Footage O’Mahony shared with JNS showed him calmly posing a question during the Q&A part of the Pappé lecture. O’Mahony noted that Israel is the only country in the Middle East where critics like Pappé are allowed freedom of expression, and that Pappé was a member of Israel’s far-left Hadash Party. He asserted that Pappé “hates Israel also because it’s a capitalist success story.”
The audience began booing, and when O’Mahony started unfolding an Israeli flag, Downes seized him. O’Mahony and two friends, who had attended the event to defend Israel and document the gathering, were ejected from the venue.
Irish Chief Rabbi Yoni Wieder said the incident underscored how discourse around Israel is increasingly “marked by aggression and attempts to silence dissent” in Ireland to the point that some believe they’re “above the law,” leading to “intimidation and violence, even in broad daylight, in an academic lecture hall,” he told JNS.
O’Mahony gave a statement to police about the incident but declined to press criminal charges against Downes, saying “ultimately no one was physically hurt” in the scuffle.
“Of course, I expected to be unpopular, but I didn’t expect them to get physical so quickly,” said O’Mahony, who was born and grew up in Limerick but studies at Dublin City University. He set up that university’s chapter of the Students Supporting Israel international network (SSI).
O’Mahony told JNS he found the incident “a depressing reinforcement of how the Palestinian movement within the West is really just a vanguard of anti-Western ideals run by people who have absolutely no regard and actually have disdain for everything that we thought makes Western civilization great, like free speech, like tolerating, dissenting opinions, and not resorting to political violence immediately.”
The University of Limerick, Downes, the municipality and the nonprofit that runs The Gaff did not respond to requests for comment by time of publication.
Israel has accused Dublin of singling out the Jewish state and aligning with extremist narratives, as bilateral relations have grown increasingly strained in recent months.
In December, Israel closed its embassy in Dublin, accusing Ireland of double standards and dehumanizing Israelis. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar at the time denounced Irish President Michael D. Higgins as an “antisemitic liar” after Higgins during a Holocaust Remembrance Day speech criticized Israeli actions.
Ireland last month joined eight other member states—Belgium, Finland, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden—in asking the European Commission, the E.U.’s executive arm, to see how Israeli goods “can be brought into line with international law.”
Ireland’s parliament is preparing to vote on a bill that outlaws the import and sale in Ireland of Israeli-made products from Judea and Samaria. If passed, the law would make Ireland the first E.U. member state with such a ban.
In April, Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism said in a report that Ireland, along with Spain and South Africa, were “countries that enable antisemitism through their selective criticism of Israel and abuse of the language of human rights.”
