Brian Stanley: Calls Israel a 'terrorist state', urges ostracism

Thanks Cathaoirleach, and I want to thank the Social Dems for bringing forward this comprehensive motion. Can I say to you Minister that football is very very important, and I certainly don't want to be stopping any sport, but there are other things that actually are more important, and the slaughter that we've witnessed in Palestine, not just in the last two to three years, but going back over generations, that's important that that's stopped. The fact that medics are being killed, journalists, families, children, absolute genocide, the strangulation of normal life in the West Bank, the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, and now Lebanon, all of southern Lebanon, almost a quarter of the territory. It's war crimes, and people in Israel who support it are as guilty as their government. And I don't care what religion anybody is, whether they're Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, whatever it is, I'm not interested. That's not the issue here. The issue is here, do you support the genocide of your government? And people in Israel that do, share some of this blame. A lot of Israeli people don't support it, and a lot of Jews don't support it, that I've met, and that's good. But over 75,000 people have died in Gaza since 2023, October 23. Along with the aerial bombardments, starvation, disease, people buried under rubble, it's horrendous what people have seen. And since the October 25 ceasefire, 947 Palestinians have been killed and over 3,000 injured. And to rub salt into the wounds, the treatment of the flotilla, including the 13 Irish citizens, was fingers up to the international community. Israel is not a normal state, Israel is a terrorist state, and should be treated as such. And FIFA and UEFA, when it came to Russia, there's been international bans on Yugoslavia as well. But what's wrong? It's the same thing as what's happening, what Israel has done to Palestinians, is that not the same? And I note the fact that well over 90% of the FAI members voted to instruct the association to call on UEFA to suspend Israel, and that should have happened. There's grown support across the country for the match not to go ahead. And ordinary people who normally wouldn't get to think too much about politics or what's going on in the world, the number of people that have spoken to me in the last couple of years who are horrified by what they're seeing, and the good work that's been done by journalists, those who have been left alive to actually witness it in Gaza, that have brought that information to us on a daily basis, people are horrified with it. And you may say that it's tokenistic or whatever, but when the girls and the women in Dunn stores back in 1984, when they took the small step of not handling South African fruit, it mushroomed and ballooned out into the boycott of the apartheid regime. And this has the potential to do the same thing. We must send a powerful message to Israel, the Israeli government, and to the Israeli people who support them. It's not acceptable, they're genocide. And as I said, there are some things more important than sport. And Irish people want action, and here's the opportunity. I want to welcome the measure taken by RTE to boycott the Eurovision, I think that was good. I welcome the measure by the government to ban the two ministers, the security minister and the finance minister. But go further, go further than that. Israel needs to be ostracised in total until they make amends for what they've done to the Palestinian people. For more UN videos visit www.un.org