Prominent Irish-Americans Make Known Their Opposition to Ireland’s Occupied Territories Bill

Following last week’s shameful events in Ireland, with the lower house of parliament voting to advance the Occupied Territories Bill, a number of prominent Irish-American leaders have come out to voice their opposition.

If business executives are skilled at anything it is sniffing out snow jobs and con artists, and Boston’s business leaders are as adept at detecting balderdash as anyone anywhere. Last week several waves of the city’s leaders endorsed a letter to Ireland’s opposition party, urging it to rethink its bill. The measure, they pointed out, simply blows past Israel’s “intractable challenge” with the Palestinians and criminalizes trade with it. Because the bill may well violate American law, it could, if enacted, interfere with trade between Massachusetts and Ireland, harming Americans and Irish alike. It would drive Palestinians and Israelis even deeper into their respective corners, driving a resolution of the conflict further away. And it is morally offensive, singling out the Jewish state on a premise which is intellectually dishonest. Bob Popeo, Boston’s peerless lawyer and power broker, deployed his characteristic bluntness on the subject. “This is the most outrageously blatant piece of anti-Semitism,” Popeo told the Boston Herald, “that I’ve seen in the past few years.”

Boston Mayor Martin Walsh

Those protesting the Irish bill are a Who’s Who of Boston’s most prominent Irish-American civic leaders. They include Boston Mayor Martin Walsh, Suffolk Construction head John Fish, community icon Jack Connors, Liberty Mutual chief David Long, Raytheon CEO Thomas Kennedy, the New England Council’s Jim Brett and State Street Corp. President Ronald O’Hanley. They are part of an honor roll of leaders not easily cowed by political fashion or gulled by fast talk, and they hail from a community that knows wrong and dumb when it sees them.

Read that last sentence again. Snap!

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