Sinn Fein, the Irish pro-independence party that for a long time sponsored the Irish Republican Army (IRA) as its terrorist wing, allied itself with the anti-Israel cause many decades ago. Now, writes Ruth Dudley Edwards, it still propagates hatred of the Jews and their country:

Sinn Fein . . . trains its gullible followers to be virulent anti-Semites. They fly Palestinian flags much less as a mark of their compassion for Palestinians than as a sign of their hatred of Israelis. Loyalists, [who want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom], see Israel as beleaguered and fly Israeli flags not because they hate Palestinians, but because they hate republicans [i.e., those in favor of detaching Northern Ireland from Britain]. . . .

Pro-Zionist in the 1920s and 30s, when [Zionism] was seen as a plucky anti-British movement for self-determination, once the state [of Israel] came into being public opinion shifted to seeing it as a colony imposed by the British on the native population. Ignoring Jews’ ancestral rights and Arab intransigence and inhuman treatment of refugees, Israelis became the bad guys and Irish political leaders unthinkingly endorsed policies that would lead to the total destruction of Israel. . . .

Sinn Fein is stepping up its anti-Israeli activism, since these days it needs, for electoral reasons in the south, to pretend it wants reconciliation with unionists, so its foot soldiers need a legitimate target for hate.

It has been worryingly successful in spreading its poison. . . . Dublin’s Lord Mayor Micheál Mac Donncha is Sinn Fein’s most recent anti-Israeli poster boy. . . . He’s been a key player in persuading the council to support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS), which seeks to strangle Israel, and demands the expulsion of its ambassador.

Unlike Hamas, which merely receives support from the Islamic Republic, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)—with which Israel engaged in a short round of fighting last week—is more or less under its direct control. In fact, the recent hostilities began with a series of terrorist attacks launched by PIJ from Samaria, which might in turn have been a response to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s call “to open a new front in the West Bank against the Zionist enemy.” Amir Taheri writes:

In Gaza, the Islamic Republic has invested heavily in promoting Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. . . . Islamic Jihad is in a minority in Gaza, hence the attempt by Tehran to help it create a base in the West Bank.

Reliable sources in Baghdad say that [Iran’s expeditionary and terrorist paramilitary] the Quds Force has been “transiting” significant quantities of arms and cash via Iraq to Jordan, to be smuggled to the West Bank. The Jordanian authorities say they are aware of these “hostile activities.” King Abdullah himself has publicly called on Iran to cease “destabilizing activities.”

But such schemes, Taheri explains, are part of a larger strategic vision of creating a grand anti-Western alliance even while engaging in nuclear negotiations with the U.S. and Europe:

Last month, Khamenei praised Vladimr Putin for his invasion of Ukraine. And this month, China’s ambassador to Iran, Chang Hua, praised the Islamic Republic for supporting China in “asserting its sovereignty” over Taiwan.

It is clear that some dangerous pipe-dreamers in Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran have fallen for the phantasmagoric vision of “three great powers” banding together and with help from “the rest,” that is to say, the so-called Third World . . . to destroy an international system created by the “corrupt and decadent.”