Why some Unionists Support Israel – Belfast Lecture

Salam Alaikum, salam, personality, I

bring the microphone because this is

where I live in many of the churches, mostly posted on the congenital, they quite as a side of Israel, their clips, not Zionist, but they will disregard Palestinian question and say that we need to help our Jewish brothers, mostly brothers. How would someone respond to that? Because we think that's why we would support them, especially if we would build a profit in this regard. Besides that, that's my question.

So, I mean, I find it interesting that

in Belfast, there are still these divisions, I was looking at the census data before I came here today, and I saw that people in Belfast could actually identify it to a greater extent, either consciously, or capitalism.

Like, for example, I think only 17 to 27 of the population consider themselves to be religious in, in Northern Ireland, or Northern Ireland, which is less than the numbers you would find in England, for instance, or other provinces will be my kingdom.

This is this indicates something interesting, I think that people have attached their identities with these labels. Okay. So anything antithetical to their identities, they oppose it. Focus has a psychological knee jerk reaction, where if you probe them and ask them, What do you actually know about the situation in Palestine or Israel, I don't even have the facts, either. It's just that it's us. And that is what you refer to a psychologist, in group and out group dynamics. So it's become a thing now, for example, driving around in Belfast, I see the Union Jack flag. This is an unusual thing. If you compare it with the rest of England, I mean, it's almost a over compensatory attitude.

But the root of this over compensatory attitude by some of the extreme members of the if you like unionism, whoever, however they identify it is actually a search for meaning identity. They don't know what to connect themselves with. So they're connecting themselves with the people who are ambivalent or otherwise, it's different to such connection. Like if you're gonna have someone in Birmingham, London, what do you think of the, you know, the situation in Belfast? And

how would you rate it and they wouldn't even know about possibly, frankly, I promise you, they wouldn't know where Belfast isn't that they wouldn't care whether these Unionists want to depart the United Kingdom, or didn't want to replant the United Kingdom. So I think now, we need to show these people who are using this kind of identity politics to frivolity and the capriciousness of their identification policies, that is totally irrelevant.

And if you ask these people, for example, I have a hunch,

although it's not backed by census data, or whatever, but I have a hunch that even if you go and ask the SoCal Protestants, right, if you ask them,

What do you to call Jesse Lee in terms of religion? Right? I think a lot of them wouldn't even identify themselves. So they say that I don't know if I believe in God or not.

I believe I'm agnostic or something like that. A lot of these people they are, like Richard Dawkins, famously and interestingly said he's, he's a traditional plus is, he's posited by tradition, my convention, where he's not actually Protestant, of course, in Naples.

I was speaking to the guys about this, I said, Look, this whole issue here in Northern Ireland has to do with Protestant and Catholic. There's only one way to saltation as if they were adopted Islam.

There are some issues, though, but honestly, in terms of how we respond to these people, is by probing them,

and let them reveal their own ignorance. And so doing some What do you think about what are the differences between Protestants and Catholics? I'm gonna ask a Protestant, give me five differences between Protestantism and capitalism. If I went and asked the people who identified as Protestant in Belfast or anywhere else in Northern Ireland, to name the five differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, my hunch is that they will not be able to do that. That's my hunch. So the word Protestant for these people has not been it's not really hasn't got as much religious value. That's more identity than political that once you expose that to the interlocutor, and you let them see the

blindness of the unbelief,

and the blatant tribalism, blind tribalism that they allege. I think that

The first step to breaking and deconstructing their unwitting and blind allegiance to a country which there is no there is nobody supporting it and so on so forth