Middle East Dail Éireann — 2024-03-20 ============================================================ Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire The Taoiseach rejected our call, and the call of huge numbers of people across the world, to boycott Joe Biden because of his complicity with the genocidal massacre that Israel is committing and the fact that he has armed Israel to the teeth and enabled it to commit that massacre. Did the Taoiseach ask him to stop arming Israel? Mary Robinson echoed the calls of millions of people throughout the world who were saying that were the United States and western governments to stop arming Israel, it would not be able to continue with this. That is the truth, is it not? It gets all the weapons, made in the USA, and billions in US aid. Did the Taoiseach ask him directly to please stop arming Israel and enabling its ability to commit a genocide? I suspect he did not. Mary Robinson asked him to. We asked him to. To my mind, he should have. To compare this with apartheid-era South Africa, is there any point at which a boycott of a state that is committing the crimes that Israel is committing against the Palestinians justifies the sort of boycott that was imposed on apartheid South Africa? --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2024-03-20/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:52:47+00:00 Sitting date: 2024-03-20