Burnt Oak’s most famous 51-year-old Irishman laughs at the suggestion that he sounds Australian. “My parents are from the west of Ireland; they migrated to Britain in 1970 so I’ve got a very Irish name. My blood is 96 percent Irish. I’m a thoroughbred Mick, but my accent is English.”
Since 7 October 2023, London-based author, Spiked’s chief politics writer,
The Smiths-T-shirt wearing, in-demand TV pundit and no-punches-pulled commentator Brendan O’Neill, aka @burntoakboy has become a staunch ally of the Jewish community.
He is utterly unafraid to call out the swamp of hate, hypocrisy, ignorance, bias and bigotry that has engulfed the intellectual realm of political discourse he navigates so assuredly, with a healthy and lyrical dose of ‘f***s thrown in for good measure (at least four in this interview alone).
Evolution of a community ally
A self-confessed original “left-winger” and member of the Revolutionary Communist Party in his earlier days, O’Neill has “never been a big fan of war”, recalling that he was a bit of a peacenik when he was younger.
“You know, hands off Iraq, hands off Kosovo. Whatever it was, I’d be on it, and I went on a couple of anti-Israel marches, because that’s what 21-year-olds do.
“Even though I was wet behind the ears, even I was able to clock that there was always something very different about anti-Israel demonstrations. They were always much more visceral. There was an ugly streak to them. They weren’t just calling for an end to war, but for the end to an entire country.”
Back then, O’Neill recalls, there would always be these kinds of young radical Muslims who “I was never very fond of, because they seemed to me very extreme and regressive. And I just found myself thinking, even back in my 20s, ‘This is a weird environment; I don’t like being here’, so I completely stopped going to anything that was related to opposing Israel.”
The experience made him think about why there is such a visceral reaction to Israel all the time. “Why is it the most hated state? You have this kind of unholy marriage of people who want to destroy the world’s only Jewish nation.”
Those are the questions “swirling” in his head and, when he got into journalism more than 20 years ago, it’s one of the topics he took on.
Defending Israel and the Jewish community became his literary calling card, alongside freedom of speech, the problem of wokeness, the trans issue, and general British and Irish political affairs.
And then, O’Neill says, “7 October happens or, in my case, more pointedly, 8 of October, because that was the day I knew the West was f****d. Excuse my language.”
He channelled his anger into writing his book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, describing the failures of the West. It was published on the first anniversary of the Hamas attacks and, from that time onwards, he says: “I became even more known as one of the people who writes about Israel.”
Does he feel in danger?
“Whenever there’s a Twitter storm involving me, and there have been a few over the years, and people threaten you, and you become the number one trending topic, it’s awful. I don’t see it all unless friends of mine do a screenshot of the worst tweets and say, ‘Look, this person wants to cut your throat.’”
In that way, he’s managed “to filter quite a lot of it out by only using Instagram, because Instagram is a nicer community.”
What gives him the genuine colly wobbles is when “people go to the effort of either finding or figuring out your email address and sending you a message”. He says that has happened a few times. “I went to the police about 15 years ago because someone had hand-delivered a bag of excrement to my office, and inside the excrement was an article I’d written for The Daily Telegraph. I get messages on Instagram at least once a week, saying, ‘Keep an eye over your shoulder’. And you know it’s just an antisemite who hates the fact that this Gentile guy is daring to stand up for Jews.”
“The minute you say, ‘I’m going to stop writing all these articles’, or ‘I’m going to stop posting all these things’, or ‘I’m going to stop being friends with Jews’, then they’ve won.
“The hate gives me a sense that the stakes are even higher than I thought. And knowing the stakes are so high, not only for the future of Jewry in Britain, but for the future of Britain itself, pushes me to keep going.”
Sheep and Ireland
He describes his ancestral homeland as “f****d”. “It really is. I’m glad you’re a person I can swear to. I love Ireland. I really do. I love its history. I love the fact I come from Ireland. I love my parents, who have a family home on the extreme west coast of Ireland, and it’s literally on the doorstep of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s beautiful. But Ireland’s in a mess, because it has fallen very hard indeed to the antisemitism bug in a really scary way.”
Sometimes he tries to comfort himself by saying, “Well, it’s just in Dublin and maybe in Cork, but it’s not true.
I was in the extreme west of Ireland, Connemara, where my parents were from, and I was cycling along in the middle of nowhere, and passed this field of sheep, and in the middle of the field there was a Palestine flag. And I was thinking, ‘God, here we go. Sheep for Palestine, which actually sums up the movement quite well when you think about it, in the middle of nowhere.”
In a confiding mood now, he says: “People often say to me, ‘Oh, you’re quite nice in real life’, because my writing is very acidic and quite cutting.
I don’t pull my puff because I get very angry when I write. Everything just bubbles up and flows through my fingers, and I rage against the world and against individuals. I like a joke, and I spend whatever free time I have in the pub with friends or my brothers. And I think people would be surprised to discover that I’m a normal, nice bloke you can have a pint with.”
