United Nations Condemns Irish Building in NYC

This week in New York City, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn announced that she would run for the office of Mayor of New York.  Speaker Quinn held her kick-off press conference in the Inwood section of Manhattan, above Washington Heights – a truly “mixed” neighborhood.

Quinn is Irish and has previously been honored as “Irish American of the year.” Yet, according to Wikipedia: “The residents of Inwood were substantially of Irish descent for much of the 20th century…. in the 1960s-1980s, many Irish residents moved out of Inwood…and in the period that the Irish were leaving Inwood, there was a dramatic rise in the number of immigrants from the Dominican Republic to the area. Today, Inwood has a predominantly Dominican population. A few elderly Irish remain, and Church Mass services are now offered in Spanish nearly as often as in English.” Clearly it’s a racially diverse area – divided between Irish-Americans and Dominicans.

Prior to Speaker Quinn’s announcement, some Irish people decided to provoke their neighbors.  They legally bought land and decided to build on the “Dominican” side of Inwood.  The Dominicans protested and threw rocks, and the United Nations weighed in and demanded that the Irish stop the building process.

Of course this did not happen, and how absurd it sounds is how absurd it looks when we see this same behavior in another part of the world.   Dominicans and Irish can live anywhere they want in America, and they can build wherever they legally own land without controversy.

Shouldn’t the same be true in Israel?  Jews can live anywhere they want in Israel, and there can be no provocation when people choose to live in a city legally.  Isn’t it that simple?