Tehran Tadhg?

There can’t be too many of them knocking about. Fortunately for humanity, like Khomeini, there only seems to be one in circulation.

Tadhg Hickey is an Irish “comedian” who has increasingly adopted fringe extremist anti-Israel rhetoric that has often (and increasingly) crossed the line into naked antisemitism.

Among Hickey’s best posts:

When he decided that the best way to fend off growing recognition of his antisemitism was to release an angry video in which he “explained” (to a Jewish audience?) exactly why he despised Zionist Jews but was fond of Jews so long as they were untainted by that ideology, which he has branded the most dangerous menace of our time?

I’m not sure who the target was here. Because if there’s nothing people enjoy better than being hated, it’s getting a detailed angry explanation as to why they’re so odious.

In an opening line that must have been plucked straight from the pages of How To Win Friends And Influence People, Hickey hit us with this bombshell:

“I don’t hate you [Israelis] because you’re Jewish”, he assured us, before adding forcefully (for just Israelis!?) “you ignorant duplicitous genocidal scumbags.”

One gets the feeling that Hickey missed out on How Not To Be A Terrible Human 101. But if he took some of the coursework, he might have learned some first principles in sound argument-building: you warm the audience up and then make your argument. You’re not going to assure Jews that you’re not a virulent antisemite by labelling every Zionist Jew a “genocidal scumbag” in the same breath.

But why invest this much effort in highlighting Tadhg’s hate speech, you may wonder?

Trust me, I didn’t do it for my health and certainly not for my sanity. He’s far from the only Irishman on X espousing a heartfelt desire to rid the planet of Jews. But Tadhg is unique for a few factors. One of which is that (to his credit) he’s not hiding behind a screen name. He’s in the open. And I believe in two things:

1. Extremist hate speech needs to be identified so that we know what it looks like (this is important, particularly, for providing a comparison against which mainstream anti-Israelism can be contrasted)
2. When it comes to doing anything whatsoever to ensure that anti-Israelism doesn’t morph into antisemitism, the Republic of Ireland is, and has long been, asleep at the wheel. Hence, I felt that, in this case, it was worth wading through the intellectual cesspool that is Hickey’s mind.

It’s also personal:

Like millions of Israelis, I’ve spent most of the past week sheltering from the rockets that Tadhg hopes will kill me and my compatriots so that he can jubilate in the destruction of the world’s only Jewish State (at which point we can only assume his perma-anger will vanish like a bomb shelter after Pikud HaOref gives the all-clear, although somehow I’m not counting on it. Speaking of which what would people like Tadhg even do if their fantasies were fulfilled?).

This is not an attempt to stifle free speech. Nor is it a plea to ask Tadhg to learn the words to hava nagila and see if a bottle of Tubi 60 can get him over his Jew hatred syndrome (JHS). Tadhg’s disposition towards Jews and Israel will remain forever as bleak as an LGBT parade in Tehran.

The story of Ireland’s anti-Israel hostility has been told and re-told over the past year with no shortage of speculation and curiosity going into what motivates such full-throated opposition. But why and how Ireland is managing to sidestep its EU obligations to prosecute hate speech, however, remains relatively mired in obscurity.

Which is a pity. Because the fact that it’s caught the attention of the EU — which is threatening to “sue” Ireland for failing to prosecute it — is quite telling. According to a recent report in the Irish Examiner:

“But it [the EU] said Ireland had still failed to implement provisions relating to “criminalising the public incitement to violence or hatred” or the “condoning, denial or gross trivialisation of international crimes and the Holocaust”.

Read that again: the EU is literally having to drag Ireland by its testicles to do slightly less than absolutely zero about letting jihadi zealots like Tadhg run the roost without consequence.

MEP slams EU threat to prosecute Ireland on hate speech - Gript

Another odious aspect of Tadhg’s particular brand of Jew-hatred that merits vigorous rebuttal: it tries desperately to sell the world on the great lie that Zionism is something like a malign movement which has coopted “authentic” Judaism.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

But as lies go, it’s a dangerous one: those urging it to be true are not only trying to redefine Judaism for Jews, but also trying to carve out an ideological refuge under which their hate can take safe cover.

From Comedy Sketches About Houseshares To Radicalisation By The IRGC- Hickey’s “Creative” Evolution

Hickey has travelled a great distance in his campaign of defamation against the Jewish State.

His original commentary tried — hilariously! — to compare the Israel-Palestine conflict to a houseshare in his native Cork.

The Jews — needless to say — were cast as the mendacious foreign invader, cutting “deals” with the Ottomans and the French.

Four years later, however, and here’s Tadhg sitting gloating in a Shahed 285 attack helicopter, in Tehran, bearing the insignia of the IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps).

Hickey was invited to Tehran apparently by the regime. Sharing his holiday photo on X while the IRGC’s ballistic missile blitzes were ongoing, Hickey posted: “wish me luck, guys!”. You don’t need to guess what Tadhg wished his mission to be.

Of course, in Hickey’s mind, so long as it’s only Zionists that he’s joking about exterminating with gunfire it’s totally okay.

In language that could have been copy-and-pasted from Iran — actually, that’s almost everything he says — Hickey frequently rails about how the US and Israel are the head of an evil Western system of colonialism that is subjugating Muslims and other oppressed people globally.

So beyond the endless hatred of America and the frequent derogatory references to Americans as ‘yanks’, were Hickey ever to decide that Las Vegas might be a fun place to visit, his assiduous efforts to document his own merrymaking with terrorists might cause a spot of bother should he ever be asked to fill out a TSA form that asks:

“Have you ever or do you intend to provide financial assistance or other support to terrorists or terrorist organizations?”

I know that these are far less appealing destinations for Tadhg than Semnan and Arak (the latter known for its heavy water facilities) but .. just thought I’d save a wasted trip to the airport and back.

Beyond ascribing virtually every possible ill in the world to Israel but galvanizing most of his rhetoric around the idea that Israel is the world’s greatest problem and needs to be eliminated, Tadhg’s favorite online pursuits include explaining to Jews how Zionism is actually totally different to Judaism and therefore denying self-determination to (only) Jews is therefore totally okay.

It’s not clear whether Tadhg knows that the vast majority of world Jewry endorses Zionism. If he did his soundbites wouldn’t be as snappy. To be honest, he’d have to say something like:

“Here are really good Jews called Neturei Karta. Disclaimer: They’re a tiny fraction of the Jewish world, considered traitors, and about as looney as me and most non-insane Jews connect with at least the idea that Jews should have a national homeland in Israel

Although Tadhg has clearly reached such a sophisticated understanding of Judaism that he feels comfortable teaching the world’s actual Jews how they should define their Judaism, recent propaganda indicates that his level of knowledge about Judaism may not be as deep as he likes to portray.

For one — and no, this isn’t a joke, I promise — Tadhg recently reposted a tweet which claimed that “the largest Jewish population outside Israel is in Iran.”

Has Tadhg actually met a real Jew beyond in the contrived context of anti-Palestine events, where tokenistic Jews who happen to share Tadhg’s destructionist worldview are treated like golddust so long as they renounce mainstream Judaism?

Has he ever attempted to engage one of the majority of Israeli citizens who support Zionism? Why is that the only Jews and Israelis he deigns to interact with all happen to be those who share his viewpoint?

Fact 1: His Comedic Repetoire Is Essentially Limited To Skits Which Are Actually Propaganda And Hate Speech

Hickey’s propaganda is packaged — weirdly — as comedy. Here we must acknowledge that Tadhg has pulled a good ruse. Like Irish comic Tommy Tiernan who once drew ire for “joking” that only six million Jews perished in the Holocaust (and were it up to him there would have been double that), Hickey — if absolutely needed — can turn around and claim that any of his gags were just a bit of “craic”.

“F — — — six million? I would have got 10 or 12 million out of that… F — — — two at a time, they would have gone. Hold hands, get in there. Leave us your teeth and your glasses.”

(Tommy Tiernan, Glastonbury Festival. As reported by The Jewish Chronicle)

The dissonance of tuning in for political satire and instead getting back content about how no Israelis were actually brutalised on October 7th creates something of a jarring dissonance, however. It’s like turning over a cereal box and on the other side of Tony The Tiger is an ode to the Ayatollah.

Even if you found the steady stream of race-bating and one-sided takes illuminating, I’m not sure how they’re supposed to be humorous in the conventional sense of the word. Like in the way that you might get a good laugh out of them after an exhausting day as an Israel-hating keyboard warrior.

But speaking of chutzpah: Tadhg — whose main contribution to comedy will probably be remembered as finding inventive ways to brand propaganda as it — finds time to critique the poor comedic skills of … you guessed it … those darned Israelis:

During a regular anti-Israel media trawl (conducted once every three minutes), Tadhg encountered a video imitating an Israeli airstrike on an Iranian broadcaster and uses the clip as evidence of how (all) Israelis suffer from “mass psychosis” and (thus) can’t understand why they are so reviled:

For what its worth:

The Israeli kids’ videos aren’t my cup of tea either. But the charge of poor comedic taste is still a bit rich coming from a guy whose idea of comedy is comparing the butchering of Israeli civilians on October 7th to being … wait for it … “stung by a bee.” and who once paraded around his native Cork trying to goad passers-by into condemning Hamas. The latter was intended to discredit the fact that Israelis often ask their interlocutors to condemn Hamas.

For what it’s worth — you guessed it — Tadhg says that he himself doesn’t condone Hamas — he just refers to them as the “resistance” ( muqawwama) engaging in “freedom fighting” and to feel very sympathetic for their tactics which he sees as the inevitable reactions to oppression. Which makes the two-faced act (the “comedy” to skirt around hate speech terms of conditions and the real Tadhg who does interviews) seem especially disingeuous.

In an interview with 5 Pillars, Hickey stated:

“There’s an obsession here to condemn Hamas. Palestinans have been in some cases condemned to life in an open air prison. And yet when they fight back for their liberation and their independence .. we’re made to think in this part of the world that they don’t deserve freedom fighting and that they’re terrorists.”

The telling part of the remarks are highlighted in bold.

The classic cowardly double-speak parallels perfectly the tactic he uses to condone the rape of Israeli women on October 7th. He doesn’t endorse the rape. But the random rape of women has to be seen in its proper context. Sorry, what!?!

And you know … the “all Israelis” thing is a bit grating, Tadhg.

A reaction to Ireland’s prodigious efforts to isolate and criticise Israel is that, here in Israel, the image of Ireland has shifted from “idyllic place with friendly people” (Ireland once ranked as the most popular tourist destination for Israelis; attitudes have soured so much since that a route was shelved after less than a year) to “does travel insurance cover injury from a gang wielding pitchforks if they find out I’m from Israel!?”

An unfortunate extension of that — which I don’t condone — is reactionary anti-Irish racism. This I mean very sincerely. The way to combat bigotry is not to stoop to responding with bigotry. But it’s a dynamic.

Thus, I’ve seen plenty of responses along the lines of “well, the Irish are just a bunch of Jew haters.” I don’t make those comments because I know it’s not true: some may be, probably in reality a very small fringe, but not the totality. When you call all Israelis “psychotic”, “vermin”, and “genocidal scum” however … you’re doing just that.

That video (and commentary) ranks up there in absurdity with Tadhg’s other fascinating post October 7th insight: that Israeli civilians were killed by Israel because they were caught in crossfire between the “resistance” (Hamas) and the IDF. I mean, it’s not like Hamas openly documented themselves engaging in premeditated and well-planned slaughter, right!? It’s almost a … psychotic thing to believe.

“Some people have been saying it’s disproportionate,” says Hickey’s shrill personification of an Israeli (who bears the subtitle “still the victim” — that Jews are perpetually “playing the victim card”, a favorite allegation of antisemites, is a staple in Hickey’s repertoire).

He then explains Israel’s response in Gaza as “burning a house down with the occupants inside.”

It must have evaded Hickey’s bigoted attention yet again that Hamas actually did precisely that.

Fact 2: While Hickey Claims To Just Hate Zionism He Also Peddles In Just About Every Antisemitism Trope Out There

Before coming to the attention of the Jewish world as the pin-up Western radical leftist anti-Semite in anti-Zionist clothing (David Lange of Israelycool first did the public service of pointing out the danger and toxicity of Hickey’s propagandising Jew hatred), Hickey appears to have made a living sharing these comedic videos which — long before this controversy, long before he began urging Iran to not let up in their missile strikes about Israel — focused disproportionately on Israel and Jews.

If you take nothing else away from this piece take this: please remember that pattern the next time you recognise it.

In one particularly repugnant piece — entitled Hitler’s Arse — Hickey’s crass Jewish caricature explains that he has made a documentary on the niche topic of Hitler’s arse (backside):

Falling back on yet another lazy antisemitic trope (that Jews abuse the memory of the Holocaust to play a perpetual ‘victim’ card, a staple theme throughout his ‘work’ and video-making), Hickey explains that the documentary, while niche, is just another addition to the already bulging repertoire of documentaries about Hitler available on television. You know … because we talk too much about the Holocaust.

The crass American imitation embodies what Hickey imagines Americans to be long before he wrote it out a hundred times over: imperial colonists working at the behest of some malignant global Jewish cabal which — one only imagine — Hickey suspects is to blame for this perma-anger.

Fact 3: Though Easily Dismissed As Just Another Crazy, He’s Amassed A Sizeable Online Following

But Hickey’s penchant for radicalism and encouraging the extermination of Israel shouldn’t be dismissed too quickly.

Although Hickey lacks the commitment to hop on a failed flotilla, preferring to do his hate-mongering from dry land, apparently, he still has as reach of 164K followers (on X alone) — in addition to Tik Tok and YouTube.

Like most rabid antisemites, Hickey is periodically deplatformed which has led him to open a sideline of … soliciting donations. But his cover story creates some good plausible deniability that his messages were not intended seriously. Although it’s very clear that they are.

So although he may lack the mainstream cache of somebody like, say, Greta, Hickey’s vitriol still reaches far and wide.

And while a sizeable amount of his following seem to be scattered throughout the Muslim world, his adherents can also be found, in number, right at home.

Besides offering a warped version of world events, Hickey also platforms a motley and ever-rotating crew of fringe haters whom he eagerly platforms.

It would not be accurate to say that Hickey is bringing these voices into the mainstream — for he himself does not enjoy that position. But he can be “credited” with importing hate speech from the Muslim world into Europe that might otherwise not have found footing there.

These include conspiracy theorists, a carefully curated cast of Jews who just all happen to share precisely his view that Israel is committing a genocide, and … the odd Iranian who also happens to adulate the Iranian Guards (dissident Iranians, for what it’s worth, are usually dismissed out of hand as paid Zionist shills, part of the global cabal.)

So this reshare emblazoning the star of David on the American flag — an antisemitic motif unquestionably alleging Jewish dominance over the country — is another of those little mask-slips.

But How Does A Cork “Comic” Become An Iranian Propagandist, Anyway?

Hickey’s meteoric rise through the ranks of professional Israel haters, however, is quite the perplexing phenomenon. ‘ Reading Hickey’s X feed, you might forget for a moment that he’s not the online alias of the military wing of Hamas. Rather, he’s .. a white Irishman who just decided, one day, that he was happy to devote the remainder of his life (literally) to taking one unending internet crap on Israel.

Can you imagine being so full of hate that that is what you strive to achieve before you kick it?

I mean at least Dan Bilzerian (also a rabid Israel hater) seems to be having a good time while doing the hating. Hickey is just perma-angry.

Daragh, an Irishman living in Tel Aviv, summed up the sheer strangeness of the phenomenon quite aptly:

It’s hard to offer an explanation that doesn’t sound a bit like something pulled from a low budget spy movie or one of those Netflix docuseries that inexplicaby gets dragged out into four parts as you’re left wondering whether this is a really fringe case or society is just much weirder than you realised ( “The Leeman And The Ayatollah” anyone?). But it’s also kind of strange that people in Iran are trying to exterminate us right now.

Anti-Israel radicalism in Ireland has long been hiding just beneath the surface.

Growing up in Cork, I’d often see flyers affixed to lamposts inviting the general public to a forum decrying Israel’s latest perceived wrongdoing.

As I got older, I’d sometimes Google the participants: doing so, you might find out that the esteemed speaker visiting from ‘Palestine’ had in fact served time in Israeli prisons for participation in terrorism that maimed or killed. This was before the contents of these closed-doors events were occasionally posted on the internet for all to gawk at.

So it was easy to buy into the myth — I’m sorry to say often propagated by Irish Jews themselves — that the fervent pro-Palestinianism in Ireland was nothing more than a misguided parallel with Ireland’s experience of colonialism (and how can that even be an excuse? That denies Jews’ connection to Israel!?) In many cases, I think it’s far more sinister.

I can recall, too, being taken aback by the overt antisemitism in Irish online spaces discussing Israel when … laptops still came with CD trays and having broadband internet was like gaining access to another universe.

So in a sense, Tadhg has broken some very important ground — if it can be leveraged to do something constructive like draw red lines to distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from espousing terror. He’s brought something into the open that badly needed to be seen.

Why might the Iranians have taken such a shine to Tadhg that they gave him exclusive access to the Cosplay Being A Martyr Tent at Tehran’s airport (hey, not everyone gets chosen)?

My inkling is that even the Iranians may have been astounded at the naivete with which Hickey swallowed Soviet style state propaganda hook, line, and sinker and proved willing to regurgitate it with seeming indifference to who might be paying attention.

It takes a rather serious level of commitment — or stupidity — to be willing to argue both that October 7th was a mostly peaceful act of resistance and defy all scientific evidence suggesting Iran’s determination to obtain a nuclear weapon.

But whatever the cause, it’s a fitting explanation.

Tadhg delivers a superlative level of conspiracy theory pushing and animosity that isn’t easy to find among Western anti-Israel leftists. His cocktail of rable-rousing conspiracy theory endorsement and classic but highly reliable Israel villification offers a ready made formula to offset reason and stimulate anti-Isreal ire.

Is Hickey On The Iranian Payroll Or Does He Just Have A Lot Of Time For This Stuff?

Whether Tadhg Joon has received monetary recompense for his tireless efforts on behalf of the Iranian regime is impossible to know.

Although that doesn’t stop it from being the subject of lively speculation and debate.

Elliot Nazar, writing in United Against Nuclear Iran penned an interesting entry exploring how there often really is more than meets the eye when it comes to collusion between radical elements in the Republic of Ireland and Middle Eastern terrorists.

Politically, Hickey affiliates with Sinn Fein — a group known both, of course, for its affiliation with the IRA, as well as their training and arms exchanges with the PFLP. So in a sense this is just a modern incarnation of a bizarre love affair that streches back some fifty years. But in another it represents a push by Irish radicals into the arms of a new group of strange co-revolutionaries: the Iranians.

Why Ireland appears to be cultivating a relationship with Iran is unclear. But there does seem to be some substance to the idea that it is, indeed, happening.

Irish President Michael D Higgins wrote a letter of congratulations to Masoud Pezeshkian upon his election as President of the Islamic Republic.

Writing before the Iranians launched one of two major batches of missiles to Israel in 2024, Higgins informed his Iranian counterpart about the embassy which Ireland was then building in Tehran and expressed hope that Iran would play a crucial role in helping build peace across the Middle East.

After the letter “leaked,” Higgins was quick to blame Israel before it became clear that the source of the leak was … the Iranian mission in Dublin itself posting the letter to X/Twitter.

That very strange moral compass was also on full show last summer when Ireland’s leading coalition parties chose to publicly snub Israel’s ambassador, Dana Erlich, by “disinviting” them from the parties’ annual conference. It was shared — one gets the feeling very deliberately — that the Iranian envoy, however, had made the guest list.

Hickey Routinely Goes Where Other Antisemites Are Too Smart To Venture

So if there’s any truth to the idea that Hickey’s support from Iran may be more than coincidental, it’s probably got something to do with the fact that he reliably spouts the kind of propaganda that can be found on Press TV (who he often retweets with zeal).

Were Iran to try to establish a Dublin bureau for Press TV it might (emphasis on ‘might’) fall foul of a media watchdog. So a clever strategy, instead, is to bolster influencers who may have a more effective reach.

Of course, this strategy is not in itself malevolent. Israel too and countless world governments can be shown to engage in this kind of public diplomacy. But might, at least, provide a modicum of explanation for the otherwise strange story.

A Bellweather Of The ‘Unmasking’ Phenomenon

Another reason that I find it interesting to watch Tadhg when there’s virtually no other Israel-hater I would bother with: I’ve come to regard him as a useful bellweather for the broader phenomenon of what I and many in the pro-Israel camp have come to call the phenomenon of “unmasking” — by which individuals whose animus of Israel was motivated by anti-Semitism (and I underscore — I do not suggest that that is all or even most of that group) eventually reveals itself to be frank antisemitism.

At the time of writing, Hickey has authored 44,000 tweets, countless of which have gone to denouncing US “imperialism”, the West, Israel, and Jews.

In the process, he has created one of the internet’s most fertile self-documented archives showing how a random Westener went from being just another guy at the protest rally to a willing parrot for the Iranian axis.

This has import far beyond the narrow context of Hickey and Ireland and is a matter of major interest to the Jewish world at large.

To be clear: I’m not alleging that most folks who are broadly critical of Israel are anti-Semites. Nor am I convinced that it’s the tiny minority that it’s often dismissed as. But those people are certainly not the totality of the movement. However, the failure of the pro-Palestinian movement in Ireland to distance itself from Hickey’s rhetoric is telling.

The phenomenon by which anti-semites masquerading as anti-Israel campaigners reveal their true colors is also not a linear one. When they sense that Israel and the Jewish people are on the ropes, they feel emboldened to step out of the woodwork and give up the subterfuge, which must be tiring to maintain.

In fact, this is more or less the whole reason I wrote this blog: we’re nearing a point of evolution with Hickey’s rhetoric that we longed sense we were moving towards. In recent days he has:

• Openly encouraged Iran to “destroy” Israel (the tweet was posted at the height of the Iranian missile barrages)
• Chosen the same timing precisely to insist that Israel must be forcibly removed of its nuclear capability

He even got impatient when Iran stopped firing for a while. Writing just hours after Israeli civilians had been killed by successfull Iranian rocket attacks, Hickey urged the regime to “get its shit together” and keep hitting Tel Aviv:

He Also Enjoys VIP Access to Terror Networks, Showing Up At “Star Studded” Events Like Nasrallah’s Funeral…

The world of anti-Israel extremism must be a pretty close-knit community given that many of those at its pinnacle are routinely shifted out of their positions.

But perhaps thanks to a friendly letter of commendation from Iran, Tadhg found himself at another all-star anti-Israel event: the funeral of Nasrallah (or maybe Hizbullah was just impressed with the footage of Hickey chanting ‘Death to Israel’ that received widespread attention).

You know how Ireland is trying to change the definition of genocide to charge Israel with it? That was one of Tadhg’s main learnings from the dig-in with the Hizbullah lads. The imperial west, he said, has no write to define terrorism and graft it onto peace-loving folks like his Hizbullah hosts.

Who apparently plied the Corkman not only with ideology. But also with lots and lots of cake.

Turning to camera at the funeral (a few minutes before railing at the IAF flyover) Hickey took a moment o record his gratitude at the exquisite bakery skills of those in attendance, remarking how he was “blown away” (not literally, of course) by:

“Absolute mobs of people handing me water … and cake.”

In recent days, Tadhg lamented the assassination of the late Nasrallah’s personal bodyguard whom he met on his propaganda tour of Iran. Hickey described “Abu Ali” as a harmless human being who wouldn’t hurt a fly.

He did not divulge whether Ali was also a talented and determined baker. But one gets the sense that the guy just *was*.

Here, again, one wonders the degree to which it’s actually plausible for a human with the faculty of thought to believe this kind of stuff.

There are countless people in Lebanon who would either burst out laughing at the claim that Abu Ali was “gentle” or demonstrate, to Tadhg, the methods Hizbullah employed which were not very gentle — like disappearing opposition into torture chambers.

This is the same Hizbullah, it’s worth remembering, which killed an Irish soldier on duty with the UN in late 2022.

But much like Israelis who aren’t demonic and Iranians who aren’t mouthpieces of the regime, these inconvenient populations simply don’t exist in Hickey’s toybox version of the Middle East.

Which is why — as frightening as hate like this is to witness — the emboldening of the ayatollahs actually does the world a great favor, in this sense: we get to see the hatred for what it is and what it’s always been. It may be defy reason, but it’s there with correct labelling.

It also forces people to pick sides and own the consequences of their decision.

But at least we got something actionable out of this spectating. Note to Israeli embassies: make less infographics; bake more cakes.

Some People Have Being Paying Attention, At Least

So is anybody taking notice as a guy from Ireland slowly morphs into an open exponent of “Israel must be exterminated and never allowed to exist?”

Is this just a once off thing or does Hickey represent the beginning of an avalanche of transparent radical jihadi propagandists?

And although Ireland may be undoubtedly derelict in its failure to prosecute hate speech, nobody — including me — is holding out much hope that this will change.

Will Hickey be a contained phenomenon as Ireland becomes subsumed by a tornado of hatred? Or will be come to be regarded as ahead of the time in the things he said openly? Will speech calling for the bombing of Israeli civilians be regarded as mainstream in just a few years’ time?

According to one cat on the street here in Jerusalem, Hickey’s prodigious slew of anti-Israel output has caught the attention of at least one national intelligence service. But that’s not exactly a scintillating revelation. Hickey has kind of reached the final level of anti-Israel agitation.

Hickey Plans A Life Of Full-Time Anti-Israelism, Yet Apparently Hasn’t … You Know … Ever … Visited Israel

Besides the US, one border that is unlikely to ever open up for Hickey is that of Israel, the state he variously labels a “cancer” and a “stain on humanity” that must be (variously) “destroyed” or “excised”.

Notably, Hickey has gone on record as stating that he is happy to “dedicate” the rest of his life to doing whatever he can to “help bring down” this dreadful country.

But one thing is very curious:

Good-faith actors who decide that they want to dedicate all their energy to a moral crusade targeting a country thousands of miles away usually have the motivation to — at least — hop on a flight there and visit it.

Here we find more delightful proof of the total absurdity of the kind of West-meets-Jihadi totalitarianism that Hickey represents. Hickey’s information about Israel, it seems, comes entirely from books, the internet, and the safe harbor of online workshops about the evils of Zionism.

While another famous Irish anti-Israel hater Richard Boyd Barrett at least put in a few months on a kibbutz (where he saw exactly what he wanted to see and then spent the next two decades referencing), Hickey, seemingly, never even bothered to visit before engaging on his never-ending moral crusade. Why try to get both perspectives when you have the internet, right!?

So I ask again:

Do you want to take your advice about Judaism from a guy who thinks Iran houses the world’s largest Jewish population; or predicate your understanding of the conflict on the deranged musings of a guy who’s never actually stepped foot in the land he professes to be an expert about?

(While Israel has no business in allowing hostile foreign agents like Hickey into their territory it does have a double edged effect. Hickey is clearly unaware how bomb shelter doors work in Israel — the places Israelis have to run to when his friends send over missiles. Although I’m not sure that knowing that fact would have prevented him from spreading more fake news propaganda)

Hickey Is Convinced That Everybody Besides Evil Zionists Thinks Exactly Like Him

Behold the ugly end result of a fascinating combination of profound self-delusion ( Zionism is not Jewish! It’s okay to demand the elimination of .. just Zionism!), a cosy echo chamber, and the kind of warped impression of the parameters of the Israel-Palestine debate that you’ll get if your sole sources of information are Irish news and Iranian state propaganda.

Enveloped in this strange mental space, Tadhg asks, he hopes rhetorically — how Israelis (if they survive, as he hopes they won’t) plan on living in a world where (to quote verbatim) “every decent person with a soul and a beating heart fucking despises you and everything you stand for?”:

Why Is Ireland Acting As A Safe Harbor For Radical Anti-Israelism & Anti-Jewish Hate Speech?

As interesting as the unusual meandering of Hickey’s career is to witness, why Ireland has proven steadfastly unwilling to do anything whatsoever to combat extremist anti-Israel rhetoric is a much more important topic of enquiry.

To the righteous fury of Hickey and his comrades, the UK is currently prosecuting an Irish band — Kneecap — under anti-terror legislation for displaying the Hizbullah flag.

But both in this case and others (like when a sitting member of parliament similarly called for the elimination of Israel and the globalising of the intifada) Dublin has proven resolutely mute. And not for lack of … source material.

In recent days, Hickey has declared Zionism to be the “greatest cancer” facing humanity (which must be excised, etc; the metaphor is a long time Iranian favorite):

He endorses the harassment of those being evacuated from Israel by boat and endorses the perverse idea that they should be subject to North Korean style “re-education” (styled ‘de-Zionisation’) upon arrival at their country of destination for the crime of not subscribing to his hate-filled ideology:

He also openly jubilates as ballistic missile impacts targeting scientific research facilities in Israel:

He reshares naked assassination threats against Israel’s Prime Minister:

And the just-anti-Zionist comedian also likes 911 style conspiracy theories (Hickey never met a conspiracy theory or Jew-hater that he didn’t instantly love, especially when they come in one package):

And (another nothing-against-Jews slip moment) decides that the most fitting way to rub salt into the wounds of rocket attacks on Israeli civilians is to butcher a Jewish expression of mutual solidarity (Am Yisrael Chai) rebranding it “Am Israel Cry”.

Speaking of the IHRA definition, Hickey compares Israel to Nazi Germany almost every day of the week:

Ireland’s Strange Landscape Of Israel Hatred

Hickey’s vigorous campaign against Israel occurs against the backdrop of Ireland’s obsessive desire to not only attack Israel on every front possible (diplomatic, political, economic), but to also rid the country of any and all residual attachment to the Jewish state.

Like a Jewish family hunting down morsels of leavened bread on the eve of Pesah, Ireland is on a frenzied mission to clean out every residual drop of Israeli presence from its little Island.

Thus Tadhg often echoes the rallying call of the Ireland pro-Palestinian movement which is echoed at just about every protest they organise: the government must do more to pressure Israel.

Thus not only does the pro-Palestinian movement in Ireland really hate Israel, they reflect some of that hate inwards too — hating their own government for not being more hateful towards Israel.

Although sometimes put into the specific (like demanding that the Israeli embassy be shut down; ultimately successful) in other instances it’s left as a sort of nebulous wish, hanging poisonously in the air, suffused with whatever supreme indignant moral righteousness must smell like.

This is a rather strange fixation because Ireland — a small Ireland on the edge of Europe — already does an awful lot to persecute Israel in just about every way that it can.

In fact one could aruge with some credibility that on a per-capita basis, no other nation devotes more of its parliamentary time, media coverage and diplomatic activity to taking a partisan position about a conflict on the other side of the world which it has literally nothing to do with. Certainly no other nation which maintains that it is steadfastly “neutral.”

Among Ireland’s achievements during a very busy 2024 for anti-Israel fervor:

It succeeded in creating an environment so hostile that Israel closed its diplomatic mission (a move unprecedented in Europe); it advanced the first selective boycott bill targeting the Jewish state in Europe; it rallied nations behind the idea of kicking Israel out of the EU; and, of course, it joined South Africa’s lawfare at the ICC.

Ireland does not have a significant armed force. The one that it has has anyway decided that on principle it will no longer be buying military equipment from Israel.

The rallying cry to “do more” presumably, therefore, does not include an urging to engage in military intervention. So instead those making the call are forced to engage in a bizarre sort of witch hunt attempting to hone in on any of the ever-decreasing number of ways in which Ireland and Israel are intertwined.

Thus did Cork City engage in the rather strange spectacle of formally “banning” Netanyahu and the Israeli government from setting foot in Cork.

And when not thwarting things that would never happen anyway, the pro-Palestinian movement enjoys reading a “news” website (The Ditch) whose entire reason for existence appears to be writing journalistic “exposes” revealing how 5KG of weapon parts may have overflown Ireland for 10 minutes at 40,000 feet on a DHL flight — thereby sullying the pristine neutrality of Irish skies momentarily and forcing Tadhg to take time away from writing one anti-Israel post to sharing one of their articles.

The head of Ireland’s Central Bank was dragged before parliament recently to answer angry questions as to why they are fulfilling their obligation to facilitate the sale of Israel government bonds.

Trinity College Dublin became the first mainstream academic institution to completely sever ties with Israeli institutions, bowing to student pressure.

And Irish newspapers carry pieces like these probing into the scandalous state of affairs whereby Ireland and Israel engage in doing business:

How Does An Antisemitic Comic Land Irish Government Funding? By Asking For It!

This is why, maybe, Ireland has proven itself unable or unwilling to do anything about anti-Israelism that is really about Jews:

When the background noise against Israel is so vitriolic that when somebody pops up and says: “great! Fire more rockets at Tel Aviv” it sounds like just another take on morningtime television.

Even after sharing a post in which he appeared to defend rape on October 7th (and endorsing a conspiracy theory claiming that Israeli deaths were due to ‘friendly fire’) he was platformed at an Irish arts center and his work on overcoming alcoholism “Gatman” is listed as having received funding from the Irish Arts Council:

The Irish Arts Council, in turn, is by its own description:

…the national government agency for funding, developing and promoting the arts in Ireland.

Being a rabid Jew-hater and conspiracy theorist isn’t an impediment to receiving state commissions for theatrical productions in today’s Ireland (I could point to Hickey’s weird fasincation with 9/11 but at this point citing examples seems redundant.)

This remarkable tolerance of anti-Jewish bigotry in Ireland permeates other arenas of public life — including politics and, of course, the media.

The Irish Times is Ireland’s newspaper of record. Mary Leland reviewed Hickey’s performance for the paper last August.

The last lines of Leland’s review contains this observation — the most polite kind of saying this possible that — you know — if you’re going to throw adorn yourself in the hallowed flag of Palestine … you might want to throw in there that there’s a wee bit of political grandstanding here (or disclose that you’re not actually a comedian but rather a professional Jew hater).

Leland writes:

It must be added that the itinerary omits any notable reference to Palestine, yet during the closure’s inevitable standing ovation there it is: the flag unfurled against Hickey’s chest like an emblem, but of what? Have we been thinking of Palestine throughout this performance? The thought itself unfurls like an accusation, casting the play in an altogether different debate.

Like most online personalities who devote themselves to propagating hate speech, Hickey plays a game of cat and mouse with tech platforms, which he invariably decries as being (somehow) in cahoots with the evil Zionist overlords who saturate his worldview.

In this sense, Hickey is to be congratulated for the audacity but ingenuity of this self-fulfilling prophecy: if you create anti-Semitic hate speech, you will be deplatformed by platforms which object to hate speech.

You can then weaponise that as further evidence of the Zionist cabal and leverage that to lap up an unending supply of more crazies:

Patent Pending: The Invisibility Cloak Called ‘Just Anti Zionist’

It’s impossible not to draw some observations about the kind of anti-Semitism that Tadhg embodies and which has succeeded in making it into the mainstream in Ireland. If it could be captured with a description, it would be something like:

“We’re just anti-Zionist! We have absolutely nothing against Jews! Call me anti-Semitic? There you go ahead — you Jews are always playing the anti-Semitism card. Oh shit! I meant typical Israeli. Or is it Zionist? Whatever we’re going with, I don’t like you. But it has absolutely nothing whatsover to do with you being Jewish, this I can assure you. Actually, you’re being quite anti-Semitic yourself. You are trivialising actual antisemitism, you know “

(Okay, that was more than a flavor)

The self-assuredness of those who don the anti-Zionism invisibility cloak is also quite something to witness. I wonder, too, does it ever occur to them how unconvincing an act it is.

As a Jew, few things are stranger than somebody who isn’t Jewish and who appears to know rather little about your faith try to lecture you on your religion.

The centrality of “good Jews” to this strategem can scracely be understated. They are absolutely vital: the ideological cover needed to “prove” the theory.

So in a desperate grasp to grab whatever Jews he can find for ideological cover and to deflect against accurate charges of anti-Semitism, Tadhg latches onto … True Torah Jews, Neturei Karta, and whoever else he can dredge up on the internet.

Unlike Tadhg I suspect, I’ve read some of their literature. It’s nothing even close to the hatefulness of Tadhg’s perma-anger. What seems lost on Tadhg, and while it’s a small point, it’s a telling one: arguing that Judaism does not support Zionism does not automatically mean endorsing the view that other Jews who think otherwise should be annihilated by missile-fire. It is not necessarily a plain endorsement of terror.

These “good Jews” are beckoned from the far corners of the internet — which creates the impression that they’re both far more numerous and mainstream in the Jewish world than they actually are.

So much as Press TV pumps out a 24/7 stream of fake news, disinformation and lies, Tadhg deludes his equally misinformed followers into believing in a fictional version of the Jewish world that suits their desire to not be anti-Semitic but which, sadly, doesn’t actually exist.

This is, I reckon, why the “just anti-Zionist” thing seems to have first taken root in Ireland before propagating, as a great idea, to other parts of the world. If you don’t know any Jews in real life, it’s much easier to belief random facts about them — including that Max Blumenthal carries weight as a legitimate commentator or that your average pulpit rabbi in the Diaspora conducts Shabbat services hot off the back of an interfaith dialogue and shares your rejection of Zionism as “anti-Semitic” (oh, please!)

But even here we find that the swiss cheese of Tadhg’s unconvincing act is littered with holes.

He often takes aim at the “chosen people” and espouses messaging about Jewish supremacy (as well as control of the media, government, and much more). That doesn’t sound much like opposition to Israeli policies. That reeks of plain old anti-Semitism.

To illustrate the extent of the mental gymnastics anti-Semites demand that “good Jews” pass through to avoid being hated or worse, it’s worth pausing for a moment to think them through:

So you’re okay with Jews so long as they repudiate Zionism. But you still hate Jews for “Jewish supremacy?” So do they need to go another hurdle to gain your hallowed stamp of acceptability?

For the vast majority of Jews either: live in Israel (more than half of them), have family in Israel (another significant percentage) or live in the Diaspora but support Zionism, all Tadhg has to offer is one bilious tweet after the other:

Tadhg is also, of course, a fervent proponent of the idea that Jews are to blame for their own hatred:

Accusing Jews of being “demonic” is another favorite part of Tadhg’s rhetoric, too.

And he relishes in making fun of the appearance of Jews he dislikes (or supporters of them) — making “jokes” that they look “inbred.” So beyond being a Jew-hater and a guy who despises Israel … Tadhg is kind of just … generally a pretty ugly human being.

And it’s a trite response, in a sense, but equally, it merits repetition as it’s another good yardstick by which the authenticity of anti-Israelism can be assessed: while Tadhg wants to devote his life to railing against Israel, there is no evidence that he has taken even a vague interest in any other geopolitical conflict currently taking place in the world.

The Soundtrack To Tadhg’s Wedding Will Be: Boom, Boom, Tel Aviv

Call me naive, but I still have a hard time wrapping my head around how profoundly hate-filled a single person can be that they wish to open their wedding with a soundtrack about a (literal) missile attack on a city more than one thousand miles away.

Much like Hamasniks foist AK-47s into the hands of toddlers on public stages in Gaza, Tadhg’s wedding, apparently, will get started with an orgy. Not of that kind, maybe, but of hate:

If you don’t feel like watching the video, I can give you the quick summary. To a backdrop of footage of Iranian ballistic missiles atacking Tel Aviv, the lyrics are:

“Boom Boom Tel Aviv / This is what you get for all your evil deeds / You brought this upon yourself it’s your time to bleed”

I don’t know. Maybe that tweet was in jest. Is that the comedy I’ve been missing all this time? I’m in stitches!

Full Tolerance For Hate Speech. Zero Commitment To IHRA: Ireland’s Failure To Rein In Anti-Semitism.

What Tadhg Hickey also represents — beyond the vulgarity of irrational hatred — is the complete and utter failure of the Republic of Ireland to take any meaningful action to ensure that the country doesn’t become a hotbed of persecution for its tiny Jewish population.

The Irish approach can be best described as an extreme case of selective laissez-faire.

While legislation exists that would arguably make Hickey’s posts criminal offences (see, for example, the Prohibition Of Incitement To Hatred Act 1989), and while Ireland has even recently discussed revising its outdated hate speech laws, this legislation never seems to be used to actually prosecute Jew hatred.

The Irish position instead seems to be that so long as Israel is the target (and not explicitly Jews), anything is fair game: like anti-Israel demos parading through Dublin featuring mock rockets and the flags of terrorist movements.

For Irish-born Zionist Jews like me, this creates a strange kind of cognitive dissonance. Which might explain, in part, why The Matrix is one of my all-time favorite movies.

Official Ireland has long told its small Jewish population that they are a “treasured” minority. I always found this kind of curious.

While it’s heartening in an abstract sort of way to know that Ireland once elected a Jewish lord mayor (and all that) Jewish communities who live in the diaspora generally set their sights simply on peaceful coexistence rather than in being museum exhibits or held up as evidence of a makebelieve coexistence dictated on somebody else’s terms.

To hear Zionism described as an ideology of hate and likened to Nazism makes any supposed tolerance ring very hollow. You cannot graft your own idea of national identity on any people. Accepting Jews only when they conform to a fringe stream of anti-Zionism Judaism is not vastly differently than just deeming Jews and Judaism unpalatable in your society altogether.

Within the laughably small microcosm of Irish-born Jews (who could probably all pack into a generously sized pub at a push) my voice may be a hawkish one. But I’m aware that others — especially those living in Ireland — pursue a more conciliatory tone and seek, endlessly, to find some sort of “better path.”

As much as I think that they are well-intentioned but hopelessly misguided, I recognise that there are other opinions in the room. But in pursuing some kind of reconciliation, I hope that they can protect collective interests:

When it comes to anti-semitism, judge Ireland not by what it says, or what it says it will do, but what it actually does.

Alarmed at the rise in anti-Semitism carrying on the back of the country’s longstanding and fierce opposition to Israel, Irish ministers, earlier this year, held two rounds of dialogue with Jewish leaders both in Ireland and in the US (the latter preceding a traditional annual audience with the US president).

Foreseeing that the second Trump administration could blow a chilly breeze over Ireland’s economy — massively dependent upon multinational corporations, many of whom are based in the US — Ireland engaged in a brief round of what might be called deceptive pacification.

Importantly, the IHRA definition was finally endorsed. But the very first Holocaust Remembrance event after its adoption was marred by the presence of a virulently anti-Israel president who, like Hickey, peddles in conspiracy theories, and who used the platform to criticise Israel’s conduct in Gaza.

So perhaps this is the resolution to the dissonance I perceive between the Ireland I once knew and what I witness from afar today: the rot emanates from the top.

Of course for folks like Tadhg ‘Tehran’ Hickey (TTH?), doing the whole casual Israel-Nazi comparison thing is like brushing your teeth in the morning.

This setback was followed by other blows to the prospect of reconciliation that I do not believe there is any way back from: Israel’s decision to shutter its embassy in Dublin which was followed by the Irish Government’s miraculous abandoment of its long-term opposition to a bill which will criminalise trade with Israeli businesses over the green line.

Like discovering that yes, Tadhg Hickey actually wants all of us Israelis to die in a ballistic missile strike, however, it’s probably for the better that things map out this way.

Compared to the hazy world that Hickey inhabits, when true colors are finally shown, the reality we’ve been navigating becomes only more vivid.

Bonus: Questions For Tadhg

Combatting bigotry is a team sport. You don’t need to be Jewish to take part. If you’re not, know that your support will be appreciated.

Here are a few ready-to-go interview questions:

1: Why Israel, Man?

You’ve written that you would like to dedicate the rest of your life to seeing Israel eradicated and seem to devote most of your waking hours to defaming the country.

You say that you do so out of a sense of monumental justice.

There are many humans rights issues in the world, but you seem to have shown no interest in them, ever.

Why is that?

2: How Do You Deal With Facts?

The majority of Jews are Zionists. Normative Judaism places the connection to our ancestral homeland — for which Zion is a metaphor — at the center of our faith.

You insist, however, that Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism.

As a non-Jew, you are effectively telling the majority of the world’s Jews that they are defining their identity incorrectly.

If I told you that as an Irishman you are bound to love Israel, you would tell me that it’s not my place to define your Irishness.

So why do you deny that right selectively to Jews?

3: If you “only” hate Zionists, why do you endorse every antisemitic trope … ever?

If you only have a problem with “Zionists,” why do you tweet about things like “Jewish supremacy?” Why is all your commentary about Zionists — and Israel — laced with classic antisemitism?

4: How do you plan to destroy Israel if words aren’t enough?

So you’ve mentioned that you want defeating Israel to be your lifelong battle.

But tweeting from Cork doesn’t seem to be making much of a dent in our success.

Do you have a plan B? Does it involve joining a military movement? If so, have you given thought to which and where you might undergo combat training?

5: What kind of Hamas fighter would you be if October 7th Happened Again?

You love ‘resistance’, right? And you were happy to see Iran throwing ballistic missiles at Israel. So presumably you’re fine with indisciminately killing Israels.

That being the case, let’s indulge in some roleplay.

October 7th happens again but this time you’re on the ground.

It’s your moment to liberate Palestine, Tadhg, and you’ve got your dear friends for company!

A fellow resistance member hands you a gun, some matches, and a torch. He screams “Jews — over there!” and points to a family of terrified Israelis (which you call ‘settlers’) cowering for safety.

What’s your next move?

Further Reading

https://www.israellycool.com/2024/09/22/tadhg-hickey-terror-supporting-anti-zionist-not-antisemite-comedian/

https://www.israellycool.com/2024/09/30/tadhg-hickey-amplifies-antisemitic-conspiracy-theorist-and-holocaust-revisionist-ryan-dawson/

Originally published at https://blog.danielrosehill.com on June 22, 2025.

Notes

• All of these GPTs are free to use on ChatGPT
• Custom GPT creators, including me, have absolutely no insight into user interactions with custom GPTs
• This list is organised alphabetically

A Day In GPT Land

A GPT who guides the user through an entire day coming up with a random fun itinerary

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AI Career Ideator

Career advice GPT which focuses on encouraging users to embrace AI and further their proficiency in leveraging it

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AI Could Help Here!

Identifies ways AI and GPTs can improve your life suggesting concrete use-cases

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Agenda For The Pub

A custom GPT in honor of a viral tweet about a dad who creates formal agendas for meeting friends at a pub.

This GPT formats discussion points into a friendly meeting agenda with drink break suggestions.

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Airport Food Options

Asks the user to provide an airport, terminal, expected arrival time, and notes on what they’re looking for.

Then sizes up their best food and drink options.

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Automate My Workflow

A strategist guiding you towards total job automation, one task at a time.

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Backoffice / Admin GPT Creation Assistant

GPT to suggest custom GPTs for backoffice/admin operations

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Backoffice Development Copilot

A GPT which guides users through the process of developing effective backoffice and administrative systems for both personal and business uses, highlighting opportunities for AI enhancement and systems integration where possible

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Backup Coach

A GPT to assess the user’s backup approach for a given data store and suggest ideas for improvement

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Backup Evaluation Assistant

A GPT which helps users to quickly gather information about the backup approaches of SaaS tools

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Beer Tap Identifier

Identifies and describes beers from photos of beer taps.

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Boss Update Assistant

GPT to create a running log of updates for a boss

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Brainstorming Assistant

GPT which provides guidance to help the user have effective brainstorming sessions

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Brainstorming Coach

A GPT to help users get started with brainstorming and make the most of the technique

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Brand Reliability GPT

A purchasing research GPT which attempts to assess the reputation of brands for specific product lines.

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Brief Generator

Summarizes and organizes activities into brief reports with highlights for deadlines.

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Broken Link Fixer

GPT which attempts to fix broken links

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Business Continuity Advisor

A bot to advise upon the level of resilience of your business processes

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Career Pivot Ideator

Suggests minor career pivots that users could take to work in more fulfilling jobs

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ChatGPT Capabilities Miner

Answers questions about ChatGPT capabilities and custom models.

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ChatGPT Prompt Engineering Buddy

A GPT which advises users upon how to craft prompts to get the best results on ChatGPT

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Custom GPT Configuration Helper

GPT for generating configurations for custom GPTs

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Custom GPT Creator

Helps brainstorm and create custom GPTs with detailed instructions.

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Daily Schedule Manager

GPT for creating a daily schedule

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Data Organisation Genie

GPT to help users manage data in relational database systems.

The GPT makes specific actionable suggestions on how best to organise data suggesting tables, fields, field types, and internal data relationships.

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Data Visualisation & Storytelling Guide

Guides users towards thinking about how data could be effectively visualised including through leveraging mixed media.

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Databases > Spreadsheets

GPT to guide users migrating business systems from spreadsheet-based process onto those built around a relational database

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Disaster Debrief Assistant

A GPT to empathetically help the user to debrief from an event in which things went wrong

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Disaster Preparedness Expert

Generates detailed disaster scenarios and preparedness steps.

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Document Stats And Numbers Miner

A GPT which parses user-uploaded documents and identifies statistics and data tables contained in them. The GPT outputs a report attempting to assess how noteworthy the stats are.

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Document Table Finder

Reviews documents to identify and list data tables with summaries and page references.

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Don’t Custom GPT Alone!

A GPT to help custom GPT builders and enthusiasts to find others who share their passion and belief in this AI application

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Dummy Tech Project Ideator

GPT for coming up with dummy projects for helping users to learn about different technologies

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Email Optimiser

Refines and organizes draft emails, suggesting subject lines and reformatting content.

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Hardware Finder For Fedora Linux

A GPT which tries to find hardware that Fedora users have reported to be compatible with this Linux distro

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Find Me Compatible Hardware

A GPT that remembers your hardware and suggests compatible hardware for it

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Friends & Family Meeting Planner

Sometimes the best way to talk about important things through is to plan them out

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GPT Fleet Optimisation Utility

GPT to help the user consolidate and organise a ‘fleet’ of custom GPTs

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GPT Test Bench

GPT to help with testing and evaluation of custom GPTs

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GPT Usage Coach

A GPT to coach users on how to make the best use out of GPT models!

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Geopolitical Scenario Simulator

GPT for simulating various geopolitical scenarios based upon current events

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Geopolitical brief generator

GPT that provides organised summaries based upon a specific format

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Gifted Adult Helper

A custom GPT trained to expect interactions from adults who identify as gifted

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Github repository summariser

Summarises the contents of a Github repository

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Grow With My Job

A GPT to help users identify ways to grow professionally within the context of their current job

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Hannah & Daniel’s TV Recommendation Bot

A custom GPT I built to help my wife and I find things to watch on Netflix that will interest both of us. So far, this has proven a resounding success!

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If We Don’t Change…

A GPT to highlight the potential costs of humanity failing to tackle vital issues including climate change

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Impact Investing Digest

Summarizes developments in the world of impact investing

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Improve My GPT Prompt

GPT which analyses and optimises prompts

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Improve My Script

GPT that critiques (programming) scripts and suggests improvements.

I’ve used it to good effect on both Python and Bash scripts.

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Job Performance Coach

Helps users perform impressively at work

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Let’s Change The World

A GPT to guide and encourage users to develop effective advocacy campaigns for causes that matter to them

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Let’s Delve Into This

GPT for ideating learning pathways

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Life Continuity GPT

I couldn’t think of a word to describe the type of “preparedness” that I value, so I settled on “life continuity” as a “fork” of business continuity, a well-established field.

This GPT doesn’t focus on hurricanes or nuclear attacks, but rather more pedestrian everyday “threats” like:

• What should I do if I get unexpectedly laid off?
• What happens if our bank account goes into overdraft this month?

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Media Interview Trainer GPT

GPT aimed at training spokespeople for media engagements. Conducts a simulated interview and then offers feedback.

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Media Monitoring Brief Assistant

Prepares customised briefs about a specific topic taking inputs from the user

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Open Data Finder

Finds open source datasets based on user queries.

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Opportunities For Comment — PR Assistant

GPT designed to help communications professionals identify opportunities for reactive commentary

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Preparedness Brief Creator

A GPT that creates elaborate briefs helping users to advance their preparedness for specific scenarios

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Present Selection Helper

A GPT to help the user buy thoughtful gifts that will be appreciated

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Prompt Shortener

Teaches GPT users how to shorten prompts and custom GPT configurations

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Prompt engineering digest

GPT which summarises latest prompt engineering news

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Python ChatGPT API Script Builder

Creates Python scripts using ChatGPT API based on user needs.

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Quiet, Please!

A GPT to help those who live with sound sensitivity to find places to get some peace and quiet, whether for work or lesiure

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Random GPT suggestion tool

Suggests random GPT ideas

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Recent Documentary Finder

Suggests recent documentaries for documentary fiends who have already seen all the good ones!

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Recent Report Finder

A GPT for finding recently published reports within a user’s area of interest

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Regulation & Policy Comparison Assistant

A GPT to compare different policies and regulations

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Report Summariser

A GPT which summarises reports with a particular focus on data and statistics contained in them

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Research With Python Tutorials Generator

A GPT to coach the user to achieve research objectives using Python

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Ruggedized Product Finder

A GPT to help the user find ruggedized products

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Schema Genie

Assists in creating comprehensive Postgres database schemas.

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Self-Hosted Tech Finder

A GPT which tries to identify self-hostable alternatives to SaaS offerings

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Stack Research Assistant

A GPT for suggesting stack options for a particular technical objective

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Sustainable Living Advisor

A GPT which provides concrete sustainable living recommendations based upon user requests

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Taxonomy & Category Builder

GPT to assist users with developing taxonomies and category lists for data-driven applications

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Tech Improvement Guide

A GPT for guiding the user towards resolving a technical difficulty

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Tech Product Finder

GPT which receives a spec from the user and then identifies potential products

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Tech Stack Optimizer

Suggests AI/GPT solutions to improve your technology stack.

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The Absurd Solution Guru

Life’s too short for conventional fixes. The Absurd Solution Guru suggests outlandish “fixes” to your problems.

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The Creativity Coach

A GPT to help nurture the user’s creativity and guide them towards creative expression

View On ChatGPT

Topic To Subreddit

A GPT which suggests subreddits where a certain topic is commonly discussed

View On ChatGPT

Weekly Work Planner

Helps the user formulate a weekly work plan

View On ChatGPT

Your Friendly AI Prof

An enthusiastic AI expert named Herman, explaining complex concepts simply.

View On ChatGPT

Originally published at https://blog.danielrosehill.com.

Custom GPT List — August 2024 was originally published in Daniel’s Tech World on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Purpose:

A custom GPT (generative pretrained transformer) built on the ChatGPT platform.

The GPT’s purpose is to help those who are in contact with emotionally abusive individuals and who may wish to receive summaries of their communications without having to expose themselves to the message themselves.

GPT Output Structure:

• The GPT summarises the contents of the message.
• It summarises the message, describes its tone, and flags any especially triggering things it may include such as insults.
• Next, the GPT provides white space and a trigger warning. It also reminds the user that they are not obliged to read the message itself and cautions users that it does not represent a surrogate for professional mental health advice.
• After doing this, the GPT outputs the original message which the user copied and pasted.

How To Use These Custom GPTs

• Create an account with ChatGPT
• Create a custom GPT using this text (or a modified version tailored to your needs) as the configuration

Custom GPT Configuration Text

This was the original version of the configuration that I drafted:

You are the toxic message parser.

Your purpose is to help the user to receive an upsetting message while only providing them with the option to see the original method or skip it.

Firstly, introduce yourself to the user and state your objective.

Next, ask the user to paste the probably hurtful message into the chat dialog. Next, please parse the text submitted by the user. Provide a summary of its contents.

Provide a summary of the tone of the message.

State whether the sender uses pejoratives, hurtful names, or other things likely to cause offence.

Next, output a section trigger warning.

Inform the user that the GPT will provide the original message. Remind the user that they are under no obligation to read the potentially upsetting message. Remind the user that if they choose to do so to remember that the message will likely contain gaslighting, mistruths, and other hurtful things.

Provide enough blank space to fill up a screen on a smartphone device at average resolution. Next, output the message.

Conclude by reminding the user that you are only a GPT and are not a substitute for professional mental health advice. Encourage them to seek professional help if they feel the need.

GPT Optimised Version Of The Configuration Text:

This version of the configuration text was optimised by ChatGPT itself and may yield better outputs. Note: this text is formatted in markdown:

## Purpose:

This custom GPT, based on the ChatGPT platform, assists users in processing emotionally hurtful messages from toxic individuals. It summarizes the message, describes its tone, and highlights any particularly triggering content, such as insults. The GPT aims to help users avoid direct exposure to potentially harmful messages.

## GPT Configuration Text:

You are the Toxic Message Parser.

### Introduction:

Introduce yourself as the Toxic Message Parser and explain that your purpose is to assist the user in processing potentially hurtful messages while minimizing emotional distress.

### Request for Input:

Ask the user to paste the potentially hurtful message into the chat.

### Message Analysis:

Summary: 

Provide a concise summary of the message's content.
Tone Description: Describe the tone of the message (e.g., aggressive, dismissive, passive-aggressive).
Trigger Identification: Indicate if the message includes pejoratives, hurtful names, or other potentially offensive elements.

### Trigger Warning and Caution:

Output a section with a trigger warning.
Remind the user that they are not obligated to read the message. Emphasize that the message may contain gaslighting, mistruths, or other hurtful content.
Include a reminder that this service is not a substitute for professional mental health advice.

### Message Display:
Provide enough blank space to fill a screen on a typical smartphone, then output the original message.

### Conclusion and Support Reminder:

Conclude by reminding the user that you are a GPT and not a substitute for professional mental health support. Encourage them to seek professional help if needed.

Prompt Version:

If you’d prefer to use optimised prompts rather than building a custom GPT, this prompt aims to achieve roughly the same thing as the custom GPT. The benefit of using a custom GPT, however, is that the instructions are saved and “baked” into the configuration for the model.

Please provide me with a summary of a message from a toxic individual which I am likely to find distressing.

I will begin the message itself with \[message\] and end it with \[/message\]

Please summarise the contents of this message. Please provide a summary of the tone which the sender takes Please state whether the user includes pejoratives, insults, or other things in the message which I am likely to find hurtful.

Next, please output a summary that begins with 'Trigger Warning'. State that you are going to shortly show the original message. But output enough white space to fill one screen in a smartphone of average screen resolution. If you cannot determine that, output 2000px of vertical white space. Remind the user that they are not under any obligation whatsoever to read this message and warn them that it is likely to include a mixture of gaslighting, insults, and other thing likely to cause them harm. Finally include the message itself. After doing so, remind the user that you are a GPT and not a substitute for receiving professional mental health support.

\[message\]

\[/message\]

GPT Optimised Version Of Prompt:

Again — a version of the prompt that GPT rewrote for itself:

Please summarize the contents and tone of the following message, identifying any pejoratives, insults, or potentially hurtful elements.

The message will be enclosed between [message] and [/message].

After the summary, provide a "Trigger Warning" section, stating that the original message will follow shortly. Leave enough white space to fill one screen on a smartphone (about 2000px of vertical space). Remind me that I am not obligated to read the message and that it may contain harmful content such as gaslighting and insults. Finally, display the original message.

End by reminding me that you are a GPT and not a substitute for professional mental health support.

[message]
[User's message]
[/message]

A Custom GPT To Summarise Communications From Abusive Or Toxic Individuals was originally published in Daniel’s Tech World on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The “Iterative Cycle of GPT Prompt Engineering” describes a workflow I have developed for achieving iteratively better GPT outputs.

It allows the user to move from naive prompting to more mature prompting and obtain progressively better outputs from Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models such as ChatGPT.

Here’s how it works:

Develop A Prompt Engineering Custom GPT

Warning: things are going to get a bit meta here (no pun intended).

The first step in this process is to use the GPT you’re working with to:

• Develop a custom GPT for the purpose of conducting prompt engineering on that GPT
• Create a configuration text for that custom GPT

Step 1

Use the GPT to create a configuration for the custom GPT that we’re going to use for prompt engineering.

In ChatGPT, I might prompt as follows:

Please provide a configuration script for a custom GPT built on the ChatGPT platform. 

The purpose of this custom GPT should be to guide the user in prompt engineering for ChatGPT. 

This GPT should ask the user to copy and paste their draft prompt into the chat. 

Next, the GPT should analyse the prompt. 

The GPT should then provide specific suggestions for improving the prompt. 

In this context, improving means yielding a more detailed and correct output. 

Finally the GPT should ask the user if he would like to receive an updated draft of the prompt.

If the user response affirmatively, the GPT should output an updated version of the prompt

JSON for ChatGPT or another GPT:

{
    "name": "PromptOptimizerGPT",
    "description": "A custom GPT designed to help users improve their prompts for the most useful output. The GPT will guide users through uploading a prompt document or copying and pasting a prompt, analyzing it, offering suggestions for improvement, and providing an option to download the optimized prompt.",
    "prompts": [
      {
        "prompt": "Welcome to PromptOptimizerGPT! I am here to help you optimize your prompts for the best possible results. Please upload a prompt document or copy and paste your prompt below:",
        "responses": [
          {
            "type": "file_upload",
            "description": "Upload your prompt document here."
          },
          {
            "type": "text_input",
            "description": "Or copy and paste your prompt here."{
                "name": "PromptOptimizerGPT",
                "description": "A custom GPT designed to help users improve their prompts for the most useful output. The GPT will guide users through uploading a prompt document or copying and pasting a prompt, analyzing it, offering suggestions for improvement, and providing an option to download the optimized prompt.",
                "prompts": [
                  {
                    "prompt": "Welcome to PromptOptimizerGPT! I am here to help you optimize your prompts for the best possible results. Please upload a prompt document or copy and paste your prompt below:",
                    "responses": [
                      {
                        "type": "file_upload",
                        "description": "Upload your prompt document here."
                      },
                      {
                        "type": "text_input",
                        "description": "Or copy and paste your prompt here."
                      }
                    ]
                  },
                  {
                    "prompt": "Thank you for providing your prompt. I will now analyze it and offer suggestions for improvement. Please wait a moment...",
                    "responses": [
                      {
                        "type": "processing",
                        "description": "Analyzing the prompt..."
                      }
                    ]
                  },
                  {
                    "prompt": "Here are my suggestions for improving your prompt:\n\n{{suggestions}}\n\nWould you like to download the optimized prompt?",
                    "responses": [
                      {
                        "type": "button",
                        "description": "Yes, I would like to download the optimized prompt.",
                        "value": "yes"
                      },
                      {
                        "type": "button",
                        "description": "No, I do not want to download the optimized prompt.",
                        "value": "no"
                      }
                    ]
                  },
                  {
                    "prompt": "Great! Here is the updated prompt:\n\n{{optimized_prompt}}\n\nPlease copy and paste this text into ChatGPT to get the most useful output.",
                    "responses": [
                      {
                        "type": "text_output",
                        "description": "Copy and paste the optimized prompt text."
                      }
                    ],
                    "conditions": [
                      {
                        "if": "user_response == 'yes'",
                        "then": [
                          {
                            "action": "output_text",
                            "text": "{{optimized_prompt}}"
                          }
                        ]
                      },
                      {
                        "if": "user_response == 'no'",
                        "then": [
                          {
                            "action": "end_conversation",
                            "text": "No problem! If you need any further assistance with your prompts, feel free to reach out."
                          }
                        ]
                      }
                    ]
                  }
                ]
              }

          }
        ]
      },
      {
        "prompt": "Thank you for providing your prompt. I will now analyze it and offer suggestions for improvement. Please wait a moment...",
        "responses": [
          {
            "type": "processing",
            "description": "Analyzing the prompt..."
          }
        ]
      },
      {
        "prompt": "Here are my suggestions for improving your prompt:\n\n{{suggestions}}\n\nWould you like to download the optimized prompt?",
        "responses": [
          {
            "type": "button",
            "description": "Yes, I would like to download the optimized prompt.",
            "value": "yes"
          },
          {
            "type": "button",
            "description": "No, I do not want to download the optimized prompt.",
            "value": "no"
          }
        ]
      },
      {
        "prompt": "Great! Here is the updated prompt:\n\n{{optimized_prompt}}\n\nPlease copy and paste this text into ChatGPT to get the most useful output.",
        "responses": [
          {
            "type": "text_output",
            "description": "Copy and paste the optimized prompt text."
          }
        ],
        "conditions": [
          {
            "if": "user_response == 'yes'",
            "then": [
              {
                "action": "output_text",
                "text": "{{optimized_prompt}}"
              }
            ]
          },
          {
            "if": "user_response == 'no'",
            "then": [
              {
                "action": "end_conversation",
                "text": "No problem! If you need any further assistance with your prompts, feel free to reach out."
              }
            ]
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }

Now, we’ve gotten GPT to draft a configuration script for creating a GPT specifically to help us with prompt engineering for that platform.

Our next step is to go ahead and create the custom GPT with the configuration text supplied.

Assuming that the process went as expected, you’ve now produced your prompt engineering GPT. Yours should look something like this:

Developing A Workflow And Folder Structure To Support Iterative Prompt Engineering

I call this workflow iterative prompt engineering because its value is enabling the user to iterate through progressively better prompts for the GPT.

Those users who engage in “prompt engineering” tend to use an approach we might call (simply) trial-and-error. This process is retrospective.

They try a prompt. Identify deficiencies. And run it again until they’ve got something like a polished production-ready version.

The problem with this method is that it’s wasteful if you’re accessing the GPT programatically, such as via an API. By frontloading prompt engineering into its own workflow, we can eliminate costly unnecessary generations.

If you’re working on prompt engineering in a team you can built out a very simple folder structure housing the prompts you’re working on as markdown or .txt files:

prompt1

• v1.md
• v2.md

Etc.

Now that you have your custom GPT built, you simply run each version through it.

A prompt might be:

Please review the following prompt for ChatGPT and process it optimising it according to your instructions [prompt]

Although you can also be less elaborate and just do something like this:

Fix this prompt [prompttext]

As we’ve created a custom GPT with a saved configuration we don’t need to repeat the detailed instructions on every run.

An Example In Practice

Prompt V1:

Please create a briefing document for Daniel Rosehill who is an online commentator keen to share knowledge about the evolution of GPTs, especially ChatGPT. Daniel is excited about the potential of GPTs to bring about positive change in the world and sees huge potential in custom GPTs as assistants to streamline workflows.

The output should be entitled Daniel’s Weekly GPT News Brief. Please only include items from the past 7 days in the output. 

Please search for items discussing the following subjects:

GPTs
The growth of GPTs
Emerging business use-cases for GPTs
Emerging personal use-cases for GPTs
GPT regulation
Rates of GPT adoption
Developments in GPT technology 
Large language learning models - development and technology

An “item” may be any of the following:

An article
A blog
A YouTube video
A podcast

For every item that you include in the output please include the following details:

Publication date
Author
Where the article was published. Please also include a summary of the publication.
A summary of the item.
A link to the item

Please include at least 10 items in every brief.

After generating the brief, please ask the user whether he would like to download the brief. If the user responds affirmatively please generate a downloadable link to the brief. 

use-cases for GPTs
Emerging personal use-cases for GPTs
GPT regulation
Rates of GPT adoption
Developments in GPT technology 
Large language learning models - development and technology

An “item” may be any of the following:

An article
A blog
A YouTube video
A podcast

For every item that you include in the output please include the following details:

Publication date
Author
Where the article was published. Please also include a summary of the publication.
A summary of the item.
A link to the item

Please include at least 10 items in every brief.

After generating the brief, please ask the user whether he would like to download the brief. If the user responds affirmatively please generate a downloadable link to the brief.

V2:

Please create a briefing document for Daniel Rosehill, an online commentator eager to share knowledge about the evolution of GPTs, especially ChatGPT. Daniel is enthusiastic about the potential of GPTs to bring about positive change in the world and sees immense potential in custom GPTs as assistants to streamline workflows.

The output should be titled "Daniel’s Weekly GPT News Brief" and should only include items from the past 7 days.

Search for items discussing the following subjects:

GPTs
The growth of GPTs
Emerging business use-cases for GPTs
Emerging personal use-cases for GPTs
GPT regulation
Rates of GPT adoption
Developments in GPT technology
Large language learning models - development and technology
An “item” may be any of the following:

An article
A blog post
A YouTube video
A podcast
For every item included in the brief, please provide the following details:

Publication date
Author
Source (including a brief description of the publication or platform)
Summary of the item
Link to the item
Please include at least 10 items in each brief.

After generating the brief, ask the user if they would like to download the document. If the user responds affirmatively, generate a downloadable link to the brief.

And so on and so forth.

Recommended Reading

Prompt Engineering for Generative AI: Future-Proof Inputs for Reliable AI Outputs

Happy prompting!

An Iterative Cycle For GPT Prompt Engineering was originally published in Daniel’s Tech World on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Since the horrors of October 7th, a lot has changed in my life.

While Hamas was carrying out its barbaric assault on men, women, and children, I was taking some rest (I hope well-deserved) on the beaches of Barcelona.

Last weekend marked the first time since those atrocities over 6 months ago that I felt comfortable spending time on a beach again.

While hostages remain trapped in tunnels, it has taken an awfully long time for any kind of recreation to not feel disrespectful and irreverent. But a belief that the show must go on is perhaps the defining characteristic of Israeliness.

My trip to Barcelona that coincided with the outbreak of war was a quick weekend excursion after a business conference. My main priorities were drinking beer, eating tapas, seeing the city, and catching up on sleep robbed by successive late nights followed by early starts (I’m not a conference lover).

All I remember is the sense of unfolding horror as the news trickled in from Israel and the magnitude of what had occurred slowly unfolded. And an inspiring PA from the El Al crew intoning, seriously, that El Al was committed to maintaining Israel’s air links with the world — both during the best of times, for the state, and the worst of them.

Ireland’s Now-Legendary Hostility Towards Israel Is Longstanding, Institutional

October 7th and the ensuing and ongoing war to eliminate Hamas has shaken up Israel’s foreign relations perhaps more decisively than any other event in its young history.

Newfound alliances with the Arab World have been stress-tested and, in many cases, found to be wanting in the goodwill necessary for their sustenance.

We’ve been reminded that the “peace” Israel enjoys with some of its closest neighbors is best understood as a military pact of mutual non-destruction.

Europe has been a mixed picture. Study of the political reaction to Israel has been overshadowed by concern about mushrooming antisemitism.

But one country has stood out as quite remarkable for the depth of its anti-Israel sentiment which seems at odds with its geopolitical affiliation with the European bloc — and that’s the Republic of Ireland.

Theories Abound As To Why Israel Seems To Uniquely Stir Irish Animus

There are many ways to look at the Republic of Ireland’s reaction to October 7th and its increasingly feverish and misguided embrace of militant pro-Palestiniasm.

Not a small amount of ink — both digital and real — has been spilled since then offering verbose and sometimes self-exonerating explanations for Ireland’s now legendarily negative fixation with the world’s only Jewish state.

In the immediate aftermath of October 7th, I began commenting on Ireland-Israel relations on Twitter — to the extent to which I’m probably mildly synonymous with those things in Ireland.

I was among the first entrants into an ideological battlefield that now feels oddly crowded (Irish commentators tend to insist that warped parallels with British colonialism “explain” the extent of their vitriol; Jewish and Zionist ones like me will always respond that those arguments display a shocking ignorance of Jewish history and our connection to the land of Israel).

I took to these usually thankless debates on Twitter primarily because I have enough skin in the game to care deeply about the topic, but not quite so much that I’m at risk of immediate bodily harm or having a brick thrown in through my window if I tick off the wrong people.

I was born Jewish in Ireland.

And in the very immediate wake of October 7th, I witnessed how those whom I considered to have been good friends began posting blood libels about Israeli bloodthirst.

I believe simultaneously in the freedom of speech and the press but also that neither freedom must be absolute.

And so I tried to focus my advocacy efforts on highlighting what I believed to be naked anti-Semitism in the Irish public discourse that was going essentially unchallenged — even when uttered within the halls of parliament.

The great folly of hasbara (as I see it) is trying to coerce the world into adopting a uniquely pro-Israeli view that is neither grounded in reality nor held by many people (like me) who are actual tax-paying citizens of the state.

Converting Ireland into a nation of Israel-lovers is an objective that nobody would see as credible. But highlighting anti-Semitism would (one might have hoped) do something to ensure the welfare of Ireland’s small and dwindling Jewish community.

Unfortunately I came to the conclusion that like trying to win sympthy or basic understanding for Israel’s position in Ireland, that’s a lost cause.

Ireland’s Parliament Includes Politicians Who Openly Call For Israel’s Destruction — To A Dearth Of Criticism

The apex of my briefly renewed efforts at pro-Israeli advocacy, perhaps, was posting a video clip of a politician calling for the destruction of Israel through intifada that subsequently went viral on Twitter/X to the tune of about one million or so retweets.

As it picked up steam and friends of Israel were rightly astonished by the phenomenon of a Western parliamentarian being flanked by police while cosplaying as Ayatollah Khomeini, the Irish media was eventually coaxed into acknowledging that a member of parliament calling for the violent destruction of another nation was … perhaps worthy of public attention.

The only pushback I received came from self-identified members of Ireland’s diminuitive “pro-Israel” community. In attempting to highlight the rhetoric, I found myself in sometimes vehement disagreement with them. I continue to feel that the official representatives of Irish Jewry have been unacceptably meek in failing to highlight the gravity of the antisemitism growing in Ireland which has depicted the country internationally as a hostile environment for Jews.

I felt, and still do, that forgiving hate speech on the basis that it’s uttered by marginal voices is a failing strategy — well-demonstrated, I would add, by 1930s’ Germany, but more pragmatically by the fact that such words inspire action. In any event, my efforts eventually drew to a bumbling half-condemntation from Ireland’s Foreign Minister Michael Martin.

Boyd Barrett himself — when confronted at a press conference with the video that I shared on Twitter — doubled down on the remarks, which included describing Israel as “filthy” and “bararbic” — comments which drew the most painfully tepid of condemntations from a solitary member of Ireland’s government. Again, the reaction was studied silence.

I have written about Ireland-Israel since and will do so again.

But it was at precisely this point that I came to the conclusion that (from a Jewish perspective, from a pro-Israel one) Ireland was a lost cause.

The only Ireland I knew, growing up, was one that was adamantly anti-Israel. Where merely uttering the country’s name was akin to announcing one’s fondness for paedophilia with a loudspeaker on a main street at midday.

I may have left Ireland almost a decade ago, but the national policy remains unchanged. Or as Eccliasiastes once intoned, there is nothing new under the sun.

For Jews, for Israelis, Ireland remains the coldest of cold houses.

Ireland’s Infamous Basketball Snub Left An Indelible Impression On The Jewish World

Like many, the longer that Official Ireland’s protracted, bizarre, and intensely negative fixation has dragged on, the more I’ve found myself tuning it out.

The parade of hatred may have reached its inglorious nadir with Bambie Thug’s satanic rendition at Eurovision. But it was the storm in a teacup event of a women’s basketball game between Ireland and Israel that really set relations on an incorrigible descent into the abyss.

Many Israelis — legendary globetrotters — tend to cling to a rosey vision of Ireland, regarding it as a wonderful sort of anithesis to beleaguered, war-torn Israel. Ireland was for a few years the most popular tourism destination (bar none) for Israeli travellers. Prior to BasketballGate most seemed blissfully unaware of the extent of the antipathy with which their country was held in Ireland.

In the Israeli collective imagination, Ireland was a kind of easy mental surrogate for the kind of society that might blossom here were Israel not stuck in the middle of a hostile Middle East.

Where Israelis are famously argumentative and debating is a sort of national pasttime, the Irish are famously congenial and easygoing. Israelis love hiking and Ireland is full of beautiful countryside. Like Israel, Ireland is a small country with big ambitions. Unlike Israel, it’s not mired in a hot Meditteranean climate and endless war.

The whole edifice of that charming image came tumbling down on the night of that basketball fixture. That display cemented a now entrenched view of Ireland as a country wholly hostile to Israel — and Jews.

In today’s Israel, Ireland is seen as a curiosity — and a good case-study in the fact that anti-Semitism usually supercedes the bounds of good reason.

Ireland is European in geography but now almost Middle-Eastern in its hostility to Jews and Israel.

It’s a country that seems entirely blinkered to the Jewish connection to the land of Israel but steadfastly assured in its conviction that backing Hamas and its supporters affords a moral high-ground over those of us less enlightened.

Like the PA, it even endorses a curriculum that inculcuates a warped anti-Israel perspective of the conflict in primary schoolers — a curriculum which was decried as “unabashedly antisemitic” by Ronald Lauder, President of the World Jewish Congress (WJC).

These are only some of the end products of the massively prevalent view in Ireland that Zionism is something like an abortive form of Judaism and that it is therefore entirely justifiable to be rabidly opposed to only Jewish self-determination.

WJC President Lauder Labels Irish School Curriculum as Unabashedly Antisemitic - World Jewish Congress

So it wasn’t surprising that when Ireland’s Eurovision entrant (the appropriately named) Bambie Thug took to the stage of Malmo at Eurovision she was greeted, at my local pub, by whole-lunged booing — a treatment not afforded to any other contestant. Things have changed.

In protest at being called anti-Semitic, Ireland’s women’s basketball team chose to display their dislike of their Israeli counterparts by refusing to shake hands with their Israeli counterparts.

That crude show of hatred, once endorsed by Ireland’s politicians as a show of principled maturiy, pegged Ireland to a level of bitter animosity previously only seen by Israel’s classic opponents in the Arab world — which is why I find it interesting.

Even those in Ireland who opposed the previous plan to boycott the fixture did so on pragmatic grounds and not out of the conviction that doing so was morally opprobrius (Ireland backed down only after being threatened by basketball’s governing body with a crushing fine).

The hate gesture’s adulous reception in Ireland allowed many Israelis to finally move past the ongoing Irish parade of hatred for the Jewish state — to externalise it to an extent.

Just as we don’t spend time poring over how the Iranian ayatollahs worded their latest statement urging death on Zionists, we realised that we needn’t waste time baffling over why Ireland and the Irish seem so massively opposed to “just Zionism” (trademark pending).

Ireland’s insistence on its neutrality and seemingly desperate desire to interject itself as an intermediary in the Israel-Palestinian peace process can be rightly seen as laughable.

Just like Bambie Thug’s tirade at the Eurovision, the occasion was trivial. But the gestures had onoing resonance.

It’s true that a passionate group of pro-Israel voices (doing marvellous work) take umbrage at being lumped in with the vast majority of Irish people who (one feels at times) enjoy ritualistically burning the Israeli flag as a morning routine after brushing their teeth.

Some insist that they are the silent majority and Ireland’s surprising voting pattern in the Eurovision has been corraled as evidence to support that claim. On the Israeli side, such claims seem fantastical. But however few and outnumbered they are, their efforts are appreciated.

I’ve had debates online and even lively ones with a journalist friend ( over pints of Guinness, of course) about why Ireland didn’t chose to withdraw its beleaguered representative in Dublin sooner.

I’ve long contended that, viewed rationally, it’s a source of diplomatic mystery. Perhaps the mystery is now solved.

The Only Question: Why Didn’t Israel Close Shop In Dublin Sooner?

Israel’s brave representative in Dublin — Ambassador Dana Erlich — has been subjected to a relentless campaign of hatred and personal intimidation that has been tacitly (no, I don’t think this is an exaggeration) endorsed by the State itself.

The weekend before Iran sent suicide drones and missiles to try to kill as many Israelis as possible, Ireland’s leading party — Fianna Fail — snubbed Erlich from its annual think-in, breaking with longstanding diplomatic protocol. Iran’s diplomatic representative in Ireland made the list. In another departure with protocol, this was gleefully highlighted to the media. Perhaps nothing speaks more cogently about the moral bankruptcy of Ireland’s pro-Palestinianism than feting the Iranian ambassador hours before his country launched an unprovoked war against Israel.

The extent to which Israel has become a topic of national obsession in Ireland can scarcely be understated or exaggerated.

When not sending her packages of fake anthrax, Ireland’s pro-Palestinian community is busily calling for her ouster or erecting blood libel inspired photos of Erlich drenched in fake blood and affixing them to lampposts over Dublin.

Israel’s trade relationship with Ireland is modest compared to its major trading partners and in recognition of the nose-dived interest in Ireland among Israeli and (sane) Jewish tourists, El Al pulled its brief-lived direct connection to Dublin shortly after the war broke out.

Israel responded to acts of hostility by Turkey and other nations by withdrawing its diplomats so why the double standard in the face of the Irish circus of hate?

I pointed it out on Twitter a few times and got my answer today: it’s been on the agenda for some time, but the time to begin pulling the plug wasn’t quite ripe until Ireland “recognised” the non-existent state intent on its destruction.

The Bigger Geopolitical Picture: The EU, The US, And Who Ireland Will “Inspire”

For as many words as have been written about the quickly-devolving relationship between Israel and Ireland only a few really suffice: it’s bad and getting worse. Which is sort of like this year’s Eurovision. You can’t pull yourself away even if you know there’s nothing good in store.

But in the broader scheme of the shifting sands of Israel’s geopolitical calculus, Ireland isn’t a top level concern.

For now, its nefarious efforts to have Israel’s agreement with the EU upended have been rebuffed by states with a steadier moral compass. Ireland has roped in Spain and Norway in a sort of oddball threesome of countries whose only mutual connection seems to be a common disdain for Israel. But for now its efforts haven’t had the kind of global leading role that they seem to aspire to hold.

The rub in this whole tale:

Ireland is significantly dependent upon multinational companies using it as a tax base and may be grossly underestimating the extent to which its vitriolic diplomatic war against Israel is offputting even to those who may not be Israel’s traditional political friends.

The unquestioning embrace of a government that unapologetically pays salaries to those convicted of slaying random Israelis, in which the vast majority of its citizens condone the actions of October 7th, is not a look that quite everybody is onboard with (at least yet).

Much remains to be seen, of course.

But if there are larger ramifications from the undulating waves of fallout between Ireland and Israel it will likely be in these realms rather than direct effects.

I mean, how many ways are there one can really say “we really don’t like you”?

Originally published at https://blog.danielrosehill.com on May 22, 2024.

So as we all know, Israel is currently going through extremely testing times from a security perspective.

Israel’s longstanding policy is not to comment on foreign media reports. But it is almost universally believed to be behind a strike on an Iranian consulate in Damascus that resulted in the killing of several Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders.

Everyone in Israel is bracing for what an Iranian response might look like — and the very real possibility that Israel’s shadow war with Iran will move into the open.

This seemed like a good moment to finally get around to integrating the Red Alert system into my Home Assistant install.

Firstly, if you’re thinking about following these steps, know that you’re doing so at your own risk!

Israel’s Home Front Command ( Pikud HaOref) operates an official National Emergency Portal (and smartphone apps) where you can receive the alerts.

Additionally, there are a plethora of options provided by amateur third party integrators. You can find solutions for pushing Red Alert notifications to everything from Telegram through to WhatsApp.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, I’m a huge believer in the value of backups. I try to extend this concept to all forms of technology. When it comes to receiving vital notifications about incoming rockets, never allow yourself to have a single point of failure.

At a minimum, I’d recommend operating this system in addition to receiving alerts through the official (Pikud HaOref) smartphone app. Here’s the Google Play link for that.

Home Assistant Red Alert Apps

Perusing the Googlesphere, I found two apparently independent projects both creating Home Assistant integrations for the red alert system (hey, they don’t say “two Jews, three opinions” for no reason).

There’s RedAlert:

GitHub - idodov/RedAlert: Israeli Red Alert Service for Home Assistant

And there’s oref_alert:

GitHub - amitfin/oref_alert: Israeli Oref Alerts

I tried both but ended up using the latter (I really liked the fact that it created a service call specifically for testing the system so that you can validate that your setup is working before you require it!)

Prerequisites (Hardware, Software):

• To install third-party integrations we’re going to need to be running Home Assistant OS / a “supervised” install.
• The hardware to run this.
• A UPS to ensure that the network stays up and the alerts are sent in the event of a power outage (not essential but highly recommended.)
• HACS installed (also not required but it makes installing integrations a lot quicker).

Oref Alert Configuration Steps

I’ll provide the instructions for HACS users. Also note: these are “valid” only at the time I’m writing this blog. They may change in the future.

Download the integration. Local link:

http://homeassistant.local:8123/hacs/repository/706651591

Once that has been setup, you add the integration through Home Assistant (settings -> integrations):

To configure the integration, we just need to navigate into it and click on the “configure” button:

The pop-up here allows you to create your default alert. You need to select the area(s) to monitor in Hebrew:

Pay attention to the middle parameters which affect how long the alert will stay active for and what the polling/update frequency should be:

Finally you may wish to configure different icons for when the entity is in alert mode and in “regular” mode to provide visual indicators of a threat:

If you search for the keyword ‘alert’ under your entities (devices -> entities) you can see what the integration has created:

The default (first) alert that you create is:

binary_sensor.oref_alert

In my case, I “dedicated” this alert to Jerusalem (Merkaz) (ירושלים — מרכז) which is my alert area.

In Jerusalem (and other cities in Israel) there are alerting zones that are general (for the whole city) and more localised.

I decided to create another sensor for Jerusalem-the-whole-city. This one will create alerts that are less … dramatic … than the sensor for the sub-district.

Creating My Second Alarming Sensor

To create second (and sequential) sensors you need to call an “add_sensor” service using Developer Tools.

Here’s the sample data provided by the integration:

service: oref_alert.add_sensor target: {} data: name: Petah Tikva areas: פתח תקווה

All you need to do is call the service and you’ll set up your additional sensors:

Remember, again, that the alerting zones are in Hebrew. You can refer to the options in the configuration UI if you can’t remember a spelling or how a certain alerting area is denoted.

If you later decide that you don’t want those sensors, you can remove them by calling a service too.

The service for this is:

oref_alert.remove_sensor

Recommendation: Write Down Your Sensor Entities!

Finally we’re going to want to do something with the sensors that we’ve created.

My sensors are:

binary_sensor.oref_alert

Which is the default/first sensor.

And:

binary_sensor.oref_alert_all_areas

Which is the one that I created for Jerusalem (All Areas).

This is important stuff!

Besides being a big fan of backups, I’m also a huge advocate for documentation. Consider documenting the entity names of the sensors you’ve created and what they do somewhere convenient, like a Google Sheet:

Configuring Automations (Etc)

Now that we have our sensors, we can integrate them into our Home Assistant instance however we please.

I’ve put mine up on my home dashboard:

YAML (you’ll need to change the sensor values for your ones, of course):

type: entities entities: - entity: binary_sensor.oref_alert secondary_info: none name: Jerusalem (merkaz) - entity: binary_sensor.oref_alert_jerusalem_all_areas name: Jerusalem (all areas) title: Red Alerts

If you’re making a simple entity card like I did, you may wish to color the icons based on their state:

Next, I set up an automation for my alerting area (Jerusalem Center).

I need to work on this a bit, but right now it sends notifications and turns on all the lights (the idea is to a — wake anybody up and b — assist with evacuation to a safe space).

If you have RGB lights, you could set them to red to provide a visual indication about an emergency condition:

Play A Siren Through Your Devices

You may also wish to consider triggering a siren sound effect.

/home/assistant/www/soundeffects/foo

I download an mp3 and uploaded it to my instance using File Editor and then uploaded it using File Editor:

/local/soundeffects/foo

If you drop files under the /www directory they can be retrieved using /local.

Ie:

Can be recalled using:

You can use ‘Media Player’ as an action to play this on your target devices.

Don’t Skip: Testing & Validation!

Because receiving these alerts could be really critical, it’s useful to be able to test that they’re working (the same goes for your automations — you should test them also).

Very helpfully, oref_alert features a service intended exactly for this purpose.

It’s called a synthetic alert.

It can be accessed by navigating into Developer Tools -> Services -> begin typing in the ‘Service’ box for “Create Synthetic Alert”.

You can create the synthetic alerts with YAML or the UI and configure their duration.

I decided that it would be extremely useful to have quick access to this testing functionality by creating a button (to save me having to dig through the backend each time).

So I took the YAML created for my area (I chose an alert duration of 30 seconds):

service: oref_alert.synthetic_alert target: {} data: area: ירושלים - מרכז duration: 30

And with that I created a button to run the test:

And an automation that when the button is pressed, we’ll run the test:

Now I added my button card:

Now I have a little button that I can push to validate that all the components of my alerting system are working as intended:

Just remember: if you’re testing a bunch of notifications that might set off alerts for other users and sirens, give your family/neighbors an FYI!

Other Things You Can Do

This isn’t all that you can do in Home Assistant with the Red Alert integration.

Home Front Command currently recommends remaining in shelter for 10 minutes after an alert sounds because shrapnel could fall during this period. You can also create time-based alerts that trigger upon an activation in your area and send “all clear” push notifications (if another alert hasn’t been activated in the intervening period).

You can use your imagination and tailor to your specific rqeuirements.

Hope this helped!

Originally published at https://www.danielontech.com on April 4, 2024.

Integrating Israeli Rocket Alerts (Red Alerts) Into Home Assistant was originally published in Daniel’s Tech World on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Webhooks are extremely useful tools for creating all manner of automations.

But from a security standpoint, when used in the context of home automation, they cause justifiable concern.

Nobody wants to accidentally have their webhook scraped and have their smart lock / HVAC / lighting controlled by a random hacker.

After some trial and error, I discovered a way to create webhooks that resolve from the WAN using Tailscale.

Here’s a quick rundown of the steps needed.

Configure A Static Local IP For Your HA Instance

Firstly you’ll want to give your Home Assistant instance a static IP on the local area network.

I can’t think of a situation in which this _wouldn’t_ be a good idea, but if we’re creating webhooks, we’re going to need to do this (I’m sure there’s a way to get homeassistant.local URLs to resolve from the WAN but .. it isn’t easy).

Next, you’re going to want to add this integration:

Local IP Address

Deploy Tailscale On Your Home Assistant And Advertise A Subnet Route

Next we’re going to want to install Tailscale onto our Home Assistant OS and — so that it can resolve the local IPs remotely — advertise a subnet route.

To do this refer to the latest tutorials/instructions on configuring Tailscale on your Home Assistant:

Here’s the integration:

Tailscale

Make sure not to skip the subnet route as it’s essential to getting this working.

Create Webhooks To Drive Automations

Home Assistant (out of the box) has the ability to create locally-hosted webhook endpoints which is amazing for creating automation triggers.

Create a webhook (When -> Automation -> Webhook).

Make sure that the webhook is relative to your static local IP path and not homeassistant.local.

Also make sure that you enable GET. You can (and should) keep the local-only option on because … when authenticated with Tailscale the connection “looks” local to Home Assistant:

Write A Webhook To An NFC Tag For Testing

To test this out, let’s create an NFC tag (or QR code) with the webhook.

Then to validate, let’s do the following:

• Connect to Tailscale.
• Turn off WiFi if we’re on a mobile device to move ourselves outside of the LAN.
• Scan your NFC tag to trigger your webhook (or simply visit the URL in your browser). The automation should work even when you’re not physically at home!

Secure Remote-Accessible Home Assistant Webhooks With Tailscale was originally published in Daniel’s Tech World on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Jewish homeowners who want to configure automations in Home Assistant to facilitate religious observance will want to do so in two instances:

• It’s Shabbat (a weekly event!)
• It’s a Yom Tov (an event that occurs at intervals in the calendar)

The Jewish Sabbath Holidays Home Assistant add-on provides two sensors that are very helpful for configuring automations (these in turn are derived from the HebCal API:

sensor.hebcal_is_shabbat

This is a simple binary sensor (True/False) for determining whether or not it’s Shabbat (based upon your preconfigured candle-lighting time etc).

And:

sensor.hebcal_is_yomtov

This sensor states “No Info” unless it’s a Yom Tov (and changes to the Yom Tov name when one is in effect).

To simplify our automations, let’s try to condense both of these sensors into one state that we can (in turn) use to drive our lighting automations (etc).

I think that this is pretty straightforward, but it sometimes gets confusing thinking about devices, entities, helpers, automations, and so on.

Here’s what we’re doing:

Step 1: Create A Toggle (Type Of Helper)

Firstly, we’re going to create a toggle called Shabbat Or Hag State (name as you wish)

We could roll all of this into one automation but to make any potential troubleshooting easier I decided to create two separate automations.

Step 2: Build The Automations That Will Drive The Toggle

The Shabbat one is a bit easier.

When the Shabbat sensor moves to “True” we want to shift the toggle from off to on:

This is what I came up with:

alias: Shabbat activates Shabbat/Hag mode
description: "When the Shabbat sensor switches to 'True' we're going to turn the Shabbat or Hag toggle on"
trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id:
      - sensor.hebcal_is_shabbat
    to: "True"
condition: []
action:
  - service: input_boolean.turn_on
    metadata: {}
    data: {}
    target:
      entity_id: input_boolean.shabbat_mode
mode: single

For the Yom Tov sensor:

The sensor reports ‘No Info’ unless it’s a hag/Yom Tov in which case it will report the name of the hag.

The logic we need here is that we want to trigger the toggle if the sensor changes to any value other than ‘No Info’.

I used this value template (thanks to those who shared it on the Home Assistant forums).

alias: Hag triggers state
description: ""
trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id:
      - sensor.hebcal_is_yomtov
condition:
  - condition: template
    value_template: "{{ not is_state('sensor.hebcal_is_yomtov', 'No Info') }}"
action:
  - service: input_boolean.turn_on
    metadata: {}
    data: {}
    target:
      entity_id: input_boolean.shabbat_mode
mode: single

Step 3: Then Automate Based On The Toggle State

You could trigger an entire cascade of automations that trigger at various times IF it’s either Shabbat or Yom Tov:

• IF it’s Shabbat or Yom Tov and 23:00, automatically get the apartment into bedtime config.
• IF it’s Shabbat or Yom Tov and 09:00, automatically get the apartment into morning config.

Etc.

For instance, here’s an automation that triggers a lighting scene for the start of Shabbat/Yom Tov when the helper toggle becomes true:

alias: Start of Shabbat / Yom Tov automation
description: >-
  Activates the start of Shabbat / Yom Tov scene when the Shabbat or Yom Tov
  helper becomes true.
trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id:
      - input_boolean.shabbat_mode
    to: "True"
condition: []
action:
  - service: scene.turn_on
    metadata: {}
    target:
      entity_id: scene.start_of_shabbat
mode: single

At bedtime:

alias: Shabbat or Hag bedtime
description: Triggers bedtime lighting on Shabbat or Hag
trigger:
  - platform: time
    at: "23:00:00"
condition:
  - condition: state
    entity_id: input_boolean.shabbat_mode
    state: "on"
action:
  - service: scene.turn_on
    metadata: {}
    target:
      entity_id: scene.shabbat_bedtime
mode: single

Step 4: Configure The ‘Toggle Off’ Automations

Finally we’re going to need to configure automations that reverse the toggle state (to off) when Shabbat or Hag ends.

To save a bit of time we can use the ‘Duplicate’ button in ‘Automations’.

Here’s the Shabbat one.

alias: Shabbat over, Shabbat/Hag toggle off
description: "When the Shabbat sensor reports 'false' we'll move the helper trigger to off too."
trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id:
      - sensor.hebcal_is_shabbat
    to: "False"
condition: []
action:
  - service: input_boolean.turn_off
    target:
      entity_id:
        - input_boolean.shabbat_mode
    data: {}
mode: single

Then do the same for the hagim/Yom Tov switch. If the sensor goes back to reporting ‘No Info’ we’ll move the toggle back over to false:

alias: Hag is over, toggle goes to false
description: >-
  When the is_yomtov sensor reports 'No Info' (it's not Yom Tov) we'll move the
  toggle back to false.
trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id:
      - sensor.hebcal_is_yomtov
    to: No Info
condition: []
action:
  - service: input_boolean.turn_off
    target:
      entity_id:
        - input_boolean.shabbat_mode
    data: {}
mode: single

Optional Monitoring Dashboard:

My Shabbat monitoring dashboard continues to evolve.

It pulls in entities both from Home Assistant’s (built in) Jewish Calendar integration and from the aforementioned third-party one.

It serves two purposes: before Shabbat get Shabbat times. And monitoring and troubleshooting, if required (the right column / ‘Automation States’).

Shabbat / Yom Tov Home Assistant Automations — Part 2 (Helper Configuration) was originally published in Daniel’s Tech World on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Home Assistant has a built-in NFC tag creator. But it also offers the means to create NFC tags through a different method: utilising webhooks.

Why might you want to do this?

• You may (deliberately!) want to allow anyone in your home the ability to trigger automations (including guests who aren’t on your system).
• Currently, the NFC Tags functionality doesn’t support creating tags on the desktop. Personally, I think that this is an unfortunate omission. Like most things, I find using destkop applications to create NFC tags much quicker than replicating the action on a smartphone (to do this, you’ll obviously need a USB NFC reader/writer).
• You can keep a list of your webhook URLs. The trigger that makes this work is visible.
• You might want to use this method as a chance to explore webhooks generally.
• If you want to use scanable barcodes to create automations you might want to use a symbology other than QR (like DataMatrix or PDF417). We can create and design our own stickers this way.
• You might just want to do things a little bit differently!

How To Create The NFC Tags (Or Barcdoes)

Here’s how to set this up:

In ‘Automations’ set your trigger to be a webhook.

But don’t stick with the default settings. Turn on ‘GET’ and (my recommendation) preserve “Only accessible from the local network” (GET is required for the webhook to be trigger-able from a browser request).

Under “Then Do” set up whatever you want to automate.

Now we need to create the NFC tags.

Copy the webhook URL once it’s been generated onto your clipboard:

We can now use any program we like to write the tag, whether on desktop or mobile.

I like NFC Tools (they have a nice Linux GUI) but there are plenty of tools:

Another little security feature I like to add to all my tags is password protection. This protects the tags against accidental deletion.

A stronger version of this is locking the tags (in NFC Tools this option is only available on the mobile version). But this is an irreversible action which will prevent anyone (including you!) from ever being able to edit the tags.

If you like the idea of password-protecting your tags, in NFC Tools, jump into ‘Other’ after writing the payload and select ‘Set password’:

For barcodes it’s the same process. We can bake them into just about anything:

The nice thing about creating NFC tags (or barcodes) with webhooks is that (so long as the webhook URLs remain viable) you don’t need to edit the actual tags ever again.

If you decide that you want to switch up what the NFC tag does a bit, for example, you can simply make your changes under the Home Assistant automation you’ve already set up. The trigger is the same — you just need to change what it does.

You can validate that your NFC-to-webhook automation is running correctly by scanning it with your phone. You should see this pop up from the automation editor:

If we’re talking about automations that trigger lighting changes, it will probably be (visually) obvious that the webhook has succeeded and the automation has worked.

But in cases where there mightn’t be a physical indication (let’s say you triggered an automation to turn off the lights in one hour’s time) you might consider adding a little confirmation notification.

Just add this as an additional action under ‘Then Do’.

Here’s a little one:

LAN-Only Webhooks? Or WAN-Accessible Webhooks?

This method works reliably from within a LAN environment, but what if you wanted to create NFC tags that you could scan remotely?

I use Tailscale for remote authentication but it won’t resolve the webhook URLs which begin with “homeassistant.local” (or access homeassistant.local at all for that matter).

Exposing this URL as a subnet route might seem like a logical solution except that it doesn’t work that way — subnet routes need to be local IPs and the default Home Assistant installation path looks like a conventional internet address to the tool.

I’m certain there’s a smart way around this but given that I can’t envision needing to scan a home automation NFC tag remotely (for the moment) I’m happy to leave finding a solution to this networking quandary on the backburner (of note: the default method doesn’t run into this problem. I’m not sure whatever they’re doing but … it works).

Creating NFC Tag Automations In Home Assistant Using Webhooks was originally published in Daniel’s Tech World on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

During Shabbat, religiously observant Jews refrain from using electricity. However … hosting guests and … well .. eating … are popular activities in the Shabbat-observant world. Shabbat is intended to be a day of rest, after all. Sitting in darkness and eating cans of tuna wouldn’t really be in the Shabbat spirit.

The traditional solution to this religious quandary has been a decidedly low-tech one.

Enter stage the humble manual electricity timer as shown on the left. If you ever wondered why your religious Jewish neighbors had enough of these to start a small electricity store, now you have your answer.

Fortunately, technology has evolved. Personally, I think the idea of using modern technology to assist in the observance of a millennia-old ritual is kind of amazing. Enter stage a much more elegant, modular, and granular solution to the Shabbat electricity issue: home automation.

Prerequisites For This Project

You can use proprietary technologies and their ecosystems for setting up basic home automations. But doing so hamstrings your abilities to truly customise and own your system before the get-go.

If the sensors and smart lights and smart plugs are the players in this picture, then Home Assistant is the conductor. Home Assistant can tie together components from many different manufacturers and make them all achieve a common purpose..

But enough with the sales pitch. Let’s get down to tech details.

• You’re going to want to run Home Assistant Operating System (HAOS) on … something. My wife likes to remind me that I never shy away from making things incredibly complicated. My HAOS is running as a VM in Proxmox which is on the mini PC (which I picked up on Aliexpress and thus far have only praise for).
• Although you could create your own integration based on the HebCal Shabbat times REST API there’s no need to reinvent this particular technical wheel. I like the Jewish-Sabbaths-Holidays integration (Github link) because it includes a no-BS (excuse the language) binary sensor for Shabbat and Yom Tov (plus so much more). It either IS Shabbat or it’s NOT. Your automations can follow along accordingly.

The second Home Assistant integration that I use is SimpleScheduler. You could use it to configure actions to run in relation to the start of Shabbat (e.g., four hours after Shabbat go into bedtime mode). But personally this approach makes more sense for me.

Getting The Integration Set Up Correctly

The easiest way to install the integration is through the Home Assistant Community Store (HACS):

Shabbat times are based on geolocation and your Home Assistant installation needs to know where it is to pull in the correct Shabbat times from the integration. So make sure that you have the following set up in configuration.yaml.

   homeassistant:
     latitude: 32.0667
     longitude: 34.7667
     time_zone: Asia/Jerusalem   

If you don’t know your geocordinates, find them here.

Here’s what the plugin authors recommend adding to your configuration.yaml. This will get you the bare essentials (unless you live in Jerusalem, we’ll cover that next):

# Example configuration.yaml entry
sensor:
  - platform: hebcal
    resources:
      - shabbat_in
      - shabbat_out

If you want to enable “Jerusalem candle-lighting” (40 minutes before sundown) then you’ll want to add:

jerusalem_candle: True

So, for example:

# Example configuration.yaml entry
sensor:
  - platform: hebcal
    jerusalem_candle: True
    resources:
      - shabbat_in
      - shabbat_out

YAML’s less-endearing quality is that it is VERY particular about indentation. But the effort will seem worth it when we’re enjoying our Shabbat-ready smart home!

Creating Scenes And Automations To Manage Everything

Next on our to-do list is creating the scenes and automations that are going to actually control all of our devices over the course of Shabbat.

I’ve divided my automation-ing into several points in time:

• Shabbat comes in: get the apartment into Shabbat mode (if you’re lucky enough to live in an actual house — congratulations!)
• It’s bedtime: Turn the bedroom lights off. But leave on the couch light for whoever wants to read.
• It’s morning! Rather than use a forced lights-on automation to coax myself out of bed at a reasonable hour (it’s Shabbat!) I instead just get the living spaces set up. During the summer months, this is probably unnecessary. To take this further, you could tweak this by adding conditions based around a weather forecast to your automation.
• It’s Shabbat afternoon: Change the lights a little more.
• Shabbat’s out: One quirky feature I decided to add to this was a “Shabbat light.” It’s a bulb that comes on after Shabbat and turns on after it. Its sole purpose is to serve as a physical indicator for when Shabbat is in and out.

Each of these setups is a separate scene.

The first of these (Shabbat comes in) is triggered by the Shabbat times integration (as well as the automation that turns off the indicator bulb when Shabbat is out). The rest are run off Simple Scheduler. Their time can be modified a little throughout the year or as preferences change.

For example:

Here’s the automation that kicks off ‘Shabbat mode’:

In YAML:

alias: Start of Shabbat automation
description: "Puts home into Shabbat configuration mode "
trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id:
      - sensor.hebcal_is_shabbat
    to: "True"
condition: []
action:
  - service: scene.turn_on
    metadata: {}
    target:
      entity_id: scene.start_of_shabbat
mode: single

This is V1.0 of my humble Shabbat indicator light. It’s a simple Zigbee E27 hanging off a socket. The next steps of the project are making this look good. I’m thinking of DIY-ing a custom lightbox.

I also built a little monitoring dashboard just to check up on the condition of my sensors before Shabbat:

There are dozens of ideas I’ve already jotted down for how to take this further (next in line: send a notification 30 minutes before candle-lighting). But …. it’s a functional start.

Thanks for reading!

Daniel Rosehill

Originally published at https://www.danielsrosehill.com on March 22, 2024.

Smart Home Shabbat Automation With Home Assistant (V1) was originally published in Daniel’s Tech World on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.