Bono and Nancy Pelosi just compared Zelenskyy and St. Patrick. Should we be upset?

March 17, 2022

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish; this is hard to miss, at least within the Jewish media circles in which I run. Perhaps it is less widely known by non-Jews, but given the fact that one of the central refutations of Putin’s accusation of Nazism in Ukraine is that Zelenskyy is Jewish, something that has been covered by every mainstream outlet as well, you’d think everyone would know by now. Besides, the Ukrainian president has invoked the Holocaust in his speeches.

But Bono — yes, the guy from U2 — seems to have missed the memo. And so did Nancy Pelosi. On Thursday, the House Speaker read a poem composed by the Irish singer that compared Zelenskyy to the Irish Catholic St. Patrick, at the Friends of Ireland luncheon in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. “I got this message this morning from Bono,” she said — not specifying whether the message in question was an email, text or Twitter DM — before launching into verse.

In the poem, Bono — who Pelosi called “a very Irish part of our lives” — references the myth that St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland with his holiness. “The snake symbolizes/the evil that rises/and hides in your heart,” he writes.

https://forward.com/culture/484170/b...raine-ireland/