I think it's genuine. He's too consistent for it not to be.
I like Pat but I don't get his hated of Israel.
“I like Pat but I don’t get his hated of Israel.”
Pat has much in common with Mel Gibson. Both of them were raised by very traditionalist Catholic fathers who were also very anti-semitic. Pat’s father was a follower of Father Coughlin, a fiery Catholic radio priest (1920s and 30s, mainly), especially listened to by Irish Catholics. Father Coughlin was extremely anti-semitic, and Pat was heavily influenced by his father and Father Coughlin’s philosophy. Google Father Coughlin and look into his background on Wikipedia. His background is a historical eye opener.
Mel Gibson’s father was equally vociferous in his beliefs which have heavily influenced Mel as well. Mel’s father is a sedevacantist, a schismatic group of Catholics that believe that Vatican II was illegitimate because of the changes it made to the way the Catholic faith is practiced, and therefore considers the Popes elected since Vatican II as illegitimate (sedevacantist means vacant seat (the post-Vatican II Popes’ seats that is). Here is an excerpt from Wiki regarding Father Coughlin so you can get a flavor of what Pat was weaned on:
“After the 1936 election, Coughlin increasingly expressed sympathy for the fascist policies of Hitler and Mussolini as an antidote to Bolshevism.[15] His CBS radio broadcasts became suffused with antisemitic themes. He blamed the Depression on an “international conspiracy of Jewish bankers”, and also claimed that Jewish bankers were behind the Russian Revolution. On November 27, 1938, he said “There can be no doubt that the Russian Revolution ... was launched and fomented by distinctively Jewish influence.”
He began publication of a newspaper, Social Justice, during this period, in which he printed antisemitic polemics such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Like Joseph Goebbels, Coughlin claimed that Marxist atheism in Europe was a Jewish plot. The December 5, 1938 issue of Social Justice included an article by Coughlin which closely resembled a speech made by Goebbels on September 13, 1935 attacking Jews, atheists and communists, with some sections being copied verbatim by Coughlin from an English translation of the Goebbels speech. At a rally in the Bronx in 1938, he gave a Nazi salute and said, “When we get through with the Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.” [16]
On November 20, 1938, two weeks after Kristallnacht, when Jews across Germany were attacked and killed, and Jewish businesses, homes and synagogues burned, Coughlin said “Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted.”[17] After this speech, and as his programs became more antisemitic, some radio stations, including those in New York and Chicago, began refusing to air his speeches without pre-approved scripts; in New York, his programs were cancelled by WINS and WMCA, leaving Coughlin to broadcasting on the Newark part-time station WHBI. This made Coughlin a hero in Nazi Germany, where papers ran headlines claiming “America Is Not Allowed to Hear the Truth”. On December 18, 1938 two thousand of Coughlin’s followers marched in New York protesting potential asylum law changes that would allow more Jews (including refugees from Hitler’s persecution) into the US, chanting, “Send Jews back where they came from in leaky boats!” and “Wait until Hitler comes over here!” The protests continued for several months. Donald Warren, using information from the FBI and German government archives, has also argued that Coughlin received indirect funding from Nazi Germany during this period.[18]
After 1936, Coughlin began supporting an organization called the Christian Front, which claimed him as an inspiration. In January 1940, the Christian Front was shut down when the FBI discovered the group was arming itself and “planning to murder Jews, communists, and ‘a dozen Congressmen’”[19] and eventually establish, in J. Edgar Hoover’s words, “a dictatorship, similar to the Hitler dictatorship in Germany”. Coughlin publicly stated, after the plot was discovered, that he still did not “disassociate himself from the movement”, and though he was never linked directly to the plot, his reputation suffered a fatal decline.[20] ....
At its peak in the early 1930s, Coughlin’s radio show was phenomenally popular. His office received up to 80,000 letters per week from listeners, and his listening audience was estimated to rise at times to as much as a third of the nation. Coughlin is often credited as one of the major demagogues of the 20th century for being able to influence politics through broadcasting, without actually holding a political office himself.”