Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘european union’

London is planning to phase out double-decker busses in order to comply with EU regulations about making public tranist more wheelchair-accessible.

I have no problem with accessibility, but the double-decker bus is too quintessentially London to simply disappear. Couldn’t the busses be refitted to make the first level wheelchair-friendly but still keeping the second story?

Update: Thanks, Tom, for saying it ain’t so. Not all the double-deckers are on their way out; only the cool vintage ones. So I guess it’s only partially so.

The EU has come under fire for refusing to publish a report on antisemitism, ostensibly because of fears of the political fallout of telling the truth (namely that a large portion of European antisemitism is coming from the far-left and from the Muslim communities).

The Canadian Jewish Congress has released the report in defiance of the EU’s refusal, and it is available online. Read it here.

Small wonder the EU is so critical of Israel… it beats introspection any day of the week, doesn’t it?

The EU won’t blacklist them and Mahmoud Abbas won’t fight them – so why is anyone surprised that Hamas just keeps gaining power?

In the meantime, only Israel has shown a willingness to fight this terror organization, and it’s a costly fight indeed – for both sides. Today’s operation to kill senior Hamas commander Mohammed al-Hanbali cost the life of an IDF soldier and wounded four more. It also collapsed the apartment structure where al-Hanbali was hiding, meaning 28 Palestinian families became homeless. And of course, Hamas will clamour for “revenge”, which it will take out on more innocent schoolchildren riding buses, or grandmothers shopping in supermarkets, or teenagers at a nightclub.

The US and especially the EU calls this a “cycle of violence”, implying that it is an endless chain of morally-equivalent actions and reactions on both sides. They then tend to blame Israel on the ground that Israel is the occupying power and the Palestinians are being occupied. I suppose using those overly simplistic leaps of logic, this makes sense somehow.

But, of course, there is no moral equivalence between assassinating a terrorist murderer, and blowing up a busload of innocent civilians. None whatsoever. Israel is engaged in defence while the Palestinian terrorists are engaged in offence. Israel’s goal is peace and security; the goal of the Palestinians is the eradication of Israel. No, not the same thing at all.

Unfortunately, the world seems to think that the terrorists are reasonable people and that they should be tiptoed around and negotiated with. Israel knows that there is no chance of peace with Hamas, or an Arafat-led PA, calling the shots. So they’ll keep fighting this war against terrorism and the world will keep on blaming them for it . . . until it’s won.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi met with leaders of the World Jewish Congress and stated his favourable position on Israel joining the European Union:

“In the future, Europe must include Israel,” Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is reported to have said at a meeting with World Jewish Congress leaders on Wednesday. “We look on Israel as a European nation to all intents and purposes: Cultural, economic and political.” Italy takes over the six-month rotating EU presidency in July, possibly coinciding with the verdict of Berlusconi’s 3-year bribery trial.

Ahead of the presidency, Berlusconi plans to visit Israel in the first week of June. “I will go to Israel to meet the prime minister [Ariel Sharon] and I will have no meetings with the Palestinian leadership,” a WJC spokesman quoted Berlusconi as saying at the meeting.

He also pledged to promote sympathy for Israel in Europe, fight anti-Semitism, and work to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace.

[ . . . ]

In March 2002 Berlusconi surprised Europeans when he said that both Israel and Russia should join the Union.

Marco Pannella, an Italian member of the European Parliament and president of the Transnational Radical Party, is promoting the initiative, United Press International reports. On Tuesday he told reporters in Israel that support was growing in the European Parliament for Israel to join the EU.

Such a step, though distant in the future at best, would help drastically in reducing Israel’s pariah status among the nations, largely imposed by its Arab neighbour states and their oil bribery. However, more importantly it means that the next president of the EU will be a much better friend to Israel, possibly ushering in a six-month period to try to reverse some of the negativity that has corrupted the body in the past couple of years.

Those morons at the EU have issued their typical criticism of Israel in the wake of the double-suicide bombing that killed 23 people in Tel Aviv on Sunday, by calling upon Israel to lift the travel ban on Palestinians:

In a statement issued by Greece, the bloc’s president until the end of June, the EU called on Israel to lift the travel ban because the decision “perpetuates hatred and extremism.”

“The Presidency of the EU calls upon the Israeli government to reconsider this decision and to immediately lift the ban,” the statement said.

Perpetuates hatred and extremism? Israel’s mere existence “perpetuates” this hatred, according to groups like Hamas and the Islamic Jihad who routinely carry out these terrorist attacks. The Palestinians kill 23 innocent people, and Israel issues travel restrictions, and it’s Israel who’s perpetuating the violence? That’s so absurd it could almost be a joke, if it weren’t the regular position of the hypocritical European Union.

The world is still reacting to the latest bombing in Israel, but I know all too well that within a few days it will be all but forgotten, relegated to just the latest in a long string of similar attacks. People keep dying, accusations keep flying, and not very much changes.

The EU has condemned the attacks, but as usual, the condemnation focused more on the fact that terrorism was counter-productive strategically than on the fact that it’s just plain wrong to kill innocent human beings. And, of course, the EU has felt the need to call on “both sides” to end the violence:

“The legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people cannot be promoted through acts of terrorism,” the EU presidency said.

Patten urged Israel and the Palestinians to recommit themselves to the peace initiative of the so-called Quartet of the United States, Russia, the United Nations and the 15-nation EU.

It’s getting harder and harder to read this stuff.

Israeli army incursions in Gaza have left ten more people dead, including two UN employees. While Israel was clearly targeting Hamas terrorists (five of the ten dead were identified as Hamas members), you’d never know it from the media reports, who love to skew everything to make it look like Israel is launching unprovoked incursions simply as a show of strength and not as the defensive measures that they are.

“This loss of civilian lives, of people working for a humanitarian UN agency, is completely unacceptable, said Peter Hansen, UNRWA’s commissioner-general, in Geneva. “I must condemn what appears to be the indiscriminate use of heavy firepower in a densely populated civilian area.”

[. . .]

Feingold, the army spokeswoman, accused Palestinian militants of hiding behind civilians in the camps. “It’s a shame because the civilian population who’s not involved in terrorism … is the one to pay the price.”

But the worst comment has to come from the Danish Foreign Minister, who uses the logic that’s so twisted and yet so prevalent in the EU these days:

Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller, representing the European Union, warned Israel that using “excessive might” could backfire.

“It’s deeply tragic that completely innocent people again have been killed,” Moeller told reporters in Copenhagen. “It creates a new fundament for more terrorism, it creates anger.”

Yet another example of the backwards thinking of most of Europe. It’s the same logic by which people in Montreal claimed that Hillel should never have invited Benjamin Netanyahu to Concordia, because “it might provoke anger and violence”.

The blame in that case lies with the violent rioters. They can’t say “well, you made us mad, so we’re not responsible for our actions”. Imagine if a serial killer said that about his victims? Imagine if an abusive husband said that about his wife?

It’s the same thing here. Moeller is excusing Palestinian terror and its killing of innocent people ON PURPOSE as an angry reaction to Israel’s ACCIDENTAL killing of innocent people – especially ones being used as human shields by cowardly terrorists. We know that Hamas is angry and violent, Moeller is saying, so let’s condemn Israel for making them mad and maybe causing them to launch more attacks. After all, it must be Israel’s fault.

I could weep.

The European Union is meddling in Israel’s elections. According to the Jerusalem Post:

Palestinian newspapers are full of paid advertisements calling for an end to terrorist attacks inside Israel in order to help Mitzna and his Labor Party. Palestinian sources say Dr. Sari Nusseibeh, the PLO’s representative in Jerusalem, is behind the advertisements. The European Union, they add, is financing the campaign.

The surprise isn’t so much that the Palestinian lobby wants a Labour victory. With a softer government, more prone to concessions, they probably figure they can get more out of Israel. But what’s the EU doing backing the ads?

And notice what else is obvious by reading between the lines. The ads are calling upon people to end terror attacks inside Israel – their way of saying that terror attacks in the Disputed Territories may still continue against innocent civilians. Plus, the call for a moratorium on attacks in the leadup to an election implies that they can resume once the election is over. Not to mention that it’s blazingly obvious that terror is being sanctioned as a political weapon.

If the EU wants to intervene to end terrorism, then it should do it unequivocally. Support a campaign to end terror attacks, period. Instead, the EU is attempting to manipulate the Israeli election so as to elect a leader it feels woud be more pliable to Europe’s demands. I doubt the Israeli people will listen, as polls show Likud leading by a landslide margin. Still, the EU has no business getting involved.

Another typical demonstration of European Union hypocrisy:

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said “these tragic incidents come as a sad reminder that no region in the world is immune from terrorist attacks.”

“This should strengthen our common determination to intensify as a matter of priority co-operation with our African partners – among others -as part of our global fight against terrorism,” he said.

Hey, Solana, these attacks are happening almost daily in Israel, and I don’t see you calling for an intensification of your co-operation with Israeli partners as part of the “global fight against terrorism”. If you would take your head out of the sand for five seconds, you would realize that the best way to fight terrorism is to fight it wherever it occurs. And where is it occurring most? Israel, of course.

Terrorism is like a cancer. Fight it there and you’ll help prevent it from spreading elsewhere. Wait for it to spread elsewhere and, well, you see what happens.