Israel Matzav

European hypocrisy on the Middle East

Anne Bayefsky and Benjamin Weinthal demolish Britain, France and Germany over their UN Security Council votes on Friday.

The EU’s bizarre and flawed fixation on settlement construction as the linchpin of Mideast peace turned absurd in the British, German, and French statement advocating a one-sided resolution rebuking Israel. It stated: “A way must be found through negotiations to resolve the status of Jerusalem as the future capital of both states.” In short, while paying lip service to a negotiated resolution to the conflict, the EU unilaterally purported to settle one of the core elements to be negotiated.

The German move was an extension of its intemperate legislative language toward Israel. In 2010, the Merkel administration made no effort to convince members of its coalition government in the Bundestag not to agree to a resolution blaming the Jewish state for “violating the principle of proportionality” against the occupants of the Turkish vessel Mavi Marmara. The ship contained a hardcore group of jihadists whose only aim was to diminish Israel’s right to self-defense and create an Iranian port on the Mediterranean.

Israel’s ambassador to Berlin was apparently under the mistaken impression that the Merkel administration would likely reject the Security Council resolution. But the anti-Israeli writing was plainly on the wall. As a 2009 WikiLeaks cable from U.S. diplomats in Berlin reveals, Christoph Heusgen, a senior adviser to Merkel, urged the U.S to water down its opposition to the U.N.’s anti-Israel “Goldstone Report” in order to force Israel to freeze settlement construction. The dispatch from Heusgen, Merkel’s point man on the Middle East, ought to raise giant question marks over her oft-repeated declarations to the U.S. Congress and the Israeli Knesset that the Jewish state’s security is “non-negotiable” for Germany.

A day after German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle instructed his U.N. diplomats to add Germany’s voice to the round of condemnations at the Security Council, he traveled to Tehran and met with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There were no statements about Israel’s security, Iranians dying in the streets, or Ahmadinejad’s grotesque denial of the Holocaust. Iranian dissidents speaking to AP called Westerwelle’s meeting “simply a disgrace.” “His meeting ignored the ruling regime’s terror, the people’s suffering,” they said.

British and French support for the resolution comes at a time when we are learning how deeply immersed both countries are with the dirty business of propping up unsavory regimes in Tunisia and Libya. WikiLeaks cables point directly to Britain’s role in releasing the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, in exchange for British energy giant BP’s right to access and develop Libyan oil. During the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tunisia, France’s foreign minister Michele Alliot-Marie offered a sophisticated French police-skills program to the security forces of now-deposed Tunisian despot Ben Ali.

There's another explanation for the Europeans' actions: rank anti-Semitism. They see no connection between the positions that they take in the Arab world and the positions they take on Israel. They just hate Jews. They have a long and bloody history of that. After all, it was the French ambassador to the Court of St. James who some years ago referred to us as that 's****y little country.'

Read the whole thing.

Labels: European anti-Semitism, Jerusalem construction, Judea and Samaria construction, UN Security Council

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:32 PM