The EU goes to school and learns nothing

Catherine Ashton is high representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and vice president of the European Commission.

At considerable public expense (she and her extensive retinue are funded by European taxpayers), she recently traveled to the Gaza Strip on what she termed was a mission “to see whether European assistance money has an effect on the ground”. Her conclusion? “It does.”

Returning from the Islamist-controlled Gaza Strip – the Hamas terrorist organisation seized control of the territory in an illegal and particularly brutal coup – she jotted down her impressions in an article in the New York Times entitled “Lessons from a Gaza Trip”.

It has to be said straight off: if this is how Catherine Ashton learns lessons, it’s a wonder she ever graduated from junior school.

She went to the Gaza Strip and learned nothing. Least of all the fundamental concept of “cause and effect”. She recorded that upon leaving the modern and vibrant Jewish nation of Israel and entering Gaza you emerge “like a time-traveler transported backwards, on a dirt track. This is where the industrial center of Gaza used to be. Now, people with donkeys and carts carry stones from the rubble”. She failed to learn, let alone explain, that the reason why the industrial center of Gaza (which used to give employment to hundreds of Gaza residents) is a pile of rubble is because the Hamas rulers consistently bombarded it in order to force its closure – and then employ gullible useful idiots like Ashton to claim that there are no jobs for Gazans because of Israel.

Among the more remarkable claims this paragon of Euro-intelligence and foreign policy blundering makes is that European financial assistance has a positive effect on the ground. She is right, in a way. Because whatever financial assistance is provided on the ground frees up corresponding funding below ground for the tunnels that are used for the purchase, import, engineering and firing of missiles at Israeli civilians – most recently with one fatality last week. It is a remarkably simple lesson in elementary mathematics and logic that Lady Catherine Ashton appears not to have learned.

To find out more about how continued EU and other foreign meddling funding extends the conflict, read the following report by NGO Monitor.

Even more remarkably, Ashton traveled to the Gaza Strip and failed to undertake the most basic and most effective steps to assure Israel that she is truly non-partisan. All she had to do was state that her planned visit would go ahead subject to the immediate and unconditional release of Gilad Schalit, the only Jew alive in an otherwise Jew-free, ethnically cleansed Gaza Strip. Schalit was kidnapped from Israel while in his teens and has been illegally held by Gaza’s Hamas rulers ever since, almost four years now. In contravention of a whole raft of international agreements, not least the Geneva Conventions, he has not been granted visitation rights by his parents, legal representation (not that he is accused of anything other than being a Jew), he has been denied visits by the Red Cross (although to be fair the Red Cross have never demanded to visit him) and as Hamas proudly boasts the young man has not seen daylight for his entire 4-year captivity.

All Ashton had to do to convince Israel of her impartiality was to demand Schalit’s release as a precondition for her high-profile visit and the continued pumping in of massive foreign aid.

But such a step was unthinkable to Lady Catherine Ashton and her EU backers.

All she could do was to feed continued Arab and Islamist intransigence with statements such as “A way must be found to resolve the status of Jerusalem as the future capital of both Israel and Palestine.” Really? Why is this so important, yet the release of Gilad Schalit is not? And why is this so important but there is no urgent need to find a way to resolve the status of Hebron as a city that is as important to many Israelis as Jerusalem itself is? Hebron used to be the political capital of the Jewish nation and to this day is of vital significance as a religious centre. Neither Jerusalem nor Hebron has ever been of the slightest importance to any Arab or Muslim community, except insofar as they are important to the Jews which automatically means they are claimed by the entire Arab and Muslim world with the subservient assistance of dhimmi (servile) European and US administrations. Visit the ME Forum and read this article to find out what dhimmitude has in store for the West.
 
“Lessons from a Gaza Trip”? The EU’s foreign-policy and security head really needs lessons in how to do her homework. She has learned nothing.


Useful links:
Read about how foreign NGOs exploit public funding – that’s taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars – to undermine Israel, a UN member state. They do so with European government acquiescence: NGO Lawfare

Read about how foreign NGOs played a vital part in the concerted propaganda war against Israel following Hizbollah’s attack on the Jewish state in 2006: NGO campaigns in the 2006 Hizbollah war on Israel

CAMERA comments on Catherine Ashton's Gaza visit: EUobserver's Misobservation on Palestinian Civilian Casualties
CAMERA exposes media duplicity and public funding of anti-Israel NGO activity
CAMERA on the lessons that the media - and the EU's Catherine Ashton - fail to learn: official Palestinian Authority anti-Semitism. Meantime, the PA and other Palestinian organisations continue to receive EU and other foreign funding.
CAMERA on continued Church bias against the Jewish state, in parallel with continued funding of Islamist intransigence

Read the Tundra Tabloids for an analysis of what dhimmitude brings to Western society.

Read more from this blog about Gilad Schalit and his incarceration. Gilad Schalit was kidnapped from Israel while he was still a teenager and his captors are currently engaged in the illegal and primitive practice of human trafficking, auctioning his life in exchange for various rewards.
In Sweden silence is golden
Ban Ki-moon's strange silence
Out with the old, in with the new - maybe
The drip effect

The European Parliament has taken a stance on behalf of Gilad Schalit
ECR group calls for release of Gilad Schalit:
Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs calls on European governments to work for Gilad Schalit’s freedom:
For an insightful analysis of the war that continued foreign meddling is going to bring to the Middle East, read the following article by Daniel Pipes

Out with the old, in with the new. Maybe.

So 2009 has ended.

Here’s how it ended in Israel.

With a powerful missile fired from a civilian residential area in Gaza into a civilian residential area in Netivot, Israel.

Palestinian Arab President Mahmoud Abbas is the head of the Fatah political party. The rocket was fired from Hamas-controlled territory by the Al-Aqsa Brigade, a UN- and US-subsidized and trained Fatah military unit.

According to such leading lights of strategy and tactic as US president Barack Hussein Obama, EU ambassador to Israel Andrew Standley, the foreign minister of the current EU presidency Carl Bildt of Sweden, UNRWA commissioner Karen Abu-Zayd and others, Mahmoud Abbas is nonetheless to be regarded as a man of peace and his counterpart in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, is a misunderstood man who only wants prosperity for his people.

Here’s something none of the high-salaried EU and US potentates ever seem to consider: linking Gaza’s well-being to the freedom of kidnapped and illegally incarcerated Israeli Gilad Shalit. Shalit has now been in captivity for three and a half years for the crime of being Jewish in Israel, the world’s only Jewish state. He was kidnapped as a teenager from within sovereign Israel and has been held by the Palestinians’ Gaza prime minister Ismail Haniyeh without access to a lawyer (not that he’s accused of anything), the International Red Cross (not that they’ve demanded Hamas honour the IRC’s internationally recognized right to see him), his family, his doctor, visits by Human Rights Watch (not that they’ve ever asked to visit him), the UN (which via UNRWA co-funds the entire Gaza regime of Ismail Haniyeh), the EU (which is the main donor bloc to UNRWA), or Sweden (which is the largest per capita donor to Palestinian Arab welfare in Gaza and as such pays to keep the regime in power. Read here and here and here about the professional anti-Zionist and often anti-Semitic campaign being waged with public funding in Sweden.). And visit aish.com to view Gilad Shalit’s father Noam’s appeal last spring on behalf of his son. Noam Shalit advocated and still advocates linking the massive aid to the Gaza regime to his son Gilad’s release from illegal captivity.

But the above publicly funded official organizations – they are funded by hard-working citizens’ tax revenues – are not interested in linking money to life. They want to keep funding the regime that engages in the ghoulish practice of human trafficking, while urging the Jewish State to release 1000 convicted Palestinian Arab mass-murderers in exchange for the life of Gilad Schalit.

No wonder then that the hard-line Palestinian Arab regimes in both Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) and the Gaza Strip (read here how women fare in the Gaza Strip) have no intention of backing down – they have all the financial and political backing they want from the international community. This is why Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas can use this massive foreign aid to pay convicted Palestinian Arab mass-murderers huge salaries and can express his confidence in continued terrorism by honouring one of the worst Palestinian Arab mass-murders in recorded history.

That was the note on which 2009 ended. There is every indication that 2010 will bring more of the same, only worse. However, there are some signs, albeit tentative, that 2010 might actually bring some improvement.

There is perhaps even a chance that politicians and the media might take a step back and look at the broader canvas, examining the plight of refugees in the entire Middle East and applying the same yardstick to all, including the countless Christian victims (read also about Christian bodies being disinterred in Gaza and a Reuters report on Muslim oppression of other religions) and Jewish victims and refugees of Muslim Arab aggression, oppression and violence.

Watch this slide show to find out more about the refugee problem that is never talked about – the 850,000 Jewish refugees escaping persecution in Arab lands.

The whole picture. Something that highly paid – and publicly funded – EU and US politicians might want to start considering. Assisted by the media. What a brave new world we might see then, one where the media actually start asking uncomfortable questions – which by definition means probing questions of the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Worlds which in the best traditions of Political Correctness have been exempt from any questioning at all.

This is the 1st of January 2010. We live in hope.

Reality check for the EU

One wonders whether the EU's paid officials (paid out of our tax revenues) really believe the nonsense they disseminate.

If they don't and all they are engaged in is cynical, money-grubbing play-acting at public expense, all well and good - at least they know what they are and whose errands they are running.

What is problematic, however, is if they really believe their own garbled, fairy-tale distortion of reality.

Take the EU's massive use of public funding to sabotage, subvert and deligitimise the Jewish State of Israel. From within that state.

“The EU’s funding of NGOs in Israel does not constitute meddling in Israeli political affairs,” says EU Ambassador to Israel Andrew Standley according to a report in the Jerusalem Post.

“There is a certain perception in Israeli society that what we are financing in Israel (is) aimed at influencing public policy in Israel,” Andrew Standley said. “The reality is that these are global programs.” He added: “The funding is not provided for a political agenda, but rather in support of a universal objective such as human rights … all over the planet”.

Really?

In the interests of transparency, it would be useful to examine the EU's records of its financing of and involvement in human rights programs in places such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, the Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, Somalia, Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

It would be heartening to see evidence of robust EU condemnation of the ban on church construction in Saudi Arabia, along the lines of the robust EU condemnation of housing construction in East Jerusalem. Financial records and a list of the programs financed by the EU in these countries. Comparative tables juxtaposing records of campaign spending in Iran and Israel, Saudi Arabia and Israel, Pakistan and Israel – that sort of thing.

There’s no better way of allaying Israeli suspicions that the EU is using massive public funds to meddle in Israeli political affairs and that the Jewish state is the target of selective treatment.

There's no better way of allaying Israeli suspicions that the EU is implementing a concealed foreign policy strategy via a plethora of NGOs. Concealed by funding through irregular, non-transparent means and by the granting of semi-official status to organisations dedicated to the deconstruction of the world's only Jewish state, to be replaced by the world's 58th recognised Islamic state.


Useful links:
NGO Monitor: Foreign Government Funding for Political Activity in Israel
NGO Monitor: Promoting Israel's isolation
NGO Monitor: Boycott and Divestment Programs

NGO Monitor: KAIROS and Political Advocacy
NGO Monitor: EC Funding for Political NGOs
NGO Monitor: Trojan Horse: The Impact of European Government Funding for Israeli NGOs
NGO Monitor: A Clouded EU Presidency - Swedish Funding for NGO Rejectionism

CAMERA: Human Rights Watch Discredited Even By Its Founder
JCPA: The Media War Against Israel
JCPA/Dore Gold: Europe Seeks to Divide Jerusalem

Middle East Forum: NGOs Make War on Israel
Jerusalem Post/Herb Keinon: Biased 'Human Rights' NGOs
Spectator/Melanie Phillips: An Inconvenient Truth

Spectator/Melanie Phillips: Spot the Difference
Spectator/Melanie Phillips: Even Perfidy is Now Gutless in Albion
Gerald Steinberg: European Funding
The Independent: The Palestinian Arab Tragedy - What the NGOs Never Deal With

Fiery Spirited Zionist: Swedish NGO Demonises Israel
Atlas Shrugs: Europe Funds NGO Belligerence Against Israel
IsraelMatsav: The Swedes Pay Attention
Arutz Sheva: Sweden Carrying Out Radical Anti-Israel Campaign