Posted 7/29/2003 11:55:00 AM by Ocean Guy
EU's Double Standard

Don't miss this exchange of letters. Isi Leibler, in an editorial in the Jeruslaem Post on July 6, was writing largely in response to Miguel Moratinos' farewell message. Moratinos was the EU representative to the Peace process. (sorry link is dead) He wrote about the EU's bias and double standard it exhibits towards Israel.

He received an unsolicited response from Cristina Gallach, spokesperson for Javier Solana, the European Union High Representative. It seems Ms Gallach isn't aware of any double standard nor bias, nor favoritism of the palestinians. Mr. Leibler responds to her including this summary:

You state that your vision is one in which hatreds do not carry the day. Yet as a former (now disillusioned) supporter of Oslo, I can assure you that there are no people more desperate for peace than the people of Israel. They entered into a peace process with a partner who demonstrated that he remained a duplicitous murderer who, at no stage, ever had any intention of conceding the right of sovereignty to the Jewish people in this region. As Hitler transformed the Germans into an evil nation, Arafat transformed Palestinians into a society suffused with evil in which suicide bombers are considered holy martyrs and kindergarten children are taught from infancy to kill Jews. Are you aware that Palestinians polls indicate that 80 percent of the people endorse suicide bombings? Yet you repeat the mindless moral equivalency which suggests that we and the Palestinians are simply two people hating one another, captured in a "cycle of violence." To resolve that, Javier Solana and his colleagues will be the saintly mediators who remain even handed and make no distinction between victims and killers and between those who seek peace and those who seek to annihilate their neighbors. And you persist in recognizing Arafat as the "elected" leader of the Palestinian people, although I doubt whether you would suggest that we should have applied the same approach in relation to Hitler or Milosevic -- also "elected" leaders.

I hope that in the near future the more responsible leaders in Europe will appreciate why so many of us are outraged by the double standards they apply in relation to us. Mr. Solana's activism in Yugoslavia and his inability to recognize the inconsistencies in his subsequent condemnation of acts of self-defense on our part exemplify this.