We wrote yesterday [“11-Dec-12: On screaming silence and thundering demagoguery“] about the almost complete silence of the governments of Europe in the face of the sickening bigotry and repeated incitements to terrorism of the Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal in a series of speeches this past weekend in the Gaza Strip.
We mentioned how the EU has poured withering criticism on Israel for its plan to build housing for several thousand families in Jerusalem, while uttering only the faintest bleat over Mashaal’s whipping up the Palestinian Arabs into a death-to-Israel frenzy.
About that bleat: turns out it happened only because of what Israel Radio calls “an 11th-hour intervention by Germany and the Czech Republic“. Here’s the statement that the pressure achieved:
“The EU finds inflammatory statements by Hamas leaders that deny Israel’s right to existunacceptable.”
Let history record that four of the EU member states opposed any condemnation at all of Mashaal’s calls for Israel’s annihilation and destruction. The four are Denmark, Finland, Portugal and Ireland.
To his credit, and his country’s, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle acknowledged today that his country was responsible for inserting the condemnation of Hamas into the EU statement.
“We absolutely condemn the statements by Hamas leader Mashaal. Anyone who questions the right of Israel to exist can not be a partner for peace talks. Mashaal’s public pronouncements demonstrate to the world how justified Israel’s security concerns are…”
The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana famously observed that
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
Given the massive demographic changes washing over Europe, and the spirit of cowardly appeasement in the air, it appears that those who cannot remember Santayana or the message he sought to impart are condemned to live through just what he warned would happen.
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