If the European Union really is serious about stopping anti-Semitism, it should stop its own funding of recipients that promote hatred against Jews and Israel, British writer and commentator Douglas Murray told EU officials in Brussels.
Writing for the Gatestone Institute Thursday, Murray pointed out that donations by the EU and European groups and nations help keep alive the Bethlehem-based Ma’an news agency, which he called one of the most supremely anti-Semitic organs in the Middle East.
Murray cited one recent article on the Ma’an website stating, “Jews think that their fortresses will protect them from death, but … Allah has stricken fear in their hearts and decreed humiliation and degradation upon them until Judgment Day…
“Historically, it is known that the lives of Jews have always been war and fighting. The only reason for this is that they have been outcasts in every corner of the earth, and not one nation in the world respects them, for they cause strife, and scheme everywhere they settle.”
Even if the diatribe can be justified by freedom of speech, “Why on earth should we pay for it?” Murray asked rhetorically.
“When Ma’an propagates the idea that ‘Allah has decreed’ that Jews are destined to be ‘humiliated,’ it is we who are acting in the role of publisher,” he wrote.
Concerning the Palestinian Authority and EU’s mantra of “two states living in peace side by side,” Murray noted that at the end of the anti-Semitic article on the website was the slogan of Fatah, the party headed by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas: “Revolution until Victory.”
