UK Ambassador to Israel says Terrorism is OK.

[Mediocrates]

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satelli...=1039928177726

British Ambassador Cowper-Coles: Terrorism has been justified


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BRET STEPHENS Dec. 16, 2002

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BERLIN Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British ambassador to Israel, surprised participants at a high-level conference on Israeli-European relations here when he appeared to suggest that terrorism in the framework of a national struggle is not necessarily wrong.

"We can all think of times in history when the use of terrorism has been justified," Cowper-Coles said, referring to Jewish terrorist cells such as the Stern Gang.

The conference, organized by the Club of Three and the Axel Springer publishing house, included Shimon Peres, George Weidenfeld, Richard Perle, Amos Schocken, Bernard Lewis, and many high-level German and Israeli politicians, journalists, and academics.

Cowper-Coles also criticized the policy and rhetoric of the Bush administration's war on terrorism. Calling terrorism a "cancer," he nevertheless said that "moral clarity is not an intelligent guide" for policy-makers in the real world, and that terrorism could not simply be treated by removing the cancer through military means, but required a more holistic approach.

Reacting sharply to Cowper-Coles, Josef Joffe, editor and publisher of the influential weekly newspaper Die Zeit, insisted that terrorist means could not be justified by any cause. The comment met with a general chorus of assent from the audience.

The conference was otherwise notable for the broad criticism by most participants of current European policies toward Israel, the Arab world, and the US.

"The perspective of democracy does not seem to bother some European leaders," said Per Ahlmark, former deputy prime minister of Sweden. Friedbert Pfluger, a ranking German parliamentarian in the opposition Christian Democratic Union, added, paraphrasing Heine, "I can hardly sleep when I see what the Europeans do."

Former foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami also spoke harshly of Europe's "betrayal" of Israel in the early days of the conflict, after Israel had gone "to the outer limits of our ability to compromise."

"This was Europe's moment of truth and it failed," he said. "Europe needs to downgrade its moralistic presumptions."

The conferees were equally critical of the European and particularly the German stance vis a vis Iraq. "If Germany was able to intervene in Kosovo without a UN resolution, then why not in Iraq?" asked Michel Friedman, vice president of the organized Jewish community in Germany.

Added Pfluger: "The impression [in Germany] has been conveyed that peace is endangered not by Saddam Hussein, but by George Bush." Europe, he said, should stand with Israel and America "not from a sense of guilt but because we share values."

[L@mplighterM]

I think Cowper-Coles line of thinking is shared by way too many VIP’s in this world one person that comes to mind is Blair’s wife (she apologized but I don’t believe she was sincere) that also justified terrorism.

If we continue to visit the past and use that to define what or what isn’t terrorism there’s no hope that Islamic fundamentalism will ever be eliminated. As slim as our chances are for maintaining and nourishing our current western civilization it can be done.

There however has to a willingness to recognize that there’s no justification whatsoever for intentionally killing children, pregnant women or others in the ME by Islamic fundamentalist. 9/11 was also a criminal act of enormous proportions.

For any one to claim self-defense in instances like that is obscene.

I posted a link the other day that gave some insight into how Islamic countries feel about suicide attacks against unarmed civilians and that in combination with other polls indicate that 100,000,000’s of millions of Muslims justify such horrendous acts.

If the west stays on the current course Islamic fundamentalism will consume the world. I believe that it’s largely the youth (16-40 years) in Islamic countries that are the main supporters of terrorism whereas it’s the youth in western countries that oppose taking action against countries like Iraq, Iran and Korea.

If this assessment is correct we have two diametrically opposed point of view one for war and the other against. The similarities between Nazi Germany indoctrinated Hitler Youth and Hitler’s fantasy for a 1,000-year Third Reich was ignored by Italy, France and Britain is striking.

Today the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism is upon and they are also being ignored. I can foresee an alliance of Islamic countries and a rouge nation like Korea sometimes in the future armed to the teeth with weapons of mass destruction.
There’s no one to stop this proliferation and I believe that soon it’ll be too late.

[Mediocrates]

Over the past week, the leaders of Europe have been tuning their instruments ahead of today's meeting of the Quartet in Washington. The sound has been lousy.

Last Friday, EU leaders met in Copenhagen for a summit on the Middle East in order to blast Israel. Israel, the European ministers alleged, is responsible for Palestinian terrorism because it dares to allow Jews to live in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. By daring to allow Jews to live in these areas, the EU said, Israel "violates international law, inflames an already volatile situation, and reinforces the fear of Palestinians that Israel is not genuinely committed to end the occupation."

The Europeans also excoriated the Bush administration for telling French President Jacques Chirac last Thursday that the Quartet would not issue a final version of its so called "road map" for the establishment of a Palestinian state in its meeting today.

After breaking for the weekend, on Monday, the Europeans were back on the warpath. This time the battle cry emanated from London. There, Prime Minister Tony Blair rejected a request from Foreign Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for a meeting to discuss cooperation on fighting terrorism and conceptualizing the said road map. Such a meeting, with a mere foreign minister was beneath Blair's dignity. Blair only meets with heads of state and ultra-leftist opposition party leaders, the Foreign Ministry was told.

At any rate, Blair was otherwise engaged this week. America's closest ally in its war against terrorism was busy debauching himself by hosting the terrorist supplier, cheerleader and enabler; the occupier of Lebanon; the weapons of mass destruction proliferator and human-rights abuser Syrian President Bashar Assad at 10 Downing Street. There, before the television cameras, Blair smiled and said, "it is important to engage with Syria because Syria is going to be an important part of building a peaceful and stable future in the Middle East."

For his part, Assad drew strength from Blair's hospitality. Assad, who last year sat next to the pope and condemned the Jews for murdering Jesus and Muhammad, has never been one to mince words.

Standing next to Blair, the Syrian dictator described the terrorist headquarters he happily houses in Damascus as "press centers." He extolled suicide bombers. He defended his friend Saddam Hussein. He condemned the United States. And of course, he condemned Israel over and over.

Moreover, Assad used his trip to London to divert any attention the international press corps might have paid to his roundup of Kurdish political activists.

These Kurds, members of the outlawed Yakiti party, had held non-violent demonstrations outside the Syrian parliament building demanding political freedoms early last week. Three days later, Assad's security services started rounding them up in house-to-house arrests.

As if Blair's embrace of this enemy of everything he and his EU colleagues claim to stand for was not enough, Blair took leave of his honored guest to make a speech in Parliament about the Palestinians. There he announced his plan to organize a conference on Palestinian "reforms." To this summit next month he will invite the members of the Quartet, representatives of the Palestinian Authority as well as representatives of the burgeoning democracies of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Together, without Netanyahu, all will discuss how to enact cosmetic reforms that will enable the assembled parties to demand the swift establishment of the State of Palestine.

Where does one begin analyzing this European behavior? Even as the Europeans launched their weekly assault against Israel and their embrace of terrorists, reports that Islamic terrorists have Europe itself in their sites were flowing freely.

On December 8th The New York Times reported on the increasing alarm of European security services over the gathering force and virility of these threats. This week the French announced the arrest of what appears to be an al-Qaida cell whose members were planning a chemical weapons attack on the Paris subway.

But no matter. The Europeans know who the villain in all of this is. The villain of course is Israel.

Assad, who launched the reenactment of the Arab League's economic boycott of Israel last year must have felt right at home in Europe where his call for economic strangulation of Israel has been enthusiastically taken up continent-wide. The British have distinguished themselves not only for their department stores' recent moves to ban Israeli products from their shelves, or for their quiet governmental ban on weapons sales, but also for their decision to launch an academic boycott of Israel. The day before Assad chatted with Queen Elizabeth while drinking tea and munching on crumpets at Buckingham Palace, the British papers were reporting that this boycott has been extended from the social sciences and humanities to the include a boycott of Israeli scientific research.

In refusing Netanyahu's request for a meeting, Blair may have lost his chance to meet with any top ranking Israeli leader. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon after all is under threat of indictment for war crimes in Belgium which has an extradition treaty with Britain, and therefore has to be careful about his European travel plans. For its part, the British Ministry of Justice has refused Israeli requests to set aside the Arab demand to indict Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz for war crimes. Given this state of affairs, there is a likelihood that neither leader be calling on Blair anytime soon.

The irony of the fact that the Europeans, who are prime targets for Islamic terrorism staunchly refuse not only to fight it, but also refuse to accept that Israel is being victimized is breathtaking. Before leaving London, Assad on Thursday threatened his generous host. Condemning Blair's meek call for Palestinian reforms, Assad proclaimed, "The result of reforms will be destruction."

This mind-boggling impertinence shows exactly where European Middle East policy is leading. By mindlessly asserting that Jewish towns in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are the greatest obstacles to peace in the region, the Europeans simply whet the terrorists' appetite for destruction. The disingenuousness of the European claim that these towns, whose establishment and expansion is not even discussed, let alone proscribed, in the Oslo agreements are illegal or equivalent to the murder of Israelis by Palestinian terrorists is as appalling as it is destructive to the fight against terrorism.

And we must not forget that when at Camp David Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians a deal that would include the evacuation of almost all of these "obstacles to peace" and the deportation of their Jewish residents into the shrunken State of Israel, Arafat responded by going to war.

Finally, it flies in the face of all the liberal values and international humanitarian laws that the Europeans so loudly espouse, that these enlightened leaders could demand the ethnic cleansing of Judea, Samaria and Gaza of Jews as a precondition not only for Palestinian statehood but also for the end of Palestinian terrorism.

Our prime minister tells us that we needn't worry about the European antagonism because at the end of the day, Washington, not Brussels, calls the shots. This would be comforting if it were not the case that the forces in Washington that call the shots are those who are most aligned with Europe.

Far from condemning Europe for its anti-Israel policies, the State Department under Colin Powell has embraced much of the European Middle East platform as its own. In his address at the Herzliya Conference earlier this month, US ambassador Dan Kurtzer warmly embraced the so-called Saudi peace plan which calls for the right of return of Palestinian refugees as "an encouraging sign." While Kurtzer was stronger in condemning terrorism than his European cohorts, he minced no words in describing his view of the Israeli towns in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. "Terrorism, like settlements, must stop," Kurtzer said.

[Mediocrates]

Kurtzer extolled the so-called road map that will be discussed in Washington today. In his own address before the same conference, Sharon tried desperately to force the State Department to lay off the road map which, the Prime Minister intimated is nothing but a sick mutation of President Bush's call for actual democratization of the Palestinian Authority as a precondition for statehood.

Many in Jerusalem have taken heart from the appointment of Elliot Abrams as the director of the Middle East desk at the National Security Council. Washington insiders however point to the fact that Flynt Leverett, the NSC's point man for the "peace process" is a State Department appointment. Leverett, a former CIA officer came to Israel with Undersecretary of State William Burns last month to discuss the road map. At the time, his participation in the delegation was seen as a sign to the Prime Minister that contrary to what he would like to believe, the White House is very much on board with the road map.

To placate European rancor over the Bush administration's decision to postpone publishing the road map until after next month's general elections, Colin Powell arranged for the Quartet members to meet with President Bush today. For its part, the World Bank kicked into State's European appeasement drive by announcing this week that it will be giving the PA $40 million in short order to pay the salaries of its employees. All of this was apparently deemed necessary in order for the State Department to win a one month delay in the publishing of road map that represents nothing more than the total repudiation of President Bush's Middle East policy.

Rather than demanding actual Palestinian reform and cessation of terror, the Orwellian road map calls for the Palestinians to regurgitate past statements to the effect that terrorism is a bad thing and declare that they plan to reform. In exchange, Israel will have to ban all Jewish construction activities in Jewish towns in Judea, Samaria and Gaza and withdraw IDF forces from Palestinian areas so that the Palestinians can think about making additional statements to the effect that they intend to reform themselves and stop murdering Israelis.

What we learn from this situation is that we are in very big trouble. The Europeans have cast their lots with the enemies of all they proclaim themselves to represent. As President Bush prepares for war in Iraq, he has allowed the State Department, whose head opposes Bush's vision, to take full control of the Israeli-Palestinian agenda. All that Prime Minister Sharon has managed to win for us is a one-month respite before we begin our descent down the European road. Fasten your seatbelts, we are in for a very bumpy ride.

[Miriam]

You know, I'm not a fan of European ME policies. But I wish it would be possible to discuss them without the hysterical undertones of Glick's article