EuroFools Betray Greek Brethren, Undermine Their Own Creation -- Prove that Their "Peace" Advice to Israel Is Either Hostile or Stupid

UPDATING 5-19-2012

As an Israeli, I am tremendously amused to see how the EU, more specifically the Eurozone, plus the IMF, cannot solve the debt crisis. It should warn us against taking any advice from the EU about our conflict with the Arabs. The Greek debt-cum-economic crisis at present is due not only to the failure of Greek governments prior to Papandreou secretively building up debts with the advice of US financial firms. It is also due --and even more so-- to the utterly stupid and counterproductive "remedy" demanded by the eurozone and IMF. And the German role here is especially thick-headed and outrageous.

I consider Wolfgang Schaeuble, German finance minister, a weapon of European self-destruction. It should have been obvious 2 years ago that without either the Eurozone [EMU = european monetary union] and/or IMF guaranteeing loans to Greece [as Krugman recommended] or/and the provision of an easy loan facility for Greece at a reasonable, low interest rate [maybe something like eurobonds], that interest rates for Greece would balloon and swell up on the open market and Greece could never pay back the loans at --let's say-- 33% interest. Especially without growth. So the original Greek "bailout" was stupid and unworkable, which some foresaw. Now, the Germans --led by Schaeuble are insisting on punishing Greece [watch films of the German finance minister seething with rage over Greeks "breaking" promises]. This is outrageous because the Germans all too easily forget that Germany did not come out of its WW2 ruin & wreckage on sheer austerity & hard work but got Marshall Plan billions from America in the form of cheap, low interest loans as well as grants. Actually in the end, most of the loans were forgiven & Germany paid back only about 15% of its Marshall Plan aid!!! The Americans could have left the Germans to grope for food in their post-war ruins, after a war that they had started [also see here & here & here]. Of course, some German economists are more sensible than Schaeuble.

Yes, Greece needed structural reforms but easy loans too were indispensable. Without them Greece got into a vicious circle that the Euro fools still don't understand. As an Israeli I see that EU "peace" prescriptions are as reliable as their economic stupidities. Doctor EU, heal thyself.

UPDATING 5-19-2012
Solidarity is a two-way street, Greece must keep its promises.
Guido Westerwelle, German Foreign Minister, FDP party
[Israel TV, channel 1, Ro'im `Olam 5-19-2012]
Solidarity is a two-way street. . . the European Community
must stand firm and demand the necessary structural reforms. . .
Only when the Greeks also provide evidence that they
are serious [must we provide help]
Rainer Bruderle, FDP party leader in Bundestag.

We called Schaeuble a European weapon of self-destruction. This implies that he has been the brains and the force behind Germany's policy on the Greek debt crisis [now a crisis in several eurozone states since the Greek "rescue" plan of 2010]. Indeed. Angela Merkel, German chancellor [PM] does not seem very bright and takes her economic directives from Schaeuble, supported by most Germans. Since Germany is the largest successful economy in the eurozone and has the most money reserves, it can force its will on the rest of the EMU, which is what has happened. Yet the first austerity plan for Greece of 2010 has obviously failed. But no change in EMU policy is likely. Nor any admission of fault in the "rescue" plan itself. Schaeuble blames the Greeks. Now Greece may leave the eurozone, the EMU, which could lead to higher interest rates for other eurozone states and to eventual break up of the EMU. This would harmfully affect EU states like the UK that are outside the eurozone as well as the whole world economy. Hence Schaeuble is a European weapon of self-destruction.

Could a different rescue plan in Greece in 2010 have saved Greece? Maybe, but as said above, it would have had to provide an easy borrowing facility for Greece --not even necessarily as generous as the Marshall Plan was to Germany [see addendum below] but with reasonably low interest rates-- plus provisions for growth. Now it is probably too late to save Greece and/or keep it in the eurozone. Maybe the EMU itself can no longer be saved. News out of the G8 summit [5-19-2012] reports that Merkel resisted the calls by other G8 members for a focus on growth & stimulus over austerity. The eurozone which the Germans love so much may be on the way to "break up," as David Cameron, UK prime minister, wondered about the other day. The Germans have shown appalling harshness and stinginess in this affair. The German urge to punish may end up punishing the Germans too. Schaeuble himself seems at times to be playing a Gestapo officer in one of those old WW2 movies.

Nevertheless, the other eurozone [EMU] states and the IMF --mainly run by Europeans-- went along with this sad comedy, this farce of greed, harshness, stinginess and historical amnesia --which especially characterizes Germany. Doctor EU, heal thyself. And don't come to Israel with barely disguised proposals for having the Arabs do your dirty work, finishing Hitler's job in the name of "palestinian self-determination."

- - - - - - - - - - -ADDENDUM- - - - - -
More on the Marshall Plan & Germany from Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt
The 1953 London Debt Agreement, or the German debt

If West Germany could redeem its debt and rebuild its economy so soon after WWII it was thanks to the political will of its creditors, i.e. the United States and their main Western allies (United Kingdom and France). In October 1950 these three countries drafted a project in which the German federal government acknowledged debts incurred before and during the war. They joined a declaration to the effect that “the three countries agree that the plan include an appropriate satisfaction of demands towards Germany so that its implementation does not jeopardize the financial situation of the German economy through unwanted repercussions nor has an excessive effect on its potential currency reserves. The first three countries are convinced that the German federal government shares their view and that the restoration of German solvability includes an adequate solution for the German debt which takes Germany’s economic problems into account and makes sure that negotiations are fair to all participants.” |5|

. . . . .

The agreement set up the possibility to suspend payments and renegotiate conditions in the event that a substantial change limiting the availability of resources should occur. |7|

To make sure that the West German economy was effectively doing well and represented a stable key element in the Atlantic bloc against the Eastern bloc, allied creditors granted the indebted German authorities and companies major concessions that far exceeded debt relief. The starting point was that Germany had to be able to pay everything back while maintaining a high level of growth and improving the living standards of its population. They had to pay back without getting poorer. To achieve this creditors accepted first, that Germany pay its debt in its national currency, second, that Germany reduce importations (it could manufacture at home those goods that were formerly imported), |8| third, that it sell its manufactured goods abroad so as to achieve a positive trade balance. These various concessions were set down in the above-mentioned declaration. |9|

Another significant aspect was that the debt service depended on how much the German economy could afford to pay, taking the country’s reconstruction and the export revenues into account. The debt service/export revenue ratio was not to exceed 5%. This meant that West Germany was not to use more than one twentieth of its export revenues to pay its debt. In fact it never used more than 4.2% (except once in 1959).

Another exceptional measure was that interest rates were substantially reduced (between 0 and 5%).

Finally we have to consider the dollars the United States gave to West Germany: USD 1,173.7 million as part of the Marshall Plan from 3 April 1948 to 30 June 1952 with at least 200 million added from 1954 to 1961, mainly via USAID. [here Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt]

Egyptian Copt Blames Obama for Abetting Egyptian Chaos

Naguib Sawiris is one of the top businessmen in Egypt and a member of the Coptic Christian minority, the purest descendants of the ancient Egyptians. He shared his views of Obama in an interview with Style, a monthly magazine of the Italian paper, Corriere della Sera, just about a month after Obama's political intervention in Egypt --Mubarak must step down-- set off the series of events that seems likely to bring the anti-peace, anti-Jewish and anti-Christian Muslim Brotherhood to power in the Land of the Nile. Sawiris' words seem prophetic:

Style: . . . your position has recently changed; you were a supporter of Barack Obama and now, on the other hand, you criticize him bitterly.
NS: Like many I had placed so many hopes on him. But he has done little, too little, and today the United States is still thrashing about in the quagmire of a deep, aggressive crisis.
[Style di Corriere della Sera, March 2011]

Style: You bemoan the lack of action of a president who in a short time carried out a reform, such as the health reform for which decades would be needed in other countries.
NS: Apart from the fact that many, including myself, do not approve the way in which the health reform was carried out. . . But what was most needed for America in these years was a policy of economic and jobs recovery. . .

NS: If I stood for election in this country, I would pick up a lot of votes.
Style: And why don't you do it?
NS: It is complicated. I am a Christian and this is a Muslim country.

NS: I must say that I don't like President Barack Obama. He projects weakness, sends the wrong message, feeds too many expectations. . .

NS: We must be very tough and have no mercy on the terrorists. Whoever kills innocent persons in the name of religion deserves to die. It doesn't seem to me that Obama is firm in the struggle against Islamic terrorism. He is too conciliatory.
Style: Do you also consider as terrorists the Palestinians who are fighting against the Israelis?
NS: Yes, if they go to Tel Aviv to put a bomb in a discotheque. Yes, when they kill women and children with Hamas' rockets. Not when they struggle in Gaza against the Israeli occupation.

Style: And as a businessman, how do you judge Obama?
NS: . . . Frankly, there is nothing about him that I like. . .

Sawiris negotiated at one stage as Mubarak was falling with Omar Suleiman and the Egyptian opposition. He wants a Marshall Plan for Egypt funded by Europe, the USA and the Gulf states, in order to create jobs and guarantee stability in Egypt. He supported Omar Suleiman for the transitional period after Mubarak and also feared constitutional chaos.

NS: And then it is important that first the Constitution should be changed because with the present constitution Egypt might fall into juridical chaos, which might benefit the Muslim Brotherhood.
[Style di Corriere della Sera, March 2011]

This last statement by Sawiris was prophetic. Now we see that Egypt is in chaos in more ways than one. Its economy is failing, the state is running out of money needed to buy basic foods abroad, Muslim mobs attack native Christians, Islamist leaders --including of the Muslim Brotherhood-- and candidates for office want to go back to a state of war with Israel, etc etc. Sawiris openly calls Obama soft on Islamic terrorism. And Obama, by pushing Mubarak out and letting his "intelligence experts" [like Clapper] pretend that the Muslim Brotherhood was moderate ["largely secular"] or even letting it be said that the United States was not opposed to religious groups taking part in the Egyptian government, helped a great deal to bring on today's chaos and crisis in Egypt which threatens Middle Eastern peace and stability in the Mediterranean region.

Sawiris founded Orascom Telecom, the largest in the Middle East, which he sold not long ago. He also is chairman of Wind telecom in Italy and has other telecom interests. Forbes lists his net worth at over $2.9 billion.

Nazi Collaborator's Son Becomes President of France

Yes, I am referring to Francois Hollande of the Socialist Party. Is there some rule that says children of Nazis and Nazi collaborators cannot become "socialists." Of course, it might be unfair to point out that the Nazis called themselves "socialists," and that their party was a "workers party." To be precise: Nazional Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei [arbeiter is the German for workers].

OK, maybe the Nazis weren't real socialists, real mass murderers yes, but not real socialists. But nowadays who can explain what words like "socialist" or "left" or "right" mean? Be that as it may, Hubert Vedrine, another son of a Nazi collaborator --vichysste in polite French-- was the foreign minister in the last French socialist government, that of Lionel Jospin, up to 2002. Hubert was the son of Jean Vedrine, a high Vichy govt official. Hollande's father was Georges Hollande, a petainiste, that is, a supporter of the Vichy govt, and in later years a close associate of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, a pro-fascist, petainiste. Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Front party, now headed by his daughter, Marine Le Pen, was an assistant of Tixier-Vignancour.

Of course, one might say that the sins of the father should not be visited upon the son, that the son belongs to a political party with principles diametrically opposed to those of Petain, Tixier-Vignancour and Le Pen. However, how do we explain all of his, Hollande's, false promises during the election campaign? He was promising pie in the sky to the French electorate. He issued a list of 60 promises, whereas it is likely that only a few if any will be kept. False promises mean demagoguery. Typical of politicians of course. But Hollande went very far. There simply isn't the money for nearly all of his promises. And the Germans are not going to give it. It's our money and we earned it and we don't want to share it with lazy Greeks or spendthrift Frenchmen, etc, they argue. We might point out parenthetically that the Germans all too conveniently forget that their post-WW2 economic "miracle," the wirtschaftswunder, was made possible only by the generosity of the Americans through the Marshall Plan billions. Otherwise the Germans could have been left to dig and grope for food in the ruins and wreckage of Germany after another war that they had started.

Be that as it may, Hollande made many false promises. He also issued other lies. For instance, and this concerns Emet m'Tsiyon, he claimed in a recent interview [broadcast or rebroadcast by France24 on 7 May 2012, 11 pm Paris time], that if elected, he would try to persuade Israel to come back to the negotiating table with the "palestinians" in order to reach peace. However, this is a big lie because it was precisely the Arab side, the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmud Abbas, that has refused to negotiate with Israel for almost four years, that is, since September 2008. Even though Israel had agreed to suspend settlement activity for ten months from November 2009 to September 2010, Abbas did no more than show up for a few photos with Netanyahu in New York and then went back to his refusal to negotiate. To be sure, Abbas has made demands on Israel as preconditions for negotiations. The main demand made by Abbas is for Israel to stop settlement activity, to stop all building in Jewish settlements over the 1949 armistice line. But this is a violation of the PA/PLO's commitment and agreement in the 1993 Oslo Accords to leave settlements and Jerusalem for negotiation as final status issues, not as preconditions for negotiation.
Isn't Hollande aware of that? One can only assume that he is lying by depicting Israel as the party unwilling to negotiate whereas the truth is the opposite. One assumes, furthermore, that he knows that he is lying.

Obama & FDR --- Who Was in Charge of the War Department during WW2 & the Holocaust?

In the Spring of election year, a young president's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of reelection. As in 2008, Obama is sweet-talking Jews, some of whom have reportedly escaped from the Democratic Party's corral because of his anti-Israel policies since his inauguration in 2009. He sweet-talked Armenian-Americans too in 2008. Once elected of course, he violated his solemn promise to them to recognize the Armenian genocide. Armenians too have escaped from the corral.

In his efforts to hold on to Jewish and other voters, Mr Promise Breaker has compared himself and had himself compared to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, long a hero of the Democratic Party.
But if the comparison is valid, should it be seen as a merit or demerit of Obama?

That brings us to the AIPAC Conference more than a month ago. In his speech there, Prime Minister Netanyahu brought up a historic fact not known to the general public nor even to many people who consider themselves well-informed. This was the rejection by the US War Department in 1944 of a request by a Jewish organization, the World Jewish Congress, to bomb the crematoria at Auschwitz [Oswiecim in Polish] and the railway lines leading there. Such actions would have significantly delayed the ongoing mass murder process. Here is the relevant excerpt from Netanyahu's speech:

Some commentators would have you believe that stopping Iran from getting the bomb is more dangerous than letting Iran have the bomb.

They say that a military confrontation with Iran would undermine the efforts already underway, that it would be ineffective, and that it would provoke even more vindictive action by Iran. I’ve heard these arguments before. In fact, I’ve read them before. In my desk, I have copies of an exchange of letters between the World Jewish Congress and the US War Department. The year was 1944. The World Jewish Congress implored the American government to bomb Auschwitz. The reply came five days later. I want to read it to you. Such an operation could be executed only by diverting considerable air support essential to the success of our forces elsewhere…..and in any case would be of such doubtful efficacy that it would not warrant the use of our resources….And here’s the most remarkable sentence of all. And I quote: Such an effort might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans. Think about that – “even more vindictive action” — than the Holocaust. [full text of speech here-- texts of letters to & from War Dept here]

Now just who was in charge of the executive branch of the US Government at that time, 1944? Who was ultimately responsible for the conduct of the war and for the setting of war aims? Who was the commander-in-chief of US armed forces in WW2? Yes, it was none other than the same Franklin Delano Roosevelt to whom Obama and his flunkeys compare him in order to place him on the same pedestal of idolization on which FDR has unjustly remained since his death. If the comparison is valid, it is not to Obama's credit.

This is not meant as an endorsement of Republicans. The president at the time of the Holocaust was not a Republican, however, but a Democrat. He was indeed idolized by millions of Americans including most Jews at the time. We can't know what a Republican president would have done if there had been one at the time. We do know that representatives and senators of both the Democratic & Republican parties were sympathetic to the Jews during the Shoah. One of the notable ones being Hugh Scott, a representative from Pennsylvania, later a senator. Scott was instrumental in bringing news of the Holocaust to the American public through a discussion with a volunteer with the Bergson Group to whom Scott provided little known information. Yet the Dulles family, Allen, John Foster and Eleanor, who held influential offices in the US Government and were also Republicans, were not sympathetic. But clearly, Jews cannot trust Democrats, especially when their lips overflow with generalities and platitudes about stopping atrocities and genocide.

Charles Malik: The West Is the Problem

Anti-Zionism is the anti-imperialism of fools.

Charles Malik was a former president of the UN General Assembly, a former foreign minister of Lebanon, and a professor of philosophy. He was not only a knowledgeable insider in world politics but had the intellect to understand what was happening in a historical perspective. Malik was deeply disappointed by the West's failure to defend Lebanon as --in part and imperfectly-- an outpost of Western civilization in the Middle East. In 1984 he wrote an op ed in the Wall Street Journal where he stated:

For months now the world has been focusing on Lebanon as a problem. The problem is not Lebanon or the importance of Lebanon. The problem is the West. Indeed, the importance of Lebanon is precisely that it raises the problem of the West. Lebanon would never have been a problem if the West itself were not the problem. And the West is not only the problem but also the solution. That is its singular greatness. And the solution is to be true to the deepest value of the West: the primacyof the spirit and the freedom of the soul. [WSJ 3-28-1984]

To confirm what Malik wrote, Lee Smith points out how US policy [he refers mainly to the Obama administration] has befriended the Syrian Assad regime despite its many many offenses against the United States and against Americans:

To survive, Damascus needs the world to ignore what it is up to. It particularly needs indifference in Washington, where the Obama administration has seemed sadly oblivious to the fact that what a regime does at home is indicative of how it will act abroad—or, in the case of Syria, a state sponsor of terror and ally of Iran, how it has acted over the last 40 years, targeting especially American citizens, interests, and allies.
For all that, the administration just wants the Syria issue, the uprising, the opposition, to go away. It would prefer not to deal with it and thus has come up with all sorts of excuses to do just that.
It was five months, and many thousand dead, into the uprising before Obama called on Assad to step down. Instead of leading, the president tasked Syria policy out to Turkey, then to the Arab League, which sent a monitoring delegation led by a former Sudanese intelligence chief suspected of war crimes in Darfur.

Smith goes farther. He argues that its position on Syria, since it asked Assad to leave office, does not indicate real opposition to Assad but rather reluctance to see the Assad clan's fall. Smith raises the question of where the Obama administration and the State Dept really stand:

Unfortunately, the White House has painted itself into a corner. Because the administration has never really wanted to see Assad fall, it has talked only of stopping the violence . . . , with the unstated provision that once the murders stop, the murderer still rules. . . .

The question of where Obama & Co. really stand arises concerning the Iranian nuke bomb project as well. Bear in mind that Iran's ayatollahs are major supporters of the Assad regime and vice versa:

What’s odd is that the White House has let on, through various media surrogates, that it may come to accept the inevitability of the Iranian nuclear program and move toward a policy of containment and deterrence. . . . In its dithering on Syria, the administration shows a lack of seriousness in dealing with Iran. . . .

Yet the Assad regime, going back to 1983 at least, has a record of killing offcial Americans as well as American troops in both Lebanon and Iraq:

Under Assad the Damascus airport was a jihadist transport hub from which foreign fighters were either bused directly to the Iraqi border to fight U.S. troops, or warehoused in Syrian prisons until they could be put to some use. Washington knew very well that Syrian intelligence was working with al Qaeda because it had evidence of it in the Sinjar documents, showing that 90 percent of the foreign fighters in Iraq were coming through Syria. When a series of suicide bombings killed hundreds of Iraqis in the fall of 2009, the Obama administration hushed Iraqi officials who pointed a finger at Damascus. In other words, al Qaeda’s position in Syria was a problem U.S. officials were content to ignore when, with the help of Assad’s intelligence agents, the organization was killing American troops and Iraqis. But now the fact that al Qaeda elements, which may still be under the control of Syrian intelligence, are targeting regime installations, is a reason not to support the opposition [here Smith is pointing at Obama administration hypocrisy]. . . . The regime in Damascus that has so much Syrian blood on its hands also, along with its allies in Iran and Hezbollah, has killed many thousands of Americans. In Lebanon, U.S. Marines, diplomats, and intelligence officials were slaughtered by Iranian and Syrian assets; in Iraq, the Syrians and Iranians backed both Sunni and Shia fighters in their war against American troops, leaving almost 5,000 dead and many more thousands wounded [The Weekly Standard, 5 March 2012]

So the Assad regime in Syria has been an enemy of the United States and of Americans, including rank and file soldiers plus diplomats and intelligence officials. Yet the Syrian Assad regime was being coddled by the State Dept in the mid-1970s, under Kissinger and since then. The Baker-Hamilton Report drawn up for the Bush 2 administration in about 2006 recommended helping solve all Middle Eastern problems by pressuring Israel to give up the Golan Heights to Assad-ruled Syria. Apparently, Israel's welfare was secondary to Assad regime welfare. Or just how does one explain the situation that Lee Smith describes together with my extending the picture of Washington indulgence of the Assads back to the mid-1970s?

Cash Short EU Gives Greece Ultimatum, While Donating Liberally to the PLO/PA

REVISED, LINKs ADDED 2-20&3-19&20-2012

Anti-Zionism is the anti-imperialism of fools

On February 7, this year, the EU announced a grant of funds to the Palestinian Authority, as reported by the PLO/PA's press agency, WAFA:

The European Union and Sweden Tuesday contributed €24.7 million to the payment of the January salaries and pensions of around 84,300 Palestinian civil servants and pensioners in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, according to an EU press release.

The European Commission made €22.5 million contribution and Sweden made €2.2 million. [here]

The next day Luxembourg, an EU member state, announced a donation of 15 million euros to the UNRWA, also for the benefit of Palestinian Arabs:

". . . in order to bring aid to the Palestinian people. . . The UNRWA which carries out remarkable and still indispensable work on behalf of 5 million [sic!] Palestinian refugees, is Luxembourg's principal partner in matters of aid to the Palestinian people,"

quoth the Luxembourg development minister.

A significant point about this aid was made by UNRWA's commissioner-general, Filippo Grandi:

In these times of political and economic uncertainty, both in this region [the ME] and worldwide, Luxembourg's increasing commitment in favor of our work is welcome. [original below]

Le Luxembourg donne 15 millions d'euros à l'UNRWA pour "porter assistance au peuple palestinien" Le Luxembourg a annoncé mercredi qu'il faisait un don de 15 millions d'euros à l'Office de secours et de travaux des Nations Unies pour les "réfugiés de Palestine" au Proche-Orient (UNRWA). L'accord a été signé par la ministre luxembourgeoise du Développement Marie-Josée Jacobs et le commissaire général de l'UNRWA, Filippo Grandi. "En ces temps d'incertitude politique et économique tant dans cette région que globalement, l'engagement croissant du Luxembourg en faveur de notre travail est le bienvenu", a déclaré Grandi. "L'UNRWA, qui poursuit son travail remarquable et encore indispensable au service de 5 millions de Palestiniens réfugiés, est le principal partenaire du Luxembourg lorsqu'il s'agit deporter assistance au peuple palestinien", a affirmé la ministre Jacobs. [Guysen News, 2-8-2012]

These are times of political and economic uncertainty indeed. Greece, a fellow member of the EU, is on the verge of bankruptcy, partly of its own doing and partly due to very mistaken policies of the EU [led by Germany] since 2010 and of the International Monetary Fund [since Christine Lagarde took over] to force a severe austerity program on Greece as a supposed remedy for its economic ills, while not providing Greece with a facility for borrowing funds at reasonable rates of interest, particularly without implementing the eurobonds idea, and thereby ensuring that Greece would not be able to pay off its ever increasing sovereign debt. That is, without growth and without a way to borrow at reasonable rates Greece could neither grow economically nor pay its debts. Failure of the "rescue plan" was foreseen by some economists back in 2010.

Nevertheless, all the while, economic experts from the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF [since Lagarde's takeover] have been making all sorts of demands on Greece. Among them Greece must cut the minimum wage by 22% [according to Natalie Savaricas, France24], cut 150,000 public sector jobs by 2015 [in a country of ca. 9 million pop.], accept a commissioner from abroad for the tax administration, and reduce public health service reimbursements for purchases of medicine, etc. Germany moreover, wanted an outside commissioner to veto Greek government policies, which the EU Commission has not yet agreed to.

Meanwhile, the PA is faring much differently.

The European Commission's contribution comes from the €155 million package of financial assistance to the recurrent expenditures of the Palestinian Authority committed for 2012, said the release.

The European Commission agreed to a request by Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to frontload €116.2 million of this package in the first five months of 2012 in order to help the Palestinian Authority meet its urgent financial needs.

The €2.2 million contribution by the Swedish Government is part of its continuous support to the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian people.

Most of the European Union's assistance to the Palestinian Authority is channeled through PEGASE, the financial mechanism launched in 2008 to support the PA Reform and Development Plan (2008-2010) and the subsequent PA Palestinian National Plan (2011-2013).

Since February 2008, €1.23 billion have been disbursed through the PEGASE Direct Financial Support programs. [here]

No mention here of austerity. No demands to reduce expenditures, let's say, on the PA's print & broadcast media which regularly spread genocidal hatred of Jews. No talk of a special commissioner to oversee tax collection. No demand by Germany for a commissioner with power to veto Palestinian Authority policies. If there is accountability to the EU for funds spent or if there is EU supervision of fund disbursement, then why are there Nazi-like propaganda and genocide incitement in Palestinian Authority institutions: TV, radio, official PA newspapers, schools, mosques, etc.?? Yet, the Greeks are held to standards and demands are made of them. But no ultimatums for Arabs. It doesn't bother anybody at the EU that many if not most of the PA's civil servants are superfluous and indeed some of them are involved in creating and spreading hate propaganda against Jews or in terrorism now or in the past. Yet Greece is to fire 150,000 civil servants.

Furthermore, after the Greek parliament followed the government in accepting the demands of the EU, ECB, and IMF, new obstacles were raised to Greece getting the needed and promised funds. And one of those holding up the funds was very conspicuously Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the Euro Zone, the EuroGroup, who also just so happens to be prime minister of Luxembourg, which was so happy to be helpful and accommodating with the Palestinian Authority by supplying additional funds to UNRWA.

Indeed, helping the PA/PLO seems to be a paramount, supreme policy of the EU. It may also be EU policy to make propaganda against Israel, considering the many millions in subsidies by the EU and member states to Arab and pro-Arab/pro-PLO/anti-Israel NGOs that carry out propaganda and agitate against Israel. We don't hear of reductions in funds for the PA and the pro-PA NGOs despite the Euro debt crisis.

Meanwhile, Greece is treated differently. Moreover, it is not the only EU country in financial trouble. Ireland and Portugal too have received EU bail out funds, while Spain and Italy are under watch for fear of financial collapse, while Belgium, France and even Germany are seen as not entirely healthy financially, as under potential threat. The EU & its member states need money. Lots of it. But there is room for funding for the Palestinian Authority --cheerfully and helpfully with few or no questions asked.

So what explains the differential treatment of the Palestinian Authority and of Greece by the EU? The PA produces little, its economy is mainly based on donations from the EU, USA, wealthy Arab states and Japan. Much of its employed work force works for the PA administration and "security" services. Its corruption is notorious. It spreads hatred and incites war and genocide through its press, TV, radio, schools, and govt-supervised mosques. Meanwhile, Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign affairs commissioner, is eager to see a PLO/PA state created, whether or not it makes peace with Israel. Why are the PA and Greece treated differently?

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Bernard-Henri Levy BHL on the Greek debt crisis.
Executive of the German firm Bosch wants Greece out of the EU [or only out of the eurozone?]
Paul Krugman thinks the EU failed to solve the crisis, partly due to their arrogance.
Charles Wyplosz points out six mistakes of Germany's finance minister.
Sarkozy & Merkel make demands on Greece [here--see video]

Qui links are in Italian, Ici links in French:
Wolfgang Schaeuble, German finance minister, speaks out against Athens [qui]
Jacques Attali on the Eurocrisis & Germany's role [ici]
The Troika's demands on Greece as of 30 January 2012 [qui]
Athens accepts cuts [qui]
Krugman's solution, print money, among other things [qui]
Economist Charles Wyplosz criticizes German dictates to the EU & Greece [qui]
The EU wants guarantees from Greece[qui]
Economist Jose Antonio Ocampo finds fault with Schaeuble and German policy [qui]
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3-19-2012 Catherine Ashton, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice President of the European Commission, displays --in her shallow & pedestrian manner-- her warm sympathies for the Arab cause and for the notion of an Arab state in the Land of Israel, while drawing an absurd parallel between youth in Gaza and the Jewish victims of the massacre today in Toulouse, France.
The EU & Catherine Ashton unblock another 35 million euros for the palestinian authority in an agreement with PA prime minister Salem Fayyad.
3-20-2012 Jonathan Tobin comments on Catherine Ashton's fatuous comparison of children deliberately murdered in Toulouse & Norway [by Breivik last year] with Belgian children killed in a bus accident and with Gazan children who may have died as a byproduct of wars and battles started by the Islamists in Gaza in their endeavors to murder Israeli civilians, including children.
Jonathan Neumann sees Ashton's fatuousness as allowing us a peek at the EU's real anti-Israel agenda and proving once again that the EU cannot be an "honest broker" between Jews and Arabs.
Elliott Abrams points out that despite Ashton's claim to have been misunderstood, "her remarks quite obviously drew a parallel." She did not explicitly deny --in her response to criticism-- that she sees a parallel between the accidental deaths of the Belgian children, unquestionably tragic, with the deliberate murder of Jewish children in Toulouse and Arab children in Gaza who are often used as human shields. For Abrams, this failure to explicitly deny a parallel confirms that she indeed wanted to draw a parallel, however false it may have been. She may be too stupid to understand this.
Walter Z Laqueur demonstrates the foolish illusions of the admirers of the EU and the "Arab Spring."

The "Arab Spring" Teaches Lessons about the Past

UPDATING 2-9&11&12&14&25-2012 at bottom

Anti-Zionism is the anti-imperialism of fools.

Let's take the "Arab Spring" at face value. It is a struggle for freedom & democracy by peoples long oppressed by their own governments. Let's overlook the cultural pathologies that infect both Arab regimes/dictatorships and Arab peoples. Taking this supposed Arab version of the 1848 "Springtime of the Nations" at face value, we are left with the indisputable fact that Arab regimes have terribly oppressed their peoples. But this was a fact many years ago.

In 1982, Syria's Assad regime, then led by young Bashar's father, Hafiz, slaughtered thousands in the rebel-dominated city of Hama [Muslim Brotherhood rebels]. Estimates of those slaughtered range from 10,000 to 40,000. On June 27, 1980, about 800 political prisoners were released from the Syrian prison at the Palmyra oasis [Tadmor in Hebrew, Tadmur in Arabic]. They were released from the jail and were walking towards a place to catch buses. While walking on the road they were attacked by helicopter gunships and slaughtered, two years before Hama [see another version of the massacre here]. Even Tom Friedman, that notorious apologist for Arab cruelty and ruthlessness, used the Hama incident as a metaphor for all Middle Eastern cruelty and ruthlessness. He calls them: Hama Rules.

So the ruthless cruelty and barbarity, the murderousness of the Assad regime, were known --at least to those who wanted to know-- thirty years ago. The regime was quite capable of slaughtering fellow Arabs. Even the supposed cherished darlings of the Arabs, the Palestinian Arab refugees. Robert Hatem, a militiaman in Lebanon, wrote in a book that Syria was behind the Sabra-Shatila massacre of Palestinian Arabs in Beirut (1982) through the instrumentality of his own leader, Elie Hobeika, a Christian Phalangist militia leader secretly in the service of Hafiz Assad.

In the 1970s, Hafiz Assad had the Lebanese political leader Kamal Jumblatt --father of Walid Jumblatt-- assassinated. These assassinations were repeated in the year 2005 and since in Lebanon, starting with Rafiq Hariri, former Lebanese prime minister. Hariri's murder has been attributed to Hizbullah operatives by the International Tribunal for Lebanon. But the Lebanese know that Hizbullah operates in the service of Syria & Iran. The top terrorist of Hizbullah, `Imad Mughniyyah, lived outside Lebanon in Damascus under Assad regime protection [until his own assassination in February 2008].

Again, Assad regime murderousness has been no secret for 35 years or more. Yet Assad's Syria has been in good odor at the UN "human rights" commission and at its replacement, the "human rights" Council. Western "Leftists" and Western haters of Israel flocked to Damascus to pay homage to Assad Senior and Junior. George Galloway, the British hater of Israel and toady to Arab dictators, openly admired the Assad regime and sought its aid for an alleged "humanitarian" operation to "Free Gaza" and shame Israel in world public opinion through a "Gaza Freedom Flotilla." Likewise, the American Friends Service Committee, the social action arm of the Quaker Church [Society of Friends] and recipient of US Govt funds, was eager to carry out a "Free Gaza Flotilla" against Israel, denouncing Israel's partial blockade of Gaza which was and is ruled by Hamas, an Islamist, jihadist terrorist organization which happens to have its headquarters in --you guessed it-- Syria where the top Hamas leadership enjoyed Assad regime protection and sponsorship. In other words, Westerners who supposedly and avowedly wanted to liberate Arabs collaborated with the butchers of Arabs [and of Jews too, of course]. Michael Rubin points out the AFSC's hypocrisy here. Rubin asks: "Where's the Syria Flotilla?" We have not heard of Galloway or the AFSC or the Free Gaza gang or the "International Solidarity Movement" organizing a Free Syria Flotilla or doing anything to alleviate the suffering of Syrian Arabs, although every day lately brings reports of scores or even hundreds killed in Homs and elsewhere in Syria by those whom Galloway obsequiously called the defenders of Arab dignity.

Not only "human rights" fakers but diplomats and high ranking politicians in the West have been eager to win the favor of the Assads, Senior and Junior both. Several years ago, James Baker, a Bush-family hanger on, secretary of state for the first Prez Bush, got together with Lee Hamilton, a former US congressional representative and mentor to Prez Obama, drawing up a report that envisioned Israel surrendering the Golan Heights --which enjoyed a large Jewish population in Roman times and overlooks Israeli towns and the Sea of Galilee-- to Syria under Junior Assad. Israeli surrender of the Golan to Syria would supposedly do wonders for American interests in the Middle East, including stopping Syrian aid for terrorists attacking American troops in Iraq. In February 2008, Zbigniew Brzezinski, another Obama mentor and Prez Jimmy Carter's national insecurity advisor, went to Damascus to notify the Assad regime that Obama in the White House would mean a friend of theirs in power in Washington. Providentially, while Zbig was in Damascus, arch-terrorist mass murderer `Imad Mughniyyah was assassinated there.

Another Washington well-wisher of the Assads was Martin Indyk, ex-US ambassador to Israel, who tried to arrange a meeting in Damascus in 2009 for high-ranking Americans with Junior Assad and other regime personalities. One of those that Indyk wanted to bring to meet Assad was former US president, Bill Clinton, of "I-did-not-have-sex-with-that-woman fame." Fortunately, for whatever reason, the meeting did not come off.

To be sure, not all of the friends and would-be friends of the Assad regime or its allied Iranian regime are Americans or British, far from it. The Turkish intelligence chief obtained custody of Iranians fighting in Syria to suppress the uprising in behalf of the regime --and captured by rebels. He released them back to Iran after their capture in Syria. He was working in collaboration with the Turkish jihadist organization, IHH, tied to the present Turkish govt and sponsor of the "Free Gaza Flotilla" of 2010, and which in particular had sent the jihadist thugs on the Mavi Marmara --a ship under lease to it-- who attacked Israeli naval commandos who had boarded the ship to enforce the anti-Hamas blockade of Gaza. Michael Rubin commented: "The IHH may describe itself as a humanitarian organization, but in practice, its main goal is to provide aid and comfort to terrorists."

There is no "Free Syria Flotilla" by the usual "human rights" campaigners against Israel. There is no counterpart of the "Goldstone Commission" for Syria, no fact-finding mission to Syria sent by the UN "human rights" Council as was sent to Gaza.

Just in the past week, on February 5, while Syrian civilians were being slaughtered, bombarded with artillery shells in Homs, Human Rights Watch held a press conference in Jerusalem at the usual location for such events --the American Colony Hotel-- to denounce alleged Israeli abuses of Arab human rights. On that same day, this story was the top main item on the HRW homepage. But we see no comparable actions on the part of HRW in favor of Syrian Arab victims of their own government. [UPDATING: on 9 February this neglect of the story of civilians being slaughtered in Homs was finally corrected. On that day the story went up as the top item. However, the agony of Homs under bombardment had been going on for weeks. No urgency on HRW's part, of course]

We see that for decades, Western powers and other great powers, including Washington, were quite willing, indeed eager, to be friends with the Syrian Assad regime. All that time, wild, crude mendacious Judeophobia, implicitly genocidal, was emanating from Damascus against the Jews and Israel, including endorsement of the 1840 ritual murder libel in Damascus against the local Jewish community. This Judeophobia did not deter either the EU or USA from befriending the Assad regime. And some liars and some lunatics in the West believe that Israel controls Western policy.

Furthermore, we see that among those who worked against Israel in the name of humanitarianism and peace and human rights --as in the Gaza Flotilla/Mavi Marmara affair-- there was and still is a cynical disregard of humanitarianism and peace and human rights when Arabs oppress fellow Arabs, slaughter fellow Arabs, deny rights to fellow Arabs, and so on. So the real motive of the "peace," "human rights" and "humanitarian" assaults on Israel in the past was not as advertised. Can we exclude the possibility that humanitarian concern, and so forth, for Palestinian Arabs concealed and conceals rancorous Judeophobia and contempt for the rights and welfare of Arabs --as well as of Jews??

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UPDATING 2-9-2012
Lessons about past indictments and excoriations of Israel on moralistic grounds:
1- The Western press and electronic media have in the past minimized the severity and horror of Arab govt assaults on their own peoples. This can be applied to Iraq, Egypt, Sudan and of course Syria.
2- Western "human rights" and "peace" campaigners have neglected to a great extent Arab govt oppression and brutality against their own peoples. Western governments have done the same for decades, in step with their own "Leftist," "human rights" and "humanitarian" groups, or perhaps the moralistic "civil society" groups in Western lands were in step with their own governments.
3- Therefore, the Western moralizers, whether in govt or in civil society groups cared little for the human rights and welfare of Arabs if this could not be blamed on Israel. Therefore, the moralistic attacks on Israel were pretexts for Judeophobia.

Palmyra prison massacre of June 27, 1980. According to the French press that I read around that time, the prisoners were killed by helicopter gunships. Another version has troops entering the prison and killing the prisoners in their cells.
2-11-2012 Lee Smith uncovers the shameless toadying of Western elites, journalists, & academics to the Assads, father & son & their hangers-on [here]
2-12-2012 The late Franklin H Littell wrote back in 1990 [Jerusalem Post, 10-28] about Syrian slaughter of several hundred prisoners of war by the Syrian army. This was accomplished in October 1989 when the Syrian army --commanded by today's Assad regime-- was crushing [with US State Dept approval] the last remnants of Lebanese independence. The troops slaughtered were Lebanese army troops under General Aoun. These were Lebanese army troops, once again, and they had surrendered to the superior force and armaments of the Syrian invaders. Slaughtering them was clearly a violation of international law, but that did not matter to the "international community." Yet this "community," the UN, the Arab League, EU, the OIC, US, did not complain. International law, which is so often brought up when it seems that violations can be imputed to Israel, was largely disregarded worldwide when Syria clearly violated the international laws of war. The horror of the lack of international response or reprimand at that time is not lessened by the fact that Aoun has since switched sides since returning from France in 2005, apparently seeing no way for Lebanon to free itself from Syrian-Hizbullah domination and choosing joining the enemy as the safest course, that is, he likely saw allying with Syria and its Hizbullah catspaws as the safest course.

Fundamentally, Aoun was acquiescing to the pro-Syrian position throughout the years of the Great Powers, the UN, EU, etc. Franklin Littell points out the pro-Syrian policy of President Bush I which was not much different from that of Obama until embarassment over Assad regime brutality pushed Obama to demanding that Assad leave office several months after he had begun slaughtering his own civilian population. It took Obama and Hilary several months to realize --or to acknowledge-- what was going on. Until Assad's brutality in his own country was obvious to all, Obama and Hilary had always referred to him sympathetically [Assad was "a reformer"], as previous administrations had done for his father. Franklin Littell wrote in 1990 about Syrian completion of the takeover of Lebanon in October 1990:
"For an American, a most wretched aspect is the role the White House and State Department have played. They threw away a stable Lebanon, rescued from terrorist invaders [by Israel] when it was handed to them in 1982 [by Israel]. They apparently gave the signal to Assad that the US would not interfere. Assad [Senior], like Hitler in 1938 at the time of the Austrian Anschluss, had nothing to fear from the world." [Jerusalem Post, 28 October 1990]. Note that the American president at that time was not Obama but his supposed Republican antithesis, George Bush I.
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2-25-2012 Martin Sherman uses current events in Syria & Egypt to show the foolishness of Israeli leaders in the past.