The EU’s Think Tank: Engage Hamas and Islamist Movements; Iranian Nuclear Weapons Not a Threat

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
24 March '10

“Stephen Spender [the great British poet] said to me recently, `Don’t you feel that any time during the past ten years you have been able to foretell events better than, say, the [government]? I had to agree to this….Where I feel that people like us understand the situation better than so-called experts is not in any power to foretell specific events, but in the power to grasp what kind of world we are living in.”
--George Orwell, War Diary, June 8, 1940

Does the flow of reports from the EU's official research center advocating engagement with Hamas, Hizballah, and Muslim Brotherhoods as well as negated any threat from Iranian nuclear weapons show the direction of European policy? In the face of the greatest challenge to freedom and stability at present, many institutions are on the other side.

The most recent paper, entitled, “Engaging Hamas: Rethinking the Quartet Principles,” is written by Carolin Goerzig, a fellow at the Institute. Other than having visited the Gaza Strip, it isn't clear what her qualifications are.

Here's how the paper is explained on the think tank's site: "Progress can only be made towards peace in the Middle East by engaging--not isolating--Hamas, without whom there can be no viable Palestinian state. Hamas’ acceptance of the Quartet Principles is a precondition for negotiations, but as Carolin Goerzig argues, it is time for a paradigm shift."

But actually she argues that acceptance should not be a precondition to pro-Hamas activities by the EU. And did anyone consider that with Hamas there can be no viable Palestinian state--it's already staged one violent coup against the Palestinian Authority--or Israeli-Palestinian peace.

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