Israel Hayom..
18 July '13..
Twelve-year-old Suleiman ran away from Syria alone to a refugee camp in Turkey after his entire family was murdered by Syrian President Bashar Assad's army in the Aleppo massacre. His family's fate is not unique, and it tells the story of an entire nation. More than 100,000 people have been murdered in the Syrian civil war since March 2011. But Europe has not said a word.
Young Pakistani Malala Yousafzai, 16, was shot in the head last October for leading a social resistance to the Taliban. She recently spoke to the U.N. about students, especially female, being murdered because of Islamist extremists' desire to keep women from completing their educations. And Europe has not said a word.
The recent Egyptian overthrow saw 57 supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi massacred in one day. In Iran, adulterous women are stoned, in Saudi Arabia women are fighting for the right to drive a car, though it seems as though they will have to give up this round. Iran is building a naval base in Sudan to deliver weapons systems to Assad and Hezbollah. But Europe has not said a word.
The Shiite-Sunni war claims the lives of hundreds of innocents every month, not only in Syria but in Iraq and Bahrain as well. The war waged by Islamic extremists against intellectual progress exacts a heavy toll on women and young girls, part of the Islamists' declaration of intent. But Europe has not said a word.
The only place were one can really find human rights in the Middle East is Israel. One could argue about the enforcement of rights, or the stalled peace talks and who is to blame for their stasis. Yet civil and human rights exist, as do progress, a culture of critiquing the government, law, court houses and international laws. But Europe chooses to exercise its right to hate.
In the Middle Eastern realm that is filled with indiscriminate killing, the European Union decided to stop cooperating with the Israeli bodies working in Judea and Samaria, Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem and in the Golan Heights. Twenty-eight countries in the enlightened, progressive union decided that the Golan Heights settlements were worse and more worthy of condemnation than any massacre taking place a few miles away on the other side of the border. Hypocrisy at its fullest.
But hypocrisy is not the only guiding principle for the nations of the EU, nor are the economic interests it has with the United Arab Emirates or the sentiments of the Muslim voters in Europe, it is the pure anti-Semitism that rejects the Jewish people's right to be the sovereign rulers and inhabitants of their own country -- without the criminal foreign intervention intended to bring it to its knees.
I cannot find any other reason for this bizarre development. The asymmetrical equation between the deafening silence to the deaths of innocents in Arab countries contrasted with the scathing condemnation Europe and its representatives in dozens of organizations working in Israel with European funding and the decision to de facto boycott Israel companies because of the stalled peace process. The decision-makers will make their judgment call on us as a people to remember the unfathomable hatred in Europe against the Jews that has existed for some 2,000 years, and not be taken aback by their latest move against Israel. It is not new, and Israeli leadership did not cause it.
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5029
The writer of this op-ed is a senior member of the Im Tirtzu organization
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