Now, like America over the decades, European countries can watch as their governing bodies fall prey to pro-Israel lobbyists ready to propose AIPAC-like legislation favoring Israel, especially censorship and defunding of organizations and critics of Israel. According to this report by Cecile Surasky of Muzzlewatch, the American based Israel Lobby organization, American Jewish Committee, is expanding operations in Europe in order to influence perceptions of Israel, whose brand went into the tank after the Gaza massacre a year ago, but also, presumably to work to influence legislation and elections in key European countries.
The AJC already maintains offices in Berlin, Brussels (Transatlantic Institute), Geneva (UN Watch), Paris and Rome.
Now that the Likud party under Netanyahu has pretty much nullified Obama’s Cairo pleas for humanitarian treatment of the Palestinians and his intent to deliver the two states solution, there is still Europe to deal with.
American Jewish Committee builds Israel lobby in Europe
February 7 2010
The terrific global news service, Inter Press Service, has an interesting article which suggests that in light of concern about waning American power, the US-based Israel Lobby, namely the American Jewish Committee and a few others, is setting up shop in the EU to replicate their success in making criticism of Israel out of bounds. They’re urging that funds to human rights groups that criticize Israeli policies as racist or defacto apartheid be cut off. Hmmm.
Given the undeniable disaster thus far known as Obama and company’s efforts to make peace in Israel and Palestine, it is meaningful that the balance of power is shifting globally. As good as the AJC may be at invoking real forms of anti-Jewish hatred to shut decent people up about Israel, they won’t get the welcome reception they’ve had here in the US. Meanwhile, since it’s absolutely clear that Israel won’t give Palestinians the rights to which they are entitled without pressure, let’s rejoice that finally, the question may not have to be resolved in the halls of Congress after all.
Surasky quotes this article from ipsnew.net:
MIDEAST: Pro-Israel Lobbies Work on Europe
David Cronin
BRUSSELS, Feb 2 (IPS) – Defenders of Israel’s aggressive stance have for many years been recognised as a powerful force shaping United States foreign policy. A less well-known fact is that the pro-Israel lobby has been making a concerted effort to strengthen its presence in Europe.
The lobby’s determination to make an impression on European Union policy-makers was exemplified by a new booklet published on Jan. 28.
Titled `Squaring the Circle?: EU-Israel Relations and the Peace Process in the Middle East’, the booklet advocates that EU should “rebalance its priorities” and pursue closer relations with Israel regardless of whether progress is made in resolving the conflict with the Palestinians.
Unlike the plethora of publications on EU affairs that quickly fade into obscurity, there are good reasons to believe that this one will not go unnoticed in the corridors of power.
First, it was published by the Centre of European Studies, the official think-tank for the network of Christian Democrat and conservative parties that dominate European governments.
Secondly, its author, Emanuele Ottolenghi, has already demonstrated his capability to catch the eyes of politicians by penning several pamphlets for Labour Friends of Israel, a group that boasts of the top figures in Britain’s ruling party among its members.
Ottolenghi is the director of the Transatlantic Institute. Also styling itself as a think-tank, this Brussels-based institute was set up by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in 2004.
“The AJC is the foreign policy wing of the Israel lobby,” says Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, a researcher in Scotland’s University of Strathclyde, who monitors the activities of hawkish pro-Israel groups for the website neoconeurope.eu “The two places that it has decided to focus on most are Latin America and Europe. This is because it has a sense that American power might be in decline.”
Read on at the LINK:
It may be noted that the AJC had previously tried to convince EU organizations that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic and that funding of NGOs that criticize Israel can be considered a general slur on Jews. In spite of Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian people for over 40 years, while it colonized their lands under government after government, to criticize these actions is fundamentally anti-Semitic. Furthermore, the AJC contended that anyone who calls the establishment of the state of Israel a “racist endeavour” in spite of its Arab-Jew segregation laws, or which compare Israel’s attacks on the Palestinians to the behavior of the Nazis during the Second World War, as a Austrian bishop did a few years ago after visiting the West Bank, is pure anti-Semitism.
Likewise, those who depict Israel as an “apartheid” regime, are necessarily anti-Semites. Was it not Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who just the other day cautioned Israel that if it does not provide independence for the Palestinians, it will inevitably become an Apartheid society?
Along with the AJC, other pro-Israel organizations, the European Jewish Congress, B’nai B’rith, and the European Friends of Israel (EFI), have opened offices in Brussels. During Israel’s offensive against Gaza last year, one of them, the EFI, circulated papers that defended the killing of Palestinian civilians. According to the EFI, it was impossible for Israel to avoid civilian deaths because Hamas, a Palestinian resistance movement, had ordered its members “to discard uniforms and dress in regular clothes that made them indistinguishable from the civilian population”.
Luisa Morgantini, a former vice-president of the European Parliament and a veteran Palestinian solidarity activist, said that all forms of racism and anti-Semitism must be opposed.
But Morgantini also suggests that pro-Israel groups are exploiting the history of Jewish suffering in Europe to dissuade its modern-day politicians from taking robust action against Israeli oppression in Palestine. “They are using the holocaust as blackmail,” she said. “It is time for us to stop this blackmail.”
