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August 2019

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Singling Out Israel By Janet Levy

By on August 16th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/singling_out_israel.html

The European Union has just announced a proposal that all Israeli products made in contested areas — Samaria, Judea, and other Israeli settlements — would be required to carry consumer warning labels specifying their origin.  This action comes only a few months after Israel’s Strategic Affairs Ministry uncovered evidence that the E.U. was funding more than a dozen NGOs, including some linked to militant groups that promote the Hamas-inspired Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel.

The E.U.’s “official” position is that it does not support or fund BDS.  Yet its failure to act on NGO funding, coupled now with the labeling proposal, reveals the E.U.’s failure to follow its own policy and to actively undermine Israel.  The idea that international law requires economic action against Israel falls flat when the E.U. failed to sanction countries that engaged in human rights violations in occupied territories.

Consider the E.U.’s lack of response to Chinese appropriation of Tibet, to Iranian subjugation and ethnic genocide in Syria, and to the Turkish invasion and more than 40 years of occupation in northern Cyprus.  Given E.U. inaction in these instances, it is glaringly obvious that Israel writer Natan Sharansky’s 3-D definition of anti-Semitism aptly applies.  That is, Israel is unfairly singled out using demonization, delegitimization, and a double standard of judging its actions.

Further, E.U. countries continue to do business with China, Iran, and Turkey despite blatant, glaring human rights violations and occupations in Tibet, Syria, and Northern Cyprus.  A brief review of those actions makes plain the E.U. bias against Israel.

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HISTORY Comments turned off

A Bad Deal, 80 Years Ago By Victor Davis Hanson

By on August 16th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/a-bad-deal-80-years-ago/

Some 80 years ago, on Aug. 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, formally known as the “Treaty of non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

The world was shocked — and terrified — by the agreement. Western democracies of the 1930s had counted on the huge resources of Communist Russia, and its hostility to the Nazis, to serve as a brake on Adolf Hitler’s Western ambitions. Great Britain and the other Western European democracies had assumed that the Nazis would never invade them as long as a hostile Soviet Union threatened the German rear.

The incompatibility between communism and Nazism was considered by all to be existential — and permanent. That mutual hatred explained why dictators Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin both despised and feared each other.

Yet all at once, such illusions vanished with the signing of the pact. Just seven days later, on Sept. 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. World War II had begun.

After quickly absorbing most of Eastern Europe by either coercion or alliance, Hitler was convinced that he now had a safe rear. So he turned west in spring 1940 to overrun Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, France and the Netherlands.

Hitler accomplished all that relatively easily, failing only to conquer Great Britain with an exhaustive bombing campaigning.

During all these Nazi conquests, a compliant Stalin shipped huge supplies of food and fuel for the German war effort against the West. Stalin cynically had hoped that Germany and the Western democracies would wear themselves out in a wasting war — similar to the four horrific years in the trenches of the Western Front during World War I.

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