The European Union (EU) discriminating policies against Israel are not new. The EU court approved the labeling of products from Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem. This labeling is reminiscent of the “Yellow Star of David” Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany and in Nazi occupied Europe. Israel considers the EU court decision to be unfair and discriminatory. It pointed out that other countries involved in land disputes are not similarly sanctioned. Now the EU has come up with a new discriminating formula in which to single out Israel. It is spelled by the EU as “housing demolitions” in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria for most Israelis).

According to Professor Hillel Frisch of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, “Entering the phrase ‘housing demolition’ in the EU’s official website yields a shocking result: 18 of the first documents to appear concern Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes in the West Bank. In other words, 80% of the EU reports on this worldwide phenomenon involve a population and an area less than one-tenth of 1% of the world’s population or landmass.”

Ironically, an EU report from 2005, acknowledge widespread discriminatory demolition and eviction within the EU against Gypsy, Roma, and Sinti populations in such countries as Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Portugal.  Housing demolition as a punitive practice occurs throughout the world.  India accuses Pakistan of the practice in Hindu areas in Pakistan’s Punjab region. Egypt evicted thousands of Bedouins in the Sinai to clear the way for housing projects for Egyptians from outside the Sinai Peninsula. In the U.S., likewise, evictions and demolition of homes occur for the purpose of urban renewal.

Israel has continued a practice that dates back to the British Mandate, when British authorities demolished homes of terrorists. Israel has continued the practice as a deterrent against would be terrorists. These terror practitioners know that it would cost their family their home. Moreover, Israel, in following the rule-of-law, has the right to demolish illegally built homes whether the occupants are Arab-Palestinians or Jews.

The EU funded what clearly amounted to efforts to thwart Israel’s plan to construct the E-1 project, which would provide residential continuity between Maaleh Adumim and Jerusalem. The illegal Ras Shahadah apartment project was meant to build hundreds of apartments in northern Jerusalem, without being approved by the Jerusalem municipality. Its aim was to create Arab-Palestinian residential continuity between northern and southern parts of the West Bank

Earlier this year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, announced Israel’s intention to extend Israeli sovereignty to the Jewish communities in the Jordan Valley. The immediate reaction was that the governments of France, Ireland, and Luxembourg pressed the EU to adopt punitive measures against Israel. In Britain, 127 members of Parliament urged Prime Minister Boris Johnson to impose sanctions should Israel go ahead with its sovereignty declaration.

Richard Goldberg, in a piece for Foreign Policy Magazine (June 10, 2020) wrote: “That some European governments would threaten sanctions against Israel while refusing to impose sanctions on Iran and Hezbollah is disappointing. If they are serious, these European governments should be on notice: their companies will pay the price.” Most U.S. states prohibit sanctions against Israel. Back in February, 2020, the EU foreign policy Chief Josep Borrell, tried to convince the 27 European foreign ministers who are member of the Union’s Foreign Affairs Council, to issue a damning resolution critical of the Trump administration Peace Plan, and warning against Israel’s intention to “annex” major parts of the West Bank. The resolution required unanimity, but Austria, Italy, Hungary and the Czech Republic, along with two other unnamed member-states, voted against it.  Borrell issued a later statement warning that Israel’s annexation would violate international law.

For the Europeans, the inventors and practitioners of racist antisemitism, Israel is the collective Jew. Jews in Europe have been the historical and permanent scapegoats for millenniums. Modern Europe’s hatred toward nationalism and religion (G-d and Christianity have been abandoned in the EU’s domain), in contrast with Israel’s proud nationalism, is an anathema to the EU. In its effort to deny Jews the right to their historical homeland centered in Judea and Samaria, the EU and its individual member-states have funded directly or through Non-Governmental Agencies (NGO’s) various anti-Israel, Palestinian-Arab organizations, as well as Israeli anti-Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and anti- ‘Occupation’ groups.

According to NGO-Monitor, “the EU’s European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) is designated for promoting human rights and democracy through civil society in non-EU countries. In 2014, civil society in Israel received €3,754,133 from EIDHR, and adding NGOs in the West Bank and Gaza €5,630,323 – the majority of which are related to the conflict. In contrast, Ukraine – a deeply flawed democracy with a population roughly five times the size of Israel’s, and at the time (2014), a war zone affected by severe human rights violations – received just €3,400,575.” Most of the recipients of the EU funding engaged in undermining the Jewish state rather than promoting democracy and human rights in the Palestinian territories.

Many NGOs that enjoy European financial support promote political agendas that are contrary to European official government policies, such as anti-Israel BDS (boycotts, divestment, and sanctions), lawfare campaigns, activities that oppose a two-state framework, and other aspects of the Durban Strategy. These heavily funded groups exploit the rhetoric of human rights and are consistently relied on by decision-makers for input, on the basis of which agendas and policies are formulated.

The shameless Durban (South Africa) conference held in September, 2001, sponsored by the UN World Conference on Racism, singled out Israel in the ugliest possible way. The then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell denounced the conference as “Hateful.” The U.S. and Israeli delegations walked out of the conference in protest, but the EU delegations did not.  The atmosphere and the rhetoric in the NGO forum (there were three forums: an official diplomatic forum, a Youth forum, and the large NGO forum) featured extreme antisemitic vitriol. Israel was accused of perpetrating a “Holocaust” on the Palestinian people, and Israeli soldiers were called “Nazis.” Antisemitic cartoons were distributed to the 7,000 attendees. The final declaration charged Israel with “perpetrating racist crimes against humanity,” including ethnic cleansing, and acts of genocide.  It called for Isolation of Israel as an “apartheid state,” imposing sanctions and embargoes, and cutting off all nations diplomatic links with the Jewish state.

The fact that the Europeans honored this racist and antisemitic conference by staying and not demonstratively leaving with Israel and the U.S. in the face of Israeli Jews being called Nazis, and accused of perpetrating a “genocide,” and a “Holocaust,” is most telling about the Europeans. Considering that Europeans such as Frenchman Count Arthur de Gobineau, German Friedrich Nietzsche, and England’s Stewart Chamberlain, were the race theorists that prepared the way for Hitler and Nazi Germany’s real Holocaust, that murdered a third of world Jewry, is instructive in understanding European attitudes toward Jews and Israel.

The Europeans, and especially the colonial and imperialist states like France, Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands, are clamoring against Israel’s “occupation.” The EU is eager to establish a Palestinian state in spite of clear knowledge that it will be another failed state like Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, where human rights, democracy, and the rule-of-law are non-existent. Nonetheless, demonizing Israel for “housing demolition” is an inherited instinct to scapegoat the Jew – or the Jewish state, in this case.

Editors’ note: Walid Phares has a new book out on the difference in foreign policy between Obama and Trump titled: The Choice: Trump vs. Obama-Biden in US Foreign Policy. Below is an exclusive excerpt – Chapter 3 – which illustrates the nightmare that Obama brought to U.S. foreign policy.

Soon after landing in the White House, President Obama initiated two major moves, which by the end of May or early June 2009 indicated where his administration was going in terms of national security and foreign policy. It was obvious to me at the time that the country was veering away from the post-9/11 posture and the so-called War on Terror and heading in the opposite direction of demobilization of America on the one hand and the activation of an apologist policy on the other in order to engage with future partners who were actually at the core of terrorism and extremism.

Most Americans in the early years of the Obama administration focused on the domestic agenda and therefore did not see or understand the much wider change of direction that the new team at the White House was implementing: the eventual dismantling of the War on Terror and with it the war of ideas. In other words, the Obama doctrine was telling Americans that our conflict with the radicals overseas was in error because the conflict was caused by us—and therefore we need not only to cease our efforts of resistance against the jihadists, Iran, and the other radicals but jump on a train going in the other direction, one that would lead us to engaging the foes and finding agreement with each of them in order to transform American policy overseas.

The first major benchmark that indicated a massive Obama-Biden change in foreign policy with implications on national security was Obama’s trip to Egypt in spring 2009 and his address at Cairo University. The main idea of President Obama on the political philosophy level was to inform the American public that the United States has been seen as an aggressor against Arabs and Muslims since 9/11—maybe even decades before that. This perception prevailed on U.S. campuses for decades among leftist academics and intellectuals. It was explained as the American branch of Western colonialism. But the urgency behind this U-turn made by the administration in foreign policy perception was in fact linked to how the United States reacted to the 9/11 attacks.

In my own experiences after the 2001 jihadist strikes against New York, D.C., and elsewhere, the immediate reaction after al-Qaeda suicide missions on American soil was explained by a combination of Far Left and neo-Marxist circles actually accusing the United States of provoking the attacks. During the seven years of the Bush administration, both the Islamist lobbies and their Red allies in America were organizing to oppose any form of American self-defense and thus did oppose both the war in Afghanistan and the one in Iraq while also framing them as neocolonialist conquests.

It was imperative for the Obama team to change the national security doctrine that had been approved by a unanimous and bipartisan 9/11 Commission to align with their own narrative. The reality was that for years, before the Obama victory in 2008, a new alliance was being forged between the Islamists in general (the Muslim Brotherhood and the Khomeinist Iranians in particular) and the core left-wing neo-Marxists within the West in general (and the United States in particular). The Obama group belonged to that core—a subset found mostly on campuses but also in parts of the media.

With the alliance already in place, it made sense for the new administration to unleash its plans as early as possible. Hence, Obama’s 2009 address in Cairo was essentially an open invitation through public acknowledgment of his desire for a partnership between his administration and the Muslim Brotherhood. Though Egypt was ruled by authoritarian President Mubarak, Obama’s visit and his praise of the Ikhwan talking points were the opening salvo of a campaign designed to crumble the Egyptian regime and, later, other Arab governments—and replace them with the Brotherhood. The genesis of the Islamization of the Arab Spring of 2011 thus started in 2009.

The Obama speech at Cairo University, in fact, officialized a partnership between the United States and the Muslim Brotherhood, and in general terms with the Islamist movements in the MENA region. One might think that such a move would be checked by the mainstream Republican Party in D.C., but it was not—due to the equal impact of the Qatar and Islamist lobbies on the Republican institution. It did, however, unnerve the conservative sectors of the Republicans both in Congress and in the grassroots while also putting pressure on the traditional liberals in the Democratic Party after the ilk of Joe Lieberman and others.

The major shift towards engaging the Islamists worldwide also opened the door for partnerships with their lobbies and NGOs inside the United States. This led to an unstoppable rise of influence of militant groups such as CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), which in turn became the spearhead of a campaign to silence the critics against Obama’s new policies in Congress and in the media.

But a shift to align with the Muslim Brotherhood was not the only onslaught of the Obama administration in foreign policy; it was simply the first one. Indeed, in the same month of June 2009, President Obama engaged in a second track that would change another U.S. national security policy, one that was established in the early 1980s: the containment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In early June 2009, President Barack Obama addressed a letter to the Grand Ayatollah of Iran, Imam Ali Khamenei, calling on him to begin a new era of cooperation between Tehran and Washington. That letter, which was as apologist as the speech to the Muslim Brotherhood weeks earlier in Cairo, signaled the beginning of a long process that would lead to the negotiation and signing of the Iran nuclear deal in 2015. But June 2009 had one more surprise that revealed a third shocking policy shift, one that would divert the country from its longstanding tradition of helping nations facing oppression and seeking freedom.

Indeed, America, in one century—between the First World War, the Second World War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union—had demonstrated its commitment, through blood and treasure, to stand by peoples on many continents as they had been brutalized and oppressed—from Europe and the Middle East to Asia and Latin America. But the events in Iran at the end of June 2009 signaled a drastic third policy change. Millions of Iranians, including many women, took to the streets to protest the suppression by the regime. Many of these protesters held signs in English—one of which called on President Obama by name to help them. Yet to reaffirm that the U.S. would not “meddle” in Iranian politics or stand with the democratic revolution in Iran, a second letter was sent to Khamenei on September 3.

The abandonment by the Obama administration of the Green Revolution in Iran was the benchmark that told me that the American policy of supporting freedom fighters and people’s uprisings against totalitarian governments, the praise for dissidents, and the backing of free societies around the world had ended.

2009 was the year that broke the backbone of post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy and rebuilt it into a radical approach inconsistent with the feelings and perceptions of the majority of Americans. Yet most Americans were not informed and educated enough, particularly by their academia and media, to correct such radicalization of policy via their members of Congress—or to elect a new president who would change directions one more time to align policy to once again be consistent with U.S. national security and traditional American liberty principles.

Fears for the Future

Both the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon in 2005 and the Green Revolution in Iran in 2009 provided indications that peoples in the region had reached critical mass in regard to their tolerance for authoritarians and would eventually protest and demand change. Social media has also evolved and has become much more accessible by ordinary people. In my book The Coming Revolution, I predicted that most countries in the Arab world were going to witness social and political unrests, results I had been waiting for, for many years, to push back against the extremists.

I briefed many members of Congress during that same period of time and convinced them that there were authentic forces of change in the region, including seculars, women, and minorities, and that the United States should immediately partner with them as the authoritarian leaders were going down—and fighting a lost battle to support ailing dictators would not be the right battle for the United States.

My concern was that the moment would be squandered as the Obama administration was racing to connect with the Islamists and the Iranians in the region and thus diverting the resources of the U.S. government to the wrong factions instead of helping civil society forces. I observed how the lobbies of our traditional foes were moving with great speed at all levels within the bureaucracies and the administration. I was also receiving many complaints from Middle East human rights and minorities groups that officials and governments were no longer engaging them like the Bush administration had tried to do. In addition, members of Congress in the Republican opposition (who won the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010) were sharing their fears that the administration had abandoned our allies in the region, not just allies among Middle East minorities, but also Israel. So by the end of 2009, early 2010, I could see the whole picture, and it was a dark and dire one.

Professor Walid Phares served as a Foreign Policy Advisor to Presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016. He also served as a National Security Advisor to Presidential Advisor Mitt Romney in 2011-2012. Professor Phares has been an advisor to the US House of Representatives Caucus on Counter Terrorism since 2007 and is the Co-Secretary General of the Trans-Atlantic Legislative Group on Counter Terrorism since 2008. He is also a Fox News National Security and Foreign Affairs expert.

Subscribe to the Glazov Gang‘s YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram: @JamieGlazov, Parler: @JamieGlazov and Twitter: @JamieGlazov.

With the new startling revelations now surfacing about the connection of top Obama officials to the hiding of Osama Bin Laden in Iran, Frontpage Mag editors have deemed it vital to run the special Glazov Gang episode in which Clare Lopez discusses Osama’s Post-9/11 Safe Haven in Iran, revealing who knew the whole time.

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch our 3-Part-Special with Clare on Obama’s Betrayal of SEAL Team Six, how9/11 Came From Riyadh & Tehran and Helping Saudis Slip Away.

[1] Revealed: Obama’s Betrayal of SEAL Team Six.

[2] 9/11 Came From Riyadh & Tehran.

[3] Helping Saudis Slip Away.

Subscribe to the Glazov Gang‘s YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram: @JamieGlazov, Parler: @JamieGlazov and Twitter: @JamieGlazov.

China appears to be on the brink.

The communist regime is threatening our ally, Taiwan — one of several Asian countries seeking closer ties with the United States while China’s domestic turmoil grows.

In a recent column in China’s state-sponsored Global Times, editor-in-chief Hu Xijin warned, “As the secessionist forces’ arrogance continues to swell, the historical turning point is getting closer.”

“The only way forward is for the mainland to fully prepare itself for war and to give Taiwan secessionist forces a decisive punishment at any time,” he wrote.

Taiwan’s opposition party has been seeking closer cooperation with the United States. But, Hu wrote: “The more trouble Taiwan creates, the sooner the mainland will decide to teach Taiwan independence forces a hard lesson.”

China has been angered by the ongoing tour of Asia by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is seeking support for U.S. efforts to contain China. Recently, the Taiwanese Kuomintang Party, or KMT, renewed its effort for the government to reestablish diplomatic ties with the U.S.

The Chinese are short on food, and face considerable flooding. If one or another dam overflows, major catastrophe could ensue.

Even without such a huge disaster, China faces a grim future. Chin Jin, one of the leaders of the opposition to the ruling Communist Party reminds his followers of the country’s unpleasant past:

The future of China has three prospects:

Prospect 1: The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will insist on continuing its rule, despite the inevitability of decline.

Prospect 2: The CCP sees increasing difficulties with ruling China due to intra-party tussles, and political purges within the ruling clique, that may force it to accept various internal and external pressures to make structural change. This would also threaten the CCP regime. Chinese leader Xi Jinping however has already explicitly ruled out any meaningful political reform.

Prospect 3: The blundering CCP collapses overnight like the former Soviet Union, and the ethnic minority regions and Taiwan take advantage of the situation to exit Greater China. Former Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui’s proposed “Seven-Block Theory” (1999) comes to fruition dividing the country into seven autonomous regions: Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, South China, North China, and Northeast China.

I believe this is the most likely.

Chin Jin thinks the past is a reliable guide to the future, and hence that our current and future actions should be based on a correct evaluation of our past. He’s an activist, and he thinks that Chinese history provides a reliable guide to its future. He believes that the current model for China—a huge state held together by a rigid ideology and a tough-minded bureaucracy—can not only last for a long time, but endure throughout a period of severe internal and external challenge.

President Trump does not believe that. He believes that American history shows that Americans are able to change course very quickly, and that the Chinese are locked into failed past models. Is he right?

We don’t know. Yet!..

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