Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Vote for EU constitution or risk new Holocaust, says Brussels

I can rest easy now I know the EU is protecting my liberty...

Vote for EU constitution or risk new Holocaust, says
Telegraph
09/05/2005

A senior European Commissioner marked VE Day yesterday by accusing Eurosceptics of risking a return to the Holocaust by clinging to "nationalistic pride". Margot Wallstrom, a Swede and the commissioner who must sell the draft constitution to voters, argued that politicians who resisted pooling national sovereignty risked a return to Nazi horrors of the 1930s and 1940s.

...

Her fellow commissioners also issued a joint declaration, stating that EU citizens should pay tribute to the dead of the Second World War by voting Yes to the draft constitution for Europe. The commissioners also gave the EU sole credit for ending the Cold War, making no mention of the role of Nato and the United States.

Richard Shepherd, the Tory MP for Aldridge-Brownhills, said it was "breathtaking" to link Nazism to the defence of national sovereignty. "It's a monstrous rewriting of history to promote a profoundly undemocratic project."

---------------------------------------------------------

EU 'covered up' attacks on Jews by young Muslims
Telegraph
01/04/2004

Jewish leaders accused the European Union yesterday of covering up the true scale of anti-Semitic violence carried out by Muslim youths, reigniting a controversy over Europe's failure to confront Islamic extremism at home. A study released by the EU's racism and xenophobia monitoring centre astounded experts by concluding that the wave of anti-Jewish persecution over the last two years stemmed from neo-Nazi or other racist groups.

"The largest group of the perpetrators of anti-Semitic activities appears to be young, disaffected white Europeans," said a summary released to the European Parliament . "A further source of anti-Semitism in some countries was young Muslims of North African or Asian extraction. "Traditionally, anti-Semitic groups on the extreme Right played a part in stirring opinion," it added.

The headline findings contradict the body of the report. This says most of the 193 violent attacks on synagogues, Jewish schools, kosher shops, cemeteries and rabbis in France in 2002 - up from 32 in 2001 - were "ascribed to youth from neighbourhoods sensitive to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, principally of North African descent

....

The European Jewish Congress accused the EU watchdog of twisting data from the 15 member states to suit its own ideological bias, describing the report as a catalogue of "enormous contradictions, errors and omissions." "We cannot let it be said that the majority of anti-Semitic incidents come from young, disaffected white men. This is in complete contradiction with the facts recorded by the police," it said.

The EU suppressed a report last year by German academics concluding that Arab gangs were largely responsible for a sudden surge in the anti-Jewish violence, allegedly because the findings were politically unpalatable.Victor Weitzel, who wrote a large section of yesterday's far more detailed study, told The Telegraph that the latest findings had been consistently massaged by the EU watchdog to play down the role of North African youth. "The European Union seems incapable of facing up to the truth on this," he said. "Everything is being tilted to ensure nice soft conclusions. "When I told them that we need to monitor the inflammatory language being used by the Arab press in Europe, this was changed to the 'minority press'. "Honestly, it's incredible," he said.

1 comment:

dan said...

I agree that the EU is remiss in many ways, but making a connection between naziism and nationalism is not entirely unreasonable. They were NATIONAL socialists after all. Lebensraum and all that. One of the reasons the Germans are such passionate Europeans is to guard against the old tendency.