The EU and Hamas: well, there’s a surprise
Daniel Hannan makes some excellent and much needed points in his sharp criticism in today’s Daily Telegraph of the EU’s decision to resume subventions to the Palestinian authority despite the fact that it is run by Hamas, the terror outfit of which the EU supposedly disapproves:
Even if a way could be found to circumvent Hamas, the very fact of pumping more money into the Occupied Territories will make terrorism more likely. Palestinians are already, by some measure, the largest per capita recipients of overseas aid in the world. Yet the level of violence in Gaza and the West Bank has risen in proportion to the amount of assistance received.
When Hamas was elected earlier this year, the EU brushed aside American objections and handed over 120 million euros. Palestinians responded by ransacking EU diplomatic missions and kidnapping European citizens. But the EU is less interested in the practical consequences of its subsidies than in the message they send. By firehosing cash at the PA, Europeans signal their opposition to Washington, suck up to their Muslim voters and, above all, vent their dislike of Israel.
True enough. However, there are a couple of other points where Hannan’s analysis requires a bit more elaboration. He states:
The Jewish state represents the supreme vindication of the national principle: that is, the desire of every people to have their own country. For 2,000 years, Jews were stateless and scattered, but they never lost their aspiration for a national home. The EU, by contrast, is founded in the belief that national loyalties are artificial, transient and ultimately discreditable. Simply by existing, Israel challenges the main assumption on which European integration is based.
Yes – and no. Yes, the EU does perfectly exemplify the anti-democratic, nation-busting philosophy of ‘trans-national progressivism’ that is inexorably destroying the national identity — and consequent willingness to defend it — of its constituent and doomed nation states. And yes, the Jewish state falls foul of that philosophy. But the very same EU – like the left, which is impaled on the same contradiction - supports the desire of the Palestinians to have their own state, which clearly doesn’t fit its belief that ‘national loyalties are artificial, transient and ultimately discreditable.’ The reason is that it supports certain national loyalties purely in order to destroy other national loyalties — those of the western world, which gave rise to the individualism and progress which it embodies and which are the real targets of both the left and the Islamists who, for different reasons, wish to undo modernity.
Second, Hannan rightly scorns the argument that economic deprivation causes terrorism. But then he fall into a parallel trap by suggesting that terrorism is caused by economic dependence:
An unconditional welfare state is thus the perfect terrorist habitat. Think of the two London Tube bombers who had been living on income support and housing benefit. Had this option been closed, perhaps they might have found jobs, and so been too busy to work themselves into a suicidal rage.
But what about the other bombers who had jobs? What about the al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri who is a qualified psychiatrist, or the paediatrician Abdel Aziz Rantisi who was a leader of Hamas? Jihad is fuelled neither by economic deprivation nor dependency but by religious fanaticism. Economic dependency has retrograde effects, to be sure; but it’s important to be clear about the wellspring of the threat to the west that Europe is so intent on denying.
