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Europe's War On America
Strange that this story isn't getting more attention. This week's edition of the Brussels-based satirical and investigative magazine The Sprout carries an article by radical German MEP Ilka Schroeder in which she accuses the EU of using the Israel-Palestine conflict to undermine US influence in the middle east.
Schroeder claims that the EU funds Palestinian organisations, well aware that much of the funding ends up in the hands of terrorists. While Schroeder says that the EU does not exactly intend to wage war on Israel, it hopes that a deepening conflict in the region will highlight America's inability to mediate a satisfactory peace deal - and that Europe will then be able to ride to the rescue.
Schroeder is very much a maverick, though her attempt last year to force the EU to open an enquiry into its funding of Palestinian organisations delivered 170 votes. The EU's fraud investigation unit, Olaf, has since launched an enquiry into where EU money to Palestine ends up. Nevertheless, if even some of her allegations are true, they could have grave repercussions for EU-US diplomatic links, not to mention any semblance of a united EU foreign policy.
Whatever you think of her claims, her conclusion makes interesting reading:
The greatest danger today is that the globalisation critique, anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism which exist in the heads of millions of people is amalgamated into a common sense that is supported and used by European policy. There is no difference in the consciousness of an average Member of the European Parliament and an average German peace demonstrator and I consider this to be a mixture of naivete, moralism, anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism and an altogether serious danger.
