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MEK - The Only Hope For Iranian Regime Change

In June, the US Appeals Court in Washington gave Secretary of State Hillary Clinton four months to decide whether or not to remove the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) – Iran’s largest and best organised democratic opposition group – from the government’s list of foreign terrorist organisations. The State Department has said that it intends to comply with the deadline, which falls on October 1.

The MEK, whose annual rally in Paris this year attracted nearly 100,000 supporters, is an anomaly on the State Department’s blacklist. Added in 1997 by the Clinton administration as a goodwill gesture toward the theocratic Iranian regime, the MEK to this day remains on the US terror list despite its explicit renunciation of violence in 2001 and total voluntary disarmament in 2003.

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EU 'buries head in sand' over Hezbollah

"Listening to all of you this morning reminds me of the great British comedy classic Carry On Up The Khyber, where the colonial English go on having dinner, ignoring the fact that disaster, impending disaster, is all around them." So began one of United Kingdom Independence Party leader Nigel Farage's famously irreverent speeches to the European Parliament in March, in which he pilloried the European Union for what seems to be its official policy of sticking its fingers in its ears and screaming the words to Beethoven's Ode to Joy at the top of its lungs whenever something unexpectedly bad happens.

On that occasion, Farage was using the Carry On analogy to ridicule the EU's delusional attitude towards the eurozone debt crisis. But he could just as easily have applied it to Brussels' similar reaction to the July 18 terrorist attack in Bulgaria that left five Israeli tourists and a Muslim bus-driver dead.

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Why is EU refusing to label Hezbollah as terrorists?

Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman’s diplomatic push last week in Brussels to convince the EU to designate the Lebanese-based Hezbollah group as a terror entity was met with robust resistance.

Liberman sought to inject new life into the drive to outlaw Hezbollah because of the murders of five Israelis and a Bulgarian bus driver on July 18. Israeli and US intelligence agencies believe Hezbollah carried out the suicide bombing  at Bulgaria's Burgas airport.

Cypriot Foreign Minister Erato Kozakou-Marcoullis, whose country heads the 26-member EU presidency, said there is “no consensus among the EU member states for putting Hezbollah on the terrorist list of the organization,” and claimed there is “no tangible evidence of Hezbollah engaging in acts of terrorism.”

Counter-terrorism blogs and experts on both sides of the Atlantic were immediately awash with reactions that quickly mounted overwhelming evidence to refute Kozakou-Marcoullis’s contentions.

Jacob Campbell, a research fellow at the Institute for Middle Eastern Democracy in the United Kingdom, and author of a report in late June on the EU “Helping Hezbollah,” told The Jerusalem Post on Friday, “Within just days of the Burgas bombing – almost undoubtedly perpetrated by Hezbollah – the Presidency of the EU Council explicitly ruled out the possibility of listing Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, insisting that there is no ‘tangible evidence’ to link Hezbollah to terrorism. This ludicrous statement was made despite an earlier resolution adopted by the European Parliament, which cites ‘clear evidence’ of terrorist acts committed by Hezbollah. On this issue, as in so many others, Brussels appears to have its head buried firmly in the sand.”

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UKIP ally slams EU funding for neo-Nazis

Morten Messerschmidt – a Danish MEP and one of the 34 members of the UKIP-led Europe of Freedom and Democracy group in the European Parliament – has demanded answers from the European Commission following the revelation that the EU is funding a Lithuanian neo-Nazi youth group, to which Friends of Israel in UKIP drew attention in May. Below is Mr Messerschmidt’s written question, submitted on 6 July:

Recently the neo-Nazi Lithuanian youth group the Union of Lithuanian Nationalist Youth (UNLY), which was behind a neo-Nazi march on 11 March 2012 in Vilnius, was admitted without demur into the umbrella organisation the Lithuanian Council of Youth Organisations (LCYO) which receives support both from the Lithuanian Government and from the EU. The LCYO is the largest youth organisation in Lithuania and comprises 64 groups with over 200 000 members.

Does the Commission agree that ULNY is a neo-Nazi organisation, and that as such it is incompatible with the EU’s founding principles?

Can the Commission state how much the LCYO – including UNLY – receives in aid from the EU?

Does the Commission propose to criticise the admission of UNLY as a member of the LCYO, and state clearly that organisations such as UNLY are incompatible with the EU’s founding principles?

In the light of the above, does the Commission propose to withdraw EU support from the LCYO until UNLY is expelled from the organisation?

Why the creation of a 'European' identity necessitates anti-semitism in Brussels

Day by day, minute by minute, speech by speech and word by word, the United Kingdom Independence Party looks and sounds increasingly like the Conservative Party in exile.

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And now, just as we have our long-held suspicions confirmed that the Foreign Office is essentially Arabist and ever so subtly anti-Israel, with government officials outrageously asserting that Benjamin Netanyahu uses ‘the incitement issue as a delaying tactic in peace talks’, we hear that Nigel Farage is confronting the ‘strong bias’ against Israel that exists within the European Union.


When have you ever heard a Conservative MEP do that?


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Helping Hezbollah

Hezbollah is at the nadir of its popularity. Tainted by its support for the murderous Syrian regime, the Iranian proxy finds itself on the wrong side of the so-called Arab Spring. Although the looming presence of its fearsome black-shirted militia has so far enabled it to dominate the Lebanese government, Hezbollah knows that brute force alone will not sustain its hegemony in the long term – a lesson currently being learned by its Ba’athist friends in Damascus. If Hezbollah is to consolidate its rule over Lebanon, it must command the loyalty of the country’s youth. And, having inherited the previous government’s five-year Education Sector Development Plan (ESDP), Hezbollah is in the ideal position to achieve this by embedding its own ideology into Lebanon’s education system.

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