Fantasy & Reality about the European Union

Many people make a rather good living off the European Union. Besides, gourmet food is often served in the Brussels headquartes of the EU. There are the bureaucrats in Brussels and elsewhere plus the elected members of the European parliament. The pay is better than average and often better than for comparable jobs in the home country of the bureaucrat or parliamentary deputy.

Hence, many have little reason or inclination to rock the boat with sustained and substantial criticism of the EU. What some do is to let out a little mild criticism of a particular policy or person or making a general criticism in a vague fashion while at the same time extolling the EU's lofty purposes [supposedly lofty]. That's what Antonio Tajani --president of the EU's parliament-- did when speaking to a group of influential people back home in Italy:

"The European Union is in the midst of fording the river. There are many things that don't work but more Europe is needed, not less. Leaving it means suicide, as many in the United Kingdom are realizing and even Marine Le Pen understands that the war on the euro [currency] is a mistake."
[Corriere della Sera, 9 Luglio 2017; emph. added]

The reader will make up his own mind as to how sensible that reasoning is. But before we analyze it, here's some reality from the chief editor [direttore] of Corriere della Sera, Luciano Fontana:

"Europe --the chief editor of Corriere observed-- has become a major actor [protagonista] in our lives. and even in our election campaigns. A Europe that often makes mistakes, [a Europe] whose management of the Greek crisis and the migrants cries out for revenge."
[Corriere, 9 Luglio 2017]

There are many things wrong with the EU which was likely the main reason that British folks voted against the EU and for Brexit more than a year ago. Despite its lofty rhetoric, the EU is very undemocratic in that decisions are made in Brussels by EU appointed officials rather than by national parliaments whereas according to the EU treaty, the Brussels officials can overrule laws passed by national parliaments, although this power can be challenged. But the Brussels bureaucracy is much less responsive to local needs, desires and conditions than national parliaments are. And then these Brussels officials like to impose a one-size-fits-all policy on all of the EU countries which of course have their own local traditions, histories, conditions, political environment. And obviously this causes resentment throughout the EU.

Then we come to the Euro currency, the single currency which is legal tender in most EU countries which gave up their national currencies to join the single currency zone. That was a bad idea whose time had come. Imagine. A single currency was imposed on some fifteen countries without a common tax policy/tax laws/, without a common pension system, a common state budget, common labor laws, so on and so forth. As no doubt was predicted the currency has great problems and one major victim --Greece, although other countries have suffered as well. To be sure, tourists who travel from one Eurozone country to another find traveling simpler [because they don't need to change currency with every new country that they come to]. Otherwise, few benefit. Un disastro, an Italian friend told me. We could go on about the EU's faults. But rather than be tedious, let's go on to Signor Tajani's logic and common sense.

"many things . . . don't work but more Europe is needed, not less". "More Europe" in the words of the Brussels crowd means closer political integration within the EU and more central control of the lives of EU citizens. But Tajani has already told us that many things don't work in the EU. So why would he think that "more Europe" would be better rather than worse? Does the centralized bureacuratic system of the EU where decisions are made far from the governed and often against their will and/or their better judgment, seem to be capable of doing a good job when and if it has more political power than now? We can go and on and maybe we will.

European Union Tortures Greek Fellow Europeans - What Can Israel Expect from the EU?

In January 2012 the EuroZone, the countries sharing the single currency, the euro, demanded extreme austerity from Greece. One of the provisions of the set of demands on Greece was to reduce medical benefits for the Greek population [veda qui].

We can now see the effect of these draconian demands. The French daily Le Figaro reported one and a half years ago, July 2015, on the gloomy picture. That is when Greece accepted a further set of harsh austerity demands by the EuroGroup which runs the EuroZone. I have no doubt that the situation now is worse than in 2015. Le Figaro writes:

Elevators out of service, tired greenish linoleum, a corridor burdened with patients abandoned on rolling beds. Over-aged medical material and medications that are running out. Austerity. At the Evangelismos Hospital in Athens, "We know what it is." . . .   

We hear them speaking harshly to each other . . .  "Go in front of me? Do you take yourself for a German?" exclaims an irritated fifty-year old  waiting his turn at the window where medicines are given out. "We're all worn out," another patient makes an excuse. "We mustn't complain," sighs Denise, an epileptic, 40 years old who subsists with her daughter  thanks to a disability pension of 300 euros per month. "We still have free medications." . . . . "I try to survive as best I can," chief cardiologist Dr Ilias Zarkos confides.  "At the  age of fifty-five I earn 1320 euros per month, as against 1600 euros four years ago. . . . In the past five years, we have all had our salaries reduced, and 20% of the staff went on retirement without being replaced. . . . Who would want to work under these conditions? Greece is now naked." "Every year the subsidies and equipment provided to the hospital are reduced by 15%," Dr Sioras continues. [Le Figaro, 15 Juillet 2015]

That is the state of Greek hospitals as of July 2015. That is the result of years of EU austerity treatment for the original debt crisis, whereas Greek debt as of July 2015 and as of now too, is worse, is higher than in 2010 when the debt crisis first came to light. Sometimes the remedy is worse than the disease.

If the Greeks were perhaps an exotic tribe in Africa or on the island of Borneo or some decidedly Third World country, would the EU be so callous to their suffering? Would the hospitals have to make do with short supplies and out of date equipment and supplies and reduced staff? Wouldn't Europe's supposed charitable and humanitarian instincts take over and wouldn't the cries for help be answered? Where is the solidarity for fellow Europeans, whereas solidarity is supposed to be a fundamental principle of the EU? Indeed, solidarity may be located in the same place as another EU principle, transparency, another EU value which is honored as much in the breach as the observance.

Besides, when the Palestinian Authority, a new form of the old PLO, is short of funds, somehow the EU finds the money. But the same generosity does not show up for the Greeks, for their fellow Europeans who are suffering. Nor does the supposed EU principle of transparency come into effect when it comes to funding a whole array of anti-Israel NGOs .....

The EuroGroup policy toward their fellow European Greeks is harsh and callous, and unproductive. What is their attitude toward Israel? Do they any longer recognize the Jewish right to live throughout the Land of Israel (Palestine in their parlance) west of the Jordan,  as the international community had decided in 1922 in the Mandate for Palestine issued to the UK for the purpose of erecting the Jewish National Home?  Today old commitments are forgotten. In fact, prominent EU member states voted at the UN Security Council for a resolution calling it a crime for Israelis to live east of the Green Line, the 1949 armistice line, even in Jerusalem, a city that has had a Jewish majority since 1853, if not before, whereas all Jews were ethnically cleansed from parts of Jerusalem --including the Old City's Jewish Quarter-- that were under Arab control after the 1947-1949 Israeli War of Independence. So the EU states represented in the UN SC favored apartheid against Jews by proclaiming that Jewish residence east of the Green Line, in Jerusalem too, was illegal according to international law, no less. That is what UN SC resolution 2334 has to say. Those EU states want to return Jews to their traditional status in Europe in the Middle Ages where often Jews were forced to live in ghettoes. Indeed, this demonstrates the cyclical nature of history. Out of the ghetto, now back to the ghetto.

Israel can hope for nothing decent at the upcoming French-sponsored "peace conference" in Paris. Bear in mind that the words, working-for-peace, can really mean working for war. There are strong grounds for assuming that the Paris war conference due to start on January 15 is meant to produce a resolution that will be taken to the UN Security Council before Donald Trump is inaugurated as US president on 20 January 2017 in order to prevent him from interfering in the gang up on Israel which Trump has already defined as "unfair". The Paris-to-New York time schedule is tight but possible. As the example of Euro treatment of Greece demonstrates, the EU and its member states can be not only stingy but harsh and cruel. Can Israel expect better from the EU after nearly 2000 years of discrimination and oppression of Jews and often of persecution?
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For more on the Eurozone's treatment of Greece, as well as the contrast between favoritism for the PLO/PA contrasted with stinginess with Greece, see here & here .

A quote from Il Sole-24 Ore (30 January 2012) on proposed reductions of medical coverage for Greeks:

Sul fronte previdenziale, la Troika fa notare che il 50% dei medicinali rimborsati dal sistema sanitario pubblico è generico, con prezzi bassi (e che vi è quindi spazio per ridurre l'esborso di denaro pubblico). [Il Sole-24 Ore, 30 Gennaio 2012  qui] 

Contemptible Europe: EU & non-EU Collaborated with PLO Terrorism against Israel

We have written here at Emet m'Tsiyon about the corruption of the European Union. The corruption also extends to Switzerland, a non-EU state. Lately, the EU wants to label products from Jewish enterprises from the parts of the ancient homeland beyond the old, 1949 armistice line. What Westerners call the "West Bank" which the UN's 1947 partition plan proposal called "Samaria and Judea." This EU policy denies Jewish rights to dwell and produce in those parts of the ancient Jewish homeland, whereas the Land of Israel was recognized in international law as the Jewish National Home (League of Nations in 1922, etc). This EU policy constitutes anti-Jewish racism and anti-Jewish apartheid.

 Moreover, the EU has shown itself stingy and cruel to Greece, one of its member states, plunging Greece into a grave economic crisis, thus failing to abide by one of the EU's supposedly cardinal principles, that is, solidarity among the members of the Union in time of need.

However, Switzerland, preserving its facade of neutrality, is also guilty of collaborating with Arab terrorism against Jews and Israel. The Swiss are even worse because Switzerland is the headquarters of the International Red Cross, the world red cross movement, and the International Committee of the Red Cross which is a semi-official arm of the Swiss government which played a morally corrupt role in the Holocaust by deliberately withholding information it had about the early stages of the Holocaust and other acts of commission and omission.

New information has lately come out about Switzerland's dirty role in promoting Arab terrorism. Vic Rosenthal at the Abu Yehuda blog has done a great job of compiling and laying out for the reader many of the corrupt acts and policies of the European Union and supposedly "neutral" Switzerland. His recent blog post on the subject begins with the morally corrupt Swiss. Bear in mind, that Swiss corruption also bears on the morally corrupt and anti-Israel ICRC [international committee of the red cross]:
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Posted on January 24, 2016 by Vic Rosenthal

It has been revealed that a secret deal kept Switzerland free of PLO terrorism:

According to the author, Swiss journalist Marcel Gyr, Switzerland was in turmoil after a spate of Palestinian terror attacks, including the February 1970 bombing of a Swissair flight from Zurich to Tel Aviv, which killed all on board shortly after takeoff. Gyr recounts that in the wake of the attacks in 1969 and 1970, then-foreign minister Pierre Graber contacted the PLO clandestinely and without informing his fellow ministers, the BBC reported Friday. …

Graber, through a Swiss member of parliament, purportedly reached an agreement with the PLO to free those charged for [a deadly 1969 attack on an El Al plane in Zurich] in return the release of the hostages in Jordan. Furthermore, he agreed that Switzerland would “quietly shelve” the investigation into bombing of the Swissair plane, and make a diplomatic push for international recognition of the PLO.

The Swiss MP, Jean Ziegler, now 81, confirmed that he had been the go-between and said “This might be absolutely shocking, but the reward was that there were no more attacks.”

Shocking? No, it was standard operating procedure. Take Italy for example:

…former Italian President Francesco Cossiga revealed that the government of Italy agreed to allow Arab terrorist groups freedom of movement in the country in exchange for immunity from attacks in Italy. Cossiga wrote that the government of the late Prime Minister Aldo Moro reached a “secret non-belligerence pact between the Italian state and Palestinian resistance [sic] organizations, including terrorist groups,” in the 1970s. According to the former president, it was Moro himself who designed the terms of the agreement with the foreign Arab terrorists. Ironically, Moro later met his death at the hands of homegrown Italian terrorists, the Red Brigades, in 1978. [we can add to this paragraph the apparent guilt of PLO terrorists for the awful Bologna train station massacre circa 1980 for which an Italian neo-fascist was sentenced to jail, whereas the bomb was set in the train station by Germans, members of the Red Army Fraction, who were working for a PLO terrorist sub-group].

Even Germany, with its “special relationship” to Israel, sold its soul. Matt Rees, in his book Cain’s Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East (p. 100) explained,

Arafat put Zakaria Baloush in charge of European operations and contacts. He built a fine relationship with Italian antiterrorist intelligence. His biggest coup, however, was a secret mission to West Germany. Through Libyan intelligence, West Germany asked the PLO for a deal. In 1980 Zakaria went to West Germany with a delegation of PLO officials. They agreed not to carry out any attacks on West German territory. In return they were allowed to operate in West Germany and exchange information with the West Germans.

Today European governments and the European Union provide a hefty part of the cost of running the PLO-based Palestinian Authority, spend millions of Euros financing illegal Arab construction in Area C – the part of Judea/Samaria that according to the Oslo Accords is under full Israeli control – and of course provide tens of millions to Israeli left-wing NGOs which act as a fifth column inside Israel. These NGOs, which have been called “wholly-owned subsidiaries” of the EU and European governments, provide raw material for anti-Israel UN resolutions, ‘lawfare’ against Israeli leaders and IDF soldiers, and provoke violent confrontations to try to destabilize the country. There is no doubt that this anti-state movement would barely exist were it not for European subsides.

The hypocrisy of claiming to oppose terrorism while giving its greatest perpetrators a free pass is obvious. It is no less hypocritical to oppose Israeli construction in disputed areas while paying for illegal Arab building there, and to require products of Judea/Samaria to have special labels while products of countless other “occupied” and disputed territories in the world need not be labeled.

The PLO is possibly one of the most malign entities to come into being in the 20th century, no less than the Nazi party or the Stalinist soviet regime, albeit on a smaller scale. In the years from its founding in 1964 and through its unfortunate legitimization by Israel as the representative of the Palestinians – one of the two greatest strategic mistakes made by an Israeli government since the founding of the state – the PLO brought terrorism into the mainstream of international politics, started wars and destabilized governments. It always kept its primary objective foremost: to destroy Israel by killing Israeli Jews. Thanks to Oslo it now has the status of a governmental authority.

The Palestinian Authority has no economy to speak of except the international dole, and much of this flows directly into the Swiss bank accounts of PLO officials. Some is also used to pay PLO fighters that are incarcerated in Israel for murder and terrorism, as well as pensions for the families of ‘martyrs’, who died in the process of killing Jews. Over the years, literally billions of dollars of aid that has been given to ‘the Palestinians’ has been used to support terrorism and the lifestyle of PLO honchos.

The PLO never allowed any voices to be heard among the Palestinian Arabs except those calling for confrontation. Moderates were liquidated and a reign of fear established. The PLO rules the areas under its control with an iron fist. Those who want to cooperate with Israel in any way are silenced.

PA leader Mahmoud Abbas claims to be opposed to “violence,” but what he means is that he does not advocate that the PLO return to organized attacks on Israelis using firearms and explosives. On the other hand, he encourages what he calls “popular resistance,”calling on individual Palestinians and groups on their own to kill Jews with knives, Molotov cocktails, stones, automobiles, meat cleavers, and so on. And the PA continues to name schools, streets and sports teams after terrorists, as well as treating the ‘martyrs of the popular resistance’ as heroes in its official media. It also makes numerous false accusations to stir up trouble, such as that Israel plans to build a third Temple on the Temple Mount, or that soldiers and police murder Palestinians and plant knives nearby.

The PLO/PA’s educational system continues to present Israeli Jews as subhumans who stole the land from them and to present the recovery of all of ‘Palestine’ from the river to the sea and the expulsion of the Jews as their objective, and not the creation of a peaceful Palestinian state on part of the territory. This system and the PA media which glorify martyrdom in the name of Palestine are directly responsible for children as young as 11 trying to murder Jews and often being killed themselves.

The PLO is a cancer in the international body. Initially given life by Egypt in 1964 as another weapon against Israel, it took its own direction when it was taken over by Yasser Arafat in 1968. It drew strength from the great-power conflict of the cold war, when it was armed by the Soviets as part of their struggle against the West. More recently it has parasitized the US (which provides the PA with $400 million/year, including a program to arm and train its ‘security’ forces) and of course the EU which gives it somewhat less. It’s difficult to determine the total amount of international aid, because it comes through many different sources (the US, UN, EU and other donors) and multiple programs. But it is at least $1 billion/year.

What is truly shocking is not that the Europeans made deals with the devil in order to protect themselves. It’s that after all these years nobody – not even Benjamin Netanyahu – has been prepared to stand up and say “enough.”

Enough money and assistance has been given to these terrorist murderers. Enough blackmail has been paid. Enough resources that could have been used to help alleviate hunger and fight disease have been squandered on this destabilizing force which has demonstrated over and over that its primary objective – its only objective – isn’t peace, but the destruction of a nation.

One of the main reasons that the PLO has continued to exist is that Israel since Oslo has believed or pretended to believe that it is in some sense a peace partner. Now that there seems to finally be a consensus here that the Oslo idea has blown up in our faces and there will not be a two-state solution in the near future, Israel has a great opportunity to do the world – including the Palestinian Arabs – a favor.

The PLO and its creature the PA has proven to be a failure – a failure as a peace partner, and a failure as a governing authority for the Palestinian Arabs in Judea and Samaria. Israel could root out and destroy this cancer by removing the PLO from power, disarming its militias, and going back to its pre-Oslo position that it would only negotiate with non-terrorist entities.

This might end up with Israel in full control of the territories again, something that many Israelis see as a burden they are loathe to undertake. But in the long term there is no alternative. The PLO, like a tumor, can’t be fixed. It must be removed.

Western Hypocrisy regarding Ruins in Ramadi as against Ruins in Gaza

The hypocrisy of Western governments is and has been blatant and sometimes gross. Their moralizing scolding of Israel belongs to their Judeophobic and self-righteous self-regard. Evelyn Gordon exposes just how deep and how offensive this hypocrisy is.

Ramadi, Gaza, and Western Hypocrisy

EVELYN GORDON / JAN. 13, 2016

Image by © STR/epa/Corbis.

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During the Hamas-Israel war of 2014, both Obama Administration officials and their European counterparts repeatedly accused Israel of excessive force over the “massive” destruction of civilian property in Gaza. But if those officials retain even a shred of intellectual integrity, the recent devastation of Ramadi during a joint Western/Iraqi effort to retake the city leaves them only two options: either hand themselves over to the International Criminal Court as suspected war criminals, or publicly apologize to Israel for all the slurs they hurled at it over far less extensive damage.

As the New York Times reported last week, the successful recapture of Ramadi from the Islamic State left the city “in ruins.” Reporter Ben Hubbard described one neighborhood as “a panorama of wreckage so vast that it was unclear where the original buildings had stood.” The city has no electricity or running water, and “Many streets had been erased or remained covered in rubble or blocked by trenches used in the fighting.” When Hubbard asked an Iraqi officer how residents would return to their homes, the officer replied, “Homes? There are no homes.”

Indeed, a different Iraqi officer told the Associated Press “that more than half of the city’s buildings have been destroyed, including government offices, markets, and houses.”

This is devastation orders of magnitude greater than what Gaza suffered. According to UN figures, 9,465 homes in Gaza were completely destroyed and another 9,644 badly damaged, out of a total of roughly 319,000 (the latter figure is my own calculation based on  official Palestinian statistics: Dividing Gaza’s total population of 1.82 million by its average household size of 5.7 people gives you 319,000 households). Thus even according to the UN – which traditionally exaggeratesPalestinian casualties and damage – only about 6 percent of Gaza’s homes were destroyed or badly damaged. That’s a far cry from “more than half of the city” in Ramadi.

But the reasons for the destruction, in both places, are no less significant than its scope. One, as Hubbard noted, is the inherent difficulty “of dislodging a group that stitches itself into the urban fabric of communities it seizes by occupying homes, digging tunnels, and laying extensive explosives.” In Ramadi, he reported, Islamic State built tunnels under the streets and planted explosives in roads and buildings. Indeed, “Entire areas are considered no-go zones because they have yet to be searched for booby traps left by the jihadists.”

These are the same tactics Hamas used in Gaza: Tunnels, booby traps, and weapons stockpiles were placed in and under civilian buildings on a massive scale. On July 30, 2014, for instance, three Israeli soldiers were killed by “an explosion at a booby-trapped UNRWA health clinic that housed a tunnel entry shaft,” the Times of Israel reported. At the same press briefing where those deaths were announced, an Israeli officer said Hamas had thus far detonated more than 1,000 bombs, destroying “thousands of buildings” in Gaza. As an example, he cited a street the army searched the previous night in which 19 out of 28 buildings were booby-trapped.

But in Gaza, both the Obama administration and European officials blamed Israel for the ensuing destruction. In Ramadi, in contrast, both American and Iraqi officials quite sensibly “placed blame for the city’s destruction on the jihadists, who mined roads and buildings.”

The other factor in Ramadi’s devastation was airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition. As AP reported, these strikes “smashed large parts of the city into rubble.” Nor is that surprising: When a target area is extensively booby-trapped, even precision airstrikes often cause greater-than-expected damage, because the attacking force can’t know which buildings are wired with explosives, and hitting a wired building will set off massive secondary explosions. Yet airstrikes are unavoidable when fighting militants entrenched in a sea of tunnels and booby-trapped buildings, because using ground troops alone would result in unacceptably high losses for the attacking force.

Consequently, a Pentagon spokesman correctly blamed Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) for the damage to Ramadi: “One hundred percent of this is on ISIL because no one would be dropping any bombs if ISIL hadn’t gone in there,” Colonel Steven H. Warren told Hubbard.

Yet in Gaza, both the Obama Administration and European officials largely blamed the damage on Israel rather than Hamas, even though Israeli airstrikes were employed for the exact same reason, sometimes caused greater-than-expected damage for the exact same reason, and obviously wouldn’t have been launched at all had Hamas not attacked Israel to begin with. Indeed, Israel’s airstrikes were arguably far more justified than America’s were: Islamic State wasn’t firing missiles at America from Ramadi or digging attack tunnels into American territory from Ramadi. In contrast, Hamas had fired thousands of rockets at Israel from Gaza over the previous decade and dug dozens of cross-border attack tunnels, including one that notoriously emerged right next to a kindergarten.

Ramadi, incidentally, is far from the only example of the way the Obama Administration and Europe hold Israel to a double standard. On Monday, the Elder of Ziyon blog highlightedanother one: According to the Herald Scotland, “The British government is refusing to accept evidence of civilian fatalities in UK air strikes from human rights groups monitoring the results of bombing raids” in Syria and Iraq; instead, it relies exclusively on “evidence from its own internal surveillance.” But that same government uncritically accepted NGO reports saying that almost 70 percent of Palestinian casualties in Gaza were civilian, even though Israel scrupulously investigated those reports and found that in reality, about half the casualties were documented members of either Hamas’ military wing or smaller terrorist organizations like Islamic Jihad.

I don’t really expect any Obama Administration or European official to admit to having unjustly criticized Israel during the Gaza war. But any fair-minded person comparing the devastation of Ramadi to that in Gaza should reach the same conclusion a group of high-ranking Western military experts did in a comprehensive report issued last month: that during the Gaza war, Israel “met and in some respects exceeded the highest standards we set for our own nations’ militaries.”

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The hypocrisy of the United States and other Western powers concerning Israel is well-established fact. The European Union is too foolish to even understand that it is being hypocritical.

More European Greed, Failure & Hypocrisy: The Greek Case

We are all familiar with the moral pretensions and pretenses of Europe, particularly the European Union which embodies Europe's flaws quintessentially. They seem to know what is right for everybody else in the world, especially for Israel and the Jews. Just listen to us and you will have peace, they tell us. Why we should listen to them is beyond me, since I am old enough to remember that the Nazi Holocaust was perpetrated not just by Germans and Austro-Germans but was aided by most of Europe (by Arabs too but we're not talking about Arabs). Think of Quisling Norway and Vichy France and so on and so forth. Europe's world championship in hypocrisy is solid and unchallenged, as this Irish example bearing on Israel demonstrates. But even more striking is how the European Union  treats some of its own who appear to belong to a lesser class of Europeans.

The EU has never threatened Turkey with any sort of boycott for its occupation of northern Cyprus, whereas Cyprus, predominantly Greek ethnically, is a member of the EU itself. But there is obviously a lot of business to be done with Turkey or maybe the Greek Cypriots are just Europeans Grade B. Their brothers and sisters in Greece, also an EU member and a NATO member, suffer from counterproductive Eurozone schemes for settling their debt crisis. The Eurozone, a subsidiary comprising most EU members, imposed on Greece a terribly dysfunctional austerity plan that guarantees to keep most Greeks in poverty and does not encourage growth.

Anyhow Philippe Legrain in Foreign Policy updates some of the things that I and many professional economists have been saying for years [although I am not a professional economist, some big flaws in the "remedy" for Greece have been much too obvious]. Whatever the flaws in the economic plans to "help" Greece, their proposals for the Middle East  would work just as badly or worse if Israel adopted their plans to "help bring peace" to the Middle East. Here is Legrain:

Why Greece Should Reject the Latest Offer From Its Creditors

Debt bondage is destroying the country — for no good reason.

• BY PHILIPPE LEGRAIN
• JUNE 12, 2015
• 

Reform — Greece sorely needs it. Cash — the government is running desperately short of it. So it is time for Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to do what’s best for Greece and accept its creditors’ reform demands in exchange for much-needed cash. That is how the Greek situation is usually framed. It is utterly misleading.

Imagine you’re in prison for not being able to pay your debts. (You’re right, it’s almost unthinkable — civilized societies no longer lock up bankrupt individuals. But bear with me.) After five years of misery, you lead a rebellion, take control of the prison, and demand your release. The jailers respond by cutting off your water supply. Should you back down and return to your cell, perhaps negotiating for slightly less unpleasant conditions, in order to obtain a little liquidity? Or should you keep fighting to be free? That, in essence, is what the standoff between an insolvent Greece and its eurozone creditors is really about.

For months, Greece has had “only days” to agree a deal with its creditors before it runs out of cash. Eventually that will be true. But even if Tsipras accepted the creditors’ demands, Greece would still have “only days” before it ran out of cash. The 7.2 billion euros on offer right now wouldn’t even cover the Greek government’s debt repayments until the end of August. And for a measly two months of liquidity, Tsipras is expected to surrender his democratic mandate: break his election promises, agree to yet more tax increases and spending cuts that would depress Greece’s economy further, and relinquish his demands for debt relief.

Then the wrangling would start again. Because so long as Greece remains in its debtors’ prison, it will be dependent on its jailers for liquidity and therefore expected to comply with whatever additional conditions they impose. Tsipras should not submit to this debt bondage.

Nine of every 10 euros that eurozone governments and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have lent to the Greek government since 2010 have gone torepay its unbearable debts, which should instead have been restructured back then. But from now on, every last cent of additional funding would go to pay back debt. The Greek government now has a small primary surplus: It doesn’t need to borrow, except to service its debts of 175 percent of GDP.

Yet in exchange for additional liquidity, Greece’s creditors are demanding a return to the failed austerity policies of the past five years, which have shrunkthe economy by 21 percent and thrown one in four people — and one in two youth — out of work. The hypothesis that austerity can cure insolvency has been tested to destruction. Another dose of it would be perverse.

As Martin Sandbu of the Financial Times points out, further austerity isn’t even in the creditors’ interests. They are demanding a fiscal tightening of 1.7 percent of GDP in the second half of this year alone. Since raising taxes and cutting spending would depress the economy — shrinking tax revenues and inflating social spending, thereby unwinding some of the budget tightening — a fiscal squeeze twice as big would be required to achieve the creditors’ target, if the past five years are anything to go by. According to Sandbu, that would crunch the economy by 5 percent, perversely raising the ratio of debt to GDP by some 9 percentage points. To achieve a primary surplus of 3.5 percent of GDP by 2018, as the creditors are demanding, would require a fiscal squeeze of 8.3 percent of GDP, depressing the economy by 12.5 percent and increasing the ratio of debt to GDP by around 22.5 percentage points. Far from bringing Greece’s debts down to more sustainable levels, further austerity would cause them to soar.

Why would eurozone authorities be so cruel and foolish? Because they don’t really care about the welfare of ordinary Greeks. They aren’t even that bothered about whether the Greek government pays back the money they forced European taxpayers to lend to it, ostensibly out of solidarity, but actually to bail out French and German banks and investors. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other eurozone policymakers just don’t want to admit that they made a terrible mistake in 2010 and have lied about it since. So they want to be seen as standing up for eurozone taxpayers’ interests, and they want Greeks to put up and shut up until Merkel and her minions are comfortably in retirement, and it is someone else’s problem.

Further austerity isn’t the only consequence of leaving Greeks languishing in their debtors’ prison. Contrary to claims that Greece shells out scarcely any interest, it pays an average interest rate of 2.5 percent on its debts, according to Joakim Tiberg of UBS, a Swiss bank — 4.5 percent of GDP in total. With prices falling by 2.1 percent over the past year, the inflation-adjusted interest rate is 4.7 percent. Worse, the debt overhang creates crippling uncertainty about how the crisis might be resolved — including whether Greece might be forced out of the euro — stunting consumption, investment, and growth. Having creditors breathing down your neck to raise taxes is a further deterrent to investment. And the debt overhang also causes deflation, making the burden even more unbearable.

The creditors’ insistence on reform is also disingenuous. Greece has been run by the institutions known as the Troika — the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the IMF — since May 2010. They have had every opportunity to insist on the reforms they are now demanding. Yet they kept on funding Greece because all they cared about was the fiscal targets (and wage cuts to boost “competitiveness”). The sudden focus on reform is primarily about forcing Tsipras to break the promises that got him elected in January.

Let me be clear: Greece urgently needs reform. Its economy is underdeveloped, hidebound, and dominated by oligarchic families who monopolize markets and suborn politics. Its public administration is corrupt and inefficient. Its legal system is dysfunctional, its tax system full of holes. Tsipras may or may not be willing to reform Greece. But ultimately, it ought to be up to Greeks whether and how they do so.

Indeed, the main sticking points between Athens and its creditors aren’t really reforms, they’re fiscal measures. While improving the collection and administration of value-added tax (VAT) is desirable, the creditors are also demanding a tax hike of 1 percent of GDP. That is wrong-headed, since it would hit the country’s main export sector, tourism, which accounts for 18 percent of GDP.

Pension reform is also necessary as Greeks live longer and fewer workers have to support more retirees. But the country’s social safety net is so threadbare that a single-slashed pension is often supporting a whole family of jobless people. So, while encouraging healthy people to continue working is desirable, pension cuts are not.

Some argue that Tsipras should sign up to what the creditors want, take the cash to pay off the looming bond payments to the IMF and the ECB, make a show of reform, and then press again for debt relief. But the notion that the creditors would then be more flexible is fanciful. In 2012, eurozone governments promised Greece debt relief once it achieved a primary surplus, but they still haven’t delivered it. The Greek government has now put forward sensible plans for restructuring its debts. Unless its creditors are willing to start negotiating meaningful debt relief, Tsipras should reject any deal on offer.

Merkel ought to be as magnanimous with Greece as the United States was with post-Nazi Germany, when Washington forgave half of the West German government’s debts in 1953 [this is not what was most important about the Marshall Plan money: None of it went back to the United States. All of it stayed in Germany-- Eliyahu m'Tsiyon]. But if eurozone authorities won’t be reasonable, unilateral default — and even euro exit — is preferable to debt bondage. 
[emphases are mine, likewise I supplied the link in the sentence above "Merkel ought to be as magnanimous. . . ."- Eliyahu] 

More Hypocrisy of European Academic Institutions -- Proof of the New Nazism

There is a widespread hate-Israel movement that calls for boycotting Israel, not only products made on either side of the 1949 armistice line, The Green Line, but even Israeli academic institutions. Now this call to boycott got its first big impetus from the 2001 Durban "anti-racism" conference that turned out to be an anti-Israel, anti-Jewish hate fest. It later came to light, mainly thanks to Edwin Black, that many of the groups, so-called NGOs, taking part in the anti-Israel hate celebration were funded by the Ford Foundation which we have discussed before.

The claim was made in defense of boycotting Israel that Israel is "occupying" parts of the ancient Jewish homeland, to wit, Judea-Samaria, roughly speaking, also called "The West Bank." The boycott movement is especially strong in Britain where several universities and a number of academics are boycotting Israel and have been for about ten years.

Yet some of the same universities and university departments that boycott Israel are happy to cooperate and collaborate with universities established in the Turkish occupation zone of northern Cyprus. They claim that international law requires them to boycott Israel in general or to specifically products and persons living in or manufactured in or --in the case of fruit and produce-- grown in Judea-Samaria.

Eugene Kontorovich shows us what is going on behind the hypocritical rhetoric:

November 17, 2014 by Eugene Kontorovich                                

A Tale of Two Green Lines

         Efforts by academic groups to impose boycotts and other kinds of punitive measures on Israeli universities have gotten considerable attention lately. However, an opposite phenomenon has escaped notice: the widespread participation by mainstream universities in programs and collaborations with institutions located in occupied territories.

         This may surprise those who recall that Israel’s establishment of Ariel University in the West Bank drew earnest condemnation from academics and even foreign ministries  around the world. Yet it turns out that Ariel is not the only graduate-level institution established in what much of the international community considers occupied territory. And the others have gotten a very different reception.
        Turkey has established 10 universities and many colleges in Northern Cyprus since seizing the territory in an invasion in 1974. Half of the universities are public, state-run institutions, and several are campuses of major Turkish institutions on the mainland. Some of the universities were established in just the past few years.

The United Nations Security Council, the European Court of Human Rights, and most of the international community have condemned the Turkish takeover of one third of the island of Cyprus. As of this writing, no nation other than Turkey recognizes the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” regime by which Ankara controls the territory. Turkey maintains a major settlement program, and settlers from the mainland now account for half or more of the population of the TRNC.
Yet surprisingly, universities in Northern Cyprus have won wide cooperation from institutions and academics elsewhere. Indeed, the growing effort to boycott Israeli institutions often coincides with a welcoming embrace of universities not just in the lands of occupying powers (like Turkey and Russia) but also established in the territories those countries occupy.
A telling example involves a conference this fall at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London. Professors from Ariel University were barred from mentioning their professional affiliations as a condition of participating, and instead were asked to come as independent scholars not representing Ariel—a deal that they refused. The conference organizers said they could not be seen as “recognizing” Ariel. The incident was incoherent on its own terms. One might think that Ariel is problematic and illegitimate—but there is no denying that it exists, and that it employs the scholars in question. Ironically, the conference was about Israel studies: Would scholarly papers about the Israeli presence in the West Bank that refer to Ariel U have to leave its name blank?
The exclusion of Ariel University from the SOAS conference stands in sharp contrast to the school’s policies regarding interactions with schools in other occupied territories. SOAS once provided a special undergraduate course at the European University of Lefke, one of the universities established by occupation authorities in Northern Cyprus. More recently, SOAS has had speakers from “Abkhazian state” institutions, an unrecognized de facto arm of Russia’s occupation government in part of Georgia. Similarly, SOAS has held events with speakers from Turkish universities that have branches in occupied Cyprus. All of those affiliations were openly acknowledged.
These dalliances are par for the course for European institutions. British institutions are particularly active in Northern Cyprus, because of Britain’s history with the island. The University of Warwick, for example, has an  “official overseas center” for master’s programs at Eastern Mediterranean University. The University of Wolverhampton and University of Sunderland have joint degree programs with Cyprus International University, in the occupied part of the divided city of Nicosia. The European University of Lefke has several partnerships with British institutions. While they stand out, French, Italian, and Spanish institutions also have numerous ties. And one Northern Cypriot institution even opened a program in Washington.
Those are just the direct, institutional relationships. In addition, many faculty members of universities in Northern Cyprus are invited to lecture at foreign universities or publish in foreign scholarly journals. Similarly, academics from elsewhere in Europe attend conferences in Northern Cyprus.
These relationships have taken on added meaning because the universities are a core aspect of the Turkish occupation regime on the island. Turkey has aggressively developed higher education in the territory as a magnet for both settlers and foreign money. The schools attract tens of thousands of settlers/students from the Turkish mainland, and they cater heavily to international students by offering classes in English. Indeed, education has become one of the bulwarks of the TRNC economy, according to a New York Times article this year. The universities boast an enrollment of 63,000 students in a territory with a population of only 300,000.
The Republic of Cyprus strenuously protests the operation of these universities. Cyprus claims that the universities are illegally established, often on private property belonging to Greek Cypriot refugees, and argues that any accreditation, degree recognition, or other dealings with them by the international academic community violates international law. But these calls by the legitimate government of a Western democracy to abjure dealings with the occupation academies fall on deaf ears in academe—while calls to boycott not just Ariel but all Israeli institutions find a growing number of supporters.
Another striking example of this incongruity occurred last year, when many European academics signed a letter to the European Union official Catherine Ashton supporting the European Commission’s restriction of funds to institutions across the Green Line (a common name for Israel’s 1949 armistice line with Jordan). Many of the signatories teach at universities that themselves have relationships across the other Green Line, as Cyprus’s de facto partition border is known.
The wide acceptance of relationships with mainland Turkish and even TRNC institutions suggests that academic boycotts of Israel cannot be reduced to principled opposition to occupation regimes or dutiful execution of international law.
Yet the attitude of international academics to TRNC schools is, in fact, the right one. Knowledge does not know creeds or boundaries.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Cypriot conflict, cooperation among institutions of learning should not be obstructed, just as in former centuries, even countries at war maintained academic exchanges. European institutions are right to not boycott universities in Northern Cyprus. But advocating boycotts of Israeli institutions without an awareness of the broad academic cooperation with institutions in Turkish and other occupied territories is hypocritical and dishonest.

Eugene Kontorovich is a professor at the Northwestern University School of Law.
[The Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 November 2014]
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The hypocrisy deployed by various and sundry European universities and academic centers and departments also demonstrates a profound Judeophobia at work, since Judeophobia is --among other things-- applying different standards and rules to Jews than to non-Jews. The hatred and self-righteousness displayed by Europeans indicates a genocidal inclination towards Jews and the Jewish state of Israel on the part of the Europeans and others taking part in the boycotts.