European Union heads in Brussels, Belgium, voted on November
11th to require member states to begin labeling products produced on
Israeli occupied lands captured in the Six-Day War of 1967- only 48 years ago- so as to differentiate them from goods made
inside of its internationally recognized
borders.
This
action makes perfect sense, does it not? Expansionism and imperialism are bad
things, no? Surely the world didn’t recognize Germany’s ‘right’ to Rhineland or the Sudetenland prior to World War II?
Did it? I assume that anything made in the Rhineland region of Germany and
exported to other nations is labeled as such? The U.S. fought a war in Vietnam
(that ended only 40 years ago) to preserve South
Vietnam’s independence, but left before it was finished. The South had to
surrender, was promptly absorbed, and Vietnam is now one nation. Surely the
E.U. has demanded that everything they may buy from Vietnam that is made in the
North is clearly labeled as such? China has laid claims to various lands and is
currently building artificial islands in international waters, without
substantive challenge from the U.S. or the E.U. Is everything the European
Union purchases from China that is made in, say, Hong Kong, duly labeled?
Of
course not.
The tiny nation of Israel is wedged in between, or lies in close
proximity to, various vastly larger Islamic states that have vowed to wipe it
off the face of the earth. It is the Middle East’s only democracy, and its
attempts at defending itself are sane, courageous and beneficial. They have, in
fact, used greater restraint in recent years than should have been the case, in
order to appease other liberal Western nation’s notions of “justice.”
The
Israelis had to endure the Holocaust. They are even today attacked,
threatened and bombed on a near-daily
basis. Now that Europe itself is being attacked by Islamic extremists,
perhaps it will rethink this hypocritical and embarrassing “labeling” of
Israel’s produce.
No comments:
Post a Comment