For decades, the Arab world specifically and the Muslim world in general has used threats as its main leverage to get the West to bend to its will. The threats aren't usually direct; most often they take the form of "if you don't do what we want, the Arab street will erupt" or "the terrorists will have an excuse." In other words, if Arab thugocracies do not get what they desire from the West, then they will be powerless to stop the irrational forces within their borders from damaging Western interests.In a speech given this week at Harvard University, High Representative/Vice-President Federica Mogherini shows that fear of irrational responses by Muslims indeed is what drives official EU security policy:
...European Mideast policy is almost wholly driven by fear of upsetting Arabs and Muslims. Those who claim to be seeking "peace" make the assumption that asking Arabs for concessions is useless and could ignite some sort of negative response - so is makes more sense to pressure Israel into making even more concessions.
How many times have we seen a variant of this recent pronouncement from Mahmoud Abbas:
Mr Abbas said the freeze was causing hardship to ordinary people and would lead to further instability.
"Instability?" We all know what he means by that - he means violence and terror, which is apparently a natural reaction in the rules of Arab physics. If the West doesn't give Palestinian Arabs more and more money, well, hey, he sure can't control his people from the spontaneous inevitable violence (remarkably similar to the violence they seem to have perfected when they had a billion dollars a year coming into their coffers.)
Mahmoud Abbas threatens the Western world and no one bothers to call him on it.
This climate of fear is so endemic that fundamentally irrational and immoral acts by the Muslim world are accepted by the West with little question - to challenge it could put you in the same category as a Salman Rushdie or a Danish cartoonist, and who needs that hassle?
Strategic autonomy for us is about responsibility. It's about being grown-ups and stating what we believe is right, what we believe in is in the interest of Europeans but also of our transatlantic friends....Any country can move their embassy to any city they choose, with no worries about security. But moving an embassy to Jerusalem suddenly becomes an issue for both European security and, we are condescendingly told, for American security as well.
I know that many people here in America, including in Washington D.C., understand this perfectly well: that our security is tied; that our destinies are connected more closely than we often admit.
So, I don't want to underplay the breadth and the depth of our disagreements with the current U.S. administration: they're there and they're self-evident. Sometimes they are so self-evident that they hide all the rest and this is a shame.
But it is true that on Iran or on Jerusalem we believe that this administration has taken decisions that run counter to our collective interest and to our collective security: our European one but also the US' interest and security.
What is the threat from moving an embassy? The threat is that Muslims will get pissed off.
And the top politicians in the EU have incorporated the fear of irrational Muslims into their foreign and security policies.
So Angela Merkel has personally intervened with European countries to not move their embassies:
The founding director of the European Coalition for Israel in Brussels, Tomas Sandell, announced in a shocking video message on Thursday that German Chancellor Angela Merkel waged a campaign to prevent central and eastern European countries from moving their capitals to Jerusalem to preserve the Iran nuclear deal.
Speaking from the European parliament, Sandell said, “What we have found out, something I heard for quite some time already, from central and eastern European countries that would have an inclination to move their embassy to Jerusalem, this is the natural thing for them to do, is that they have received phone calls from Berlin, from Angela Merkel, the chancellor. Basically, this cannot happen under any circumstances.”
Muslims have cultivated this Western fear of them going crazy for over a century, as this 1899 article shows.
This willingness to outsource security decisions to adhere to whatever the Muslim world is threatening today is so much a part of European thinking that they don't even realize how this is a violation of their own principles. It is outrageous that right after that Mogherini claims that the EU policy is about responsibility and being grown-ups and stating what they believe is right, she openly says that all of these high sounding principles are consistent with cowering in fear and buckling under Muslim threats of irrational violence. And then she self-righteously claims that those who do not believe that political decisions must be approved first by the Muslim world are the ones who are acting immaturely.
Letting Muslim threats drive policy makes the world less safe, not more secure. It shows that fear of Muslims, not lofty principles, are the most important drivers for European policy.
A proud state or group of states would not act this way, let alone justify cowardice as a security imperative. But the EU is doing exactly that - and they brag about it!
(h/t Irene)