Europe legitimizes the cold killers of Hamas at its own peril. AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday said Europeans appeared to have learned nothing from the Holocaust, after a European Union court ordered the removal of Hamas from its terror blacklist.
“In Luxembourg, the European court removed Hamas from the list of terrorist organizations, Hamas that has committed countless war crimes and countless terror acts,” Mr. Netanyahu was quoted as saying by his office. “It seems that too many in Europe, on whose soil six million Jews were slaughtered, have learned nothing.”
The EU General Court ruled Wednesday that the original listing of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas in 2001 was based not on sound legal judgments but on conclusions derived from the media and the Internet. But it stressed the decision to remove Hamas was based on technical grounds and does “not imply any substantive assessment of the question of the classification of Hamas as a terrorist group.”
Paul Fivat, Switzerland’s special ambassador for the Geneva Conventions, said the intent was “not to accuse, it was not a tribunal. … It was a place simply for the parties to reiterate what is international law.”
“This declaration is a signal that is being sent to conflicting parties, especially the civilian populations, that there is a law which is protecting their interests,” he told reporters.
Hamas’s charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic state on the pre-1948 borders of British-mandated Palestine.
Washington, meanwhile, urged the EU to keep up its sanctions against Hamas, saying there was “no change” in U.S. policy.
