Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-02-23-Speech-3-038"
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"en.20050223.5.3-038"2
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"Mr President, when in the autumn of 2003, Mr Mahmoud Abbas had no choice but to step down as Prime Minister because Yasser Arafat did not give him the elbow room to work on peace, few people could imagine that one and a half years later, we would get such an historic opportunity to make peace sustainable – and historic this opportunity truly is. If we see how Mahmoud Abbas is adopting a pragmatic position, and what Israel’s first reaction is like, but also how the people in Lebanon are claiming their right to freedom and self-determination in a historic manner, I think it is of great importance for Europe to be giving the right signals. What are those signals?
First of all, we, along with the United States, should press for breathing new life into the roadmap, but also, as Mr Brok said a moment ago, give support to the Palestinians at this particular time, so that the people there realise, the sooner the better, that the pragmatists and moderates can really offer benefits. Thirdly, we must also give a clear signal, clearer than before, to the ill-intentioned, by which, in particular, I am referring to Hezbollah, to which our attitude in Europe is really odd.
In the case of Hamas, we said at one time that it was, as a whole, both politically and militarily wrong. Where Hezbollah is concerned, we are still two-faced, because in their case, we say that the military side is wrong, but we can deal with them at a political level. There is no longer any reason to sustain that division, for that division is implausible. There is a leader, Mr Nasrallah, who is the political and military leader, and who claims that they are an organisation. Equally, the second man in the organisation, Sheikh Naim Qassem, says that they are an organisation, that politically and militarily speaking, they have the same objective: ‘Political activity is integrated into resistance operations, it is a inseparable part of the political activity’. That is what was said by Hezbollah’s Number Two, and should there be any doubt left, I should like to quote Hezbollah’s representative in the Lebanese Parliament, the one we have dealings with, who states: ‘Hezbollah is an organisation in which all the fighters are simultaneously politicians and fighters. The manner in which some in the West seek to betray Hezbollah does not deceive us’.
We cannot afford to be naïve any longer, particularly at this time. We must send the right message to the Palestinians, Israelis and the Lebanese who want freedom, by taking a firm line with the evil-minded like Hezbollah. I know that during the last Council presidency, the Dutch Government tried to move away from this two-faced attitude and place Hezbollah as a whole on the list of terrorist organisations. I think that the people in the Middle East deserve that signal from the EU as a whole. I would like to ask the Commissioner, but also the Council’s representative, whether they would like to elaborate on this. Why are we still two-faced in our dealings with Hezbollah, and when will we at last come to fight the organisation as a whole by fire and sword, as we do Hamas?"@en1
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