Former Finnish foreign minister, Erkki Tuomioja, recently laid a major ‘steaming pile’ of disingenuous falsehoods on his website last week (6.7.07), in which he cast Israel as the chief wrong doer in the present mess called the ME conflict. Here’s a quick translation by Tundraman:
“The possibilities to create a Palestinian state have become more and more remote during the last years. It is evident that the Palestinians have also themselves made crucial mistakes. The internal strife’s of the Palestinians have now also lead to the situation where the Palestinian territories are divided into Gaza which lives under the authority of Hamas and the West Bank which is ruled by the Fattah of President Abbas.
But the international community has not been able and maybe not really wanted to do anything to stop the Palestinians from being driven to this situation. A special responsibility lies with Israel, who has all the time acted in a way which works against hope, possibilities for peace and the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Even the European Union has only watched from aside how Israel has all the time acted, both on the West Bank and especially in the vicinity of Jerusalem, against both international law and the peace plans it has accepted and enlargened the area settled by Israel in a way which, in other circumstances, would be openly called ethnic cleansing.
In this way, the creation of a viable Palestinian state is, in fact, made impossible and a situation, which the former US president Jimmy Carter would have had the courage to call apartheid conducted by the Jewish state, is deep-frozen. It goes without saying that the stagnant situation which obscures hope and the prospect of a better future is also fuel for extremist groups planning terror acts.”
Al Avai adds: Yes, here you see him accusing Israel of being a racist state (ethnic cleansing), distorting the terms of previous agreements (which permitted expansion on the West Bank), and misinterpreting international law. Coming from such a smart cookie, it only can mean that he is either knowingly dishonest or that his prejudices and preconceptions are so fixed that he fails to analyze the data before him. That is why it was so deeply satisfying that he dropped from the Cabinet.
Tundraman: The worrying part is of course that he is now where he really wants to be – in the opposition – and can use all his rhetoric freely to gather more support within his party for the next election. And we do know that he is not alone with his opinions in his political milieu…
Ol’Scruffy represents the Leftist mindset here in Scandinavia that holds to the illusion that it’s “the occupation” that is the main fault for the impasse in the peace process, not the extremist Islamist “all or nothing” call for the destruction/dismanteling of the Jewish state. Tuomioja is more than willing to turn a “blind eye” to the genocidal rantings of the Palestinian Islamists in the Hamas as well as in the Fattah, because that type of language is expected from them since they are “oppressed”.
He mentally distances himself from blaming the radical ideology at play within the Palestinian camp, because to do otherwise would be to admit that he had been wrong, be harshly critical against his pet project, and conceed that Israel has indeed a right to reject outside pressure to negotiate with an entirely unreasonable entitey. The idea that one can only negotiate a true peace with one’s “former enemy”, is an alien thought to the guy who has so fuddled his brain with Leftist goo, that he actually believes that “all conflicts can be solved through negotiations”.
In a very enlightening read, Professor Efraim Karsh exposed a couple o f years ago E.Tuomija: “European Misreading of theIsraeli-Palestinian Conflict:Finnish Foreign Minister Tuomioja – A Case Study.
