In the old Superman comics, there was a character called Bizarro who was a mirror image of Superman - that is everything was reversed, including speech patterns and notions of bad and good. There was, at one point, an entire planet named BizarroWorld that shared Bizarro's outlook.
Catherine Ashton, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice President of the European Commission provides us with a superb example of this kind of bizarro world view in a recent op-ed in the New York Times on Gaza.
Her ideas? Israel and Egypt should remove the Gaza blockade permanently and Israel should depend on what she referred to as the EU's 'highly trained staff members' to man the border crossings, keep out Iranian weaponry and allow in things that will allow what she calls 'normal, decent people, denied the chance to lead normal lives' to live in peace next to Israel.
She also makes the point that this is what the United Nations Security Council and the European Union have demanded, as well as what Israel agreed with the Palestinian Authority in 2005.
Let's examine this bizarro world position in a little detail.
Nowhere amid the strains of kumbayah exuded by Ms. Ashton does the nasty little fact emerge to soil her vision that these normal decent people she's so enamored of are the same ones who voted for the genocidal Hamas by a huge majority before there was any blockade.To listen to her, not only would one would never know that Hamas won an election, you wouldn't even know that they're in full control of the Gaza Strip!
Ms. Ashton also doesn't seem to be able to bear to mention that Hamas is a proxy of Iran,and that that without the Israeli/Egyptian blockade the larger, deadlier arms shipments from Iran and Syria like Grad missiles(which can only be transported by ship) can come in, just as they did with Hezbollah right under the UN's nose in defiance of its own Security Council Resolution 1701.
Does she really expect the Israelis to sit back and watch that happen again in Gaza?
In fact the entire notion of those 'trained staff members on the ground who could help implement this at Gaza’s border' is a ludicrous joke to anyone who remembers the events of the last few years. When the Israelis left Gaza, they were assured by the EU and the US that Gaza would never become a security risk for Israel because they would monitor the border crossings and take action to make sure no heavy weapons were smuggled in.
When Hamas took over Gaza in a bloody coup in 2007, those 'highly trained EU monitors' stationed at border crossings like the one in Rafah ran like scared rabbits for the Israeli border. Nor did the EU (or the US, for that matter) do a single thing to prevent Hamas from receiving Iranian arms to attack Israel. What Ms. Ashton and her cohorts in the EU are essentially saying is 'hey Israel, forget about what happened before in Lebanon and in Gaza. Trust us!'
What the Israelis constantly get from the so-called international community Catherine Ashton represents is nothing but inconsequential fantasy about 'human rights' that carefully excludes the right of Israel's self-defense and does nothing to deal with the reason for the blockade - Hamas receiving arms from Iran and Syria and using them to attack Israel. Instead of dealing with that piece of reality, they're far too busy currying favor with the Muslim world by condemning Israel for the singular sin of defending itself.
Bizarro world indeed.
And lets not forget the EU monitors are still being paid while sitting in Ashkelon
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