BERLIN – Since Hossam Taleb Yaacoub, a Lebanese-Swedish man, confessed to
membership in Hezbollah last week in a Cypriot criminal court proceeding, close
observers of the radical Islamic group have been warning of new dangers if the
group is not sanctioned.
”Terrorism is terrorism. But where it concerns
the terrorist organization Hezbollah, Europe has been, and still is, a giant
ostrich,” Wim Kortenoeven, a former Dutch MP and one of the Netherland’s leading
Middle East experts, told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday. “I fear that the
European citizens are going to pay a very heavy price for this dangerous
policy.”
Kortenoeven added that Hezbollah and its terrorist Iranian
masters are not only the enemies of the Jewish people and the Jewish State, but
also of Europe and Western civilization as a whole.
“If these menacing
forces are not defeated by us, they will eventually defeat us. The next
Hezbollah bombing target might not be Jewish, but the Channel Tunnel or
Disneyland near Paris,” he said.
Hezbollah provided financial payments,
as well as weapons training, to Yaacoub to carry out tracking of Israeli flight
and tourist movements on the Island, according to his own
testimony.
Cyprus authorities allege Yaacoub sought to mount terror
attacks against Israelis. The defendant denies planning to participate in terror
acts against Israelis.
Lisa Abramowicz, secretary-general of the
Swedish-Israel Information Center, told the Post that it’s time for the “EU to
call a spade a spade.”
“Hezbollah is a terror organization and should be
listed as such by the EU, same as the USA and Canada. It is especially important
for Sweden to push for this, as two Swedish citizens have been charged with
being responsible for the attack and the planning for a similar attack,” she
said.
The EU’s refusal to designate Hezbollah a terror entity attracted
attention last week in the US media.
The New York Daily News
editorialized on Saturday “Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, plain and
simple,” and asked and answered its own question: “Should the continent’s
authorities systematically choke off Hezbollah’s extensive European fund-raising
networks? A trial in Cyprus screams the answer louder than any white paper or
hearing could: Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.”
Writing in his New York
Post column, the Mideast commentator Benny Avni noted last week, “Not all
Europeans are so wishy-washy.
The Netherlands, for one, unilaterally put
Hezbollah on its terrorist list back in 2008. And Britain is now lobbying the
entire EU to do the same. As are Canada and the Obama administration, which
deserves some kudos.”