{"id":224641,"date":"2022-11-28T12:00:13","date_gmt":"2022-11-28T12:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=224641"},"modified":"2024-07-01T08:20:14","modified_gmt":"2024-07-01T07:20:14","slug":"what-does-the-eu-parliaments-designation-of-russia-as-a-state-sponsor-of-terrorism-mean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/11\/what-does-the-eu-parliaments-designation-of-russia-as-a-state-sponsor-of-terrorism-mean\/","title":{"rendered":"What Does the EU Parliament\u2019s Designation of Russia as a \u2018State Sponsor of Terrorism\u2019 Mean?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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EU Parliament – Ruptly<\/p><\/div>\n

24 Nov 2022 – <\/em>Yesterday, members of the European Parliament adopted a resolution naming Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism. The move follows a similar NATO parliamentary committee vote<\/a> just two days earlier, in response to demands from the Ukrainian delegation.<\/p>\n

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With NATO, there could have been no other outcome, given that the bloc has been justifying its continued post-Cold War existence by constantly playing up the need to counter Moscow. And would be redundant without the promotion of a “Russian threat.”<\/p>\n

But what exactly is the European Parliament\u2019s endgame?<\/p>\n

The bloc doesn\u2019t even have an actual \u201cstate sponsor of terrorism\u201d<\/em> designation, and the resolution points that out. \u201cThe EU maintains a list of persons, groups and entities involved in terrorist acts which are subject to sanctions but the current legal framework, unlike those of countries such as the United States and Canada, does not provide for the designation of a state as a sponsor of terrorism,\u201d<\/em> one of its lines reads<\/a>.\u00a0The resolution is not legally binding, and Russia has already been hit with an unprecedented number of sanctions, with more being added on constantly. So, what does Brussels hope to accomplish, beyond adding to a Western-led PR effort to conflate \u201cRussia\u201d<\/em> and \u201cterrorism\u201d<\/em> in the minds of the public?<\/p>\n

The Parliament has spent the past few years \u2013 long before the Ukraine conflict went red hot \u2013 referring to Russia alongside actual terrorist groups like ISIS. \u201cPropaganda pressure on the EU from Russia and Islamic terrorist organisations is growing, say Foreign Affairs Committee MEPs in a resolution,\u201d<\/em> Strasbourg announced<\/a> back in October 2016, for example.\u00a0It\u2019s a particularly egregious commingling of \u201cterrorism,\u201d \u201cISIS,\u201d<\/em> and \u201cRussia,\u201d<\/em> since Moscow at the time was at the very forefront of the fight against the Islamic State\u00a0hotbed in Syria at the invitation of President Bashar Assad, in the wake of Washington\u2019s training and equipping of \u201cSyrian rebels,<\/a><\/em>\u201d some of whom ended up joining an actual jihadist group: Al Qaeda.<\/p>\n

Wednesday’s resolution inverts that history by labeling the government of Syria as the terrorists. \u201cRussia has supported and financed terrorist regimes and organisations, notably the Assad regime in Syria, to which Russia has supplied arms and in whose defence it has carried out deliberate attacks on the Syrian civilian population,\u201d<\/em> according to the resolution.<\/p>\n

Similarly, the EU had a whole eight years to denounce the Western training, equipping, and funding of Azov fighters \u2013 actual non-state violent actors in Ukraine, previously described<\/a> as \u201cneo-Nazis<\/a>\u201d\u00a0<\/em>by the Western\u00a0press \u2013 before they were folded into the Ukrainian army and rebranded as freedom fighters against Russia. Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna even pointed out back in 2018 that, for years, the US congressional funding bill had been stripped of language banning the supply of American weapons and funding to \u201ca controversial ultranationalist militia<\/a> in Ukraine that has openly accepted neo-Nazis into its ranks.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

While the EU has failed to do anything to prevent or stop the conflict \u2013 for instance, by refusing to cut off its own cheap energy supply from Russia and insisting instead that Kiev and its primary benefactor, Washington, work things out with Moscow \u2013 the resolution doubles down on the EU officials\u2019 anti-Russian rhetoric. \u201cRussia\u2019s attempt to leverage energy exports as a tool of geopolitical coercion amounts to using energy supplies as a weapon,\u201d<\/em> it reads, ignoring the fact that it\u2019s EU officials who have been bragging about cutting off their own energy supply \u201cfor Ukraine.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe damage to the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines on 26 September 2022 resulted in major gas leaks in the Baltic Sea, which also constitutes an environmental attack on the EU,\u201d<\/em> the resolution also says, implying without evidence that it was indisputably Russia who blew up its own energy infrastructure rather than, say, Western interests seeking to secure EU dependency on their own gas sales.<\/p>\n

The bloc-level resolution is non-binding, meaning it\u2019s largely a symbolic move. French President Emmanuel Macron has repeatedly rejected calls from Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky to pin<\/a> a similar designation on Russia. So has US President Joe Biden, who admitted<\/a> that the move could backfire with implications for America\u2019s support of Ukrainian fighters.<\/p>\n

America\u2019s own past use of the \u2018terrorism\u2019 designation tends to align conveniently with its own foreign-policy agenda. The Iranian Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MeK) opposition group was conveniently delisted<\/a> from Washington\u2019s official list<\/a> of terrorist organizations\u00a0around the time that several high-profile US officials started visiting the group while talking up Iranian regime<\/a> change.\u00a0When former President Donald Trump was trying to claim a victory in securing Middle East peace with his Abraham Accords, he dangled the carrot of a terror-sponsoring state delisting in front of Sudan if it made<\/a> nice with Israel.\u00a0Cuba was taken off the list by former President Barack Obama<\/a> as he pursued a policy of normalization with Havana, but Trump reinstated<\/a> the designation, appealing to his voter base.<\/p>\n

So now it\u2019s apparently the EU\u2019s turn to abuse the \u2018terrorism\u2019 label and deflect attention from the bloc’s own\u00a0poor choices, under which its citizens continue to suffer.<\/p>\n

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Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist, and host of independently produced talk-shows in French and English.<\/em> rachelmarsden.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Go to Original – rt.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

24 Nov 2022 – The European Parliament\u2019s non-binding resolution is a PR effort rooted in political agenda.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":67289,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[1035,1268,109,278,265,961],"class_list":["post-224641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe","tag-eastern-europe","tag-european-union","tag-politics","tag-russia","tag-terrorism","tag-ukraine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224641"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":265845,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224641\/revisions\/265845"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}