17th December, 2014
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday that Europeans appeared to have learned nothing from the Holocaust, after an EU court ordered the removal of Hamas from its terror blacklist.
“In Luxemburg the European court removed Hamas from the list of terrorist organisations, Hamas that has committed countless war crimes and countless terror acts,” Netanyahu’s office quoted him as saying.
“It seems that too many in Europe, on whose soil six million Jews were slaughtered, have learned nothing.”
“But we in Israel, we’ve learned. We’ll continue to defend our people and our state against the forces of terror and tyranny and hypocrisy,” he said at the start of a meeting with US Republican Senator-elect Joni Ernst.
The General Court of the European Union ruled Wednesday that the original listing of Hamas in 2001 was based not on sound legal judgements but on conclusions derived from the media and the Internet.
But it stressed that the decision to remove Hamas was based on technical grounds and does “not imply any substantive assessment of the question of the classification of Hamas as a terrorist group”.
Founded in 1987 shortly after the start of the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, Hamas was inspired by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.
Its charter calls for the eventual destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic state on the pre-1948 borders of the British Palestine Mandate.