AIPAC's European cousin evades scrutiny

I don’t envy the 81 members of the US Congress who are on an expenses-paid trip to Israel this week. Having to listen to Zionist claptrap throughout the junket’s packed schedule is not my idea of a fun vacation.

But I was struck by how the jaunt, organized by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), has received some attention from the mainstream press on both sides of the Atlantic. London’s right-wing Daily Mail noted that AIPAC’s critics believe it operates on behalf of the Israeli government and has “secured too much influence on Congress”.

While it’s positive that AIPAC’s activities are coming under greater scrutiny, it is noteworthy that little attention has been paid to how a similar lobbying outfit is being developed in Europe. In February, around 400 members of parliaments from across this continent were brought to Israel in a trip hosted by the European Friends of Israel (EFI). They included 120 members of the European Parliament (MEPs) -- one-sixth of that assembly’s total membership.

When I checked The Daily Mail’s online archive, I could find no reference to the February trip. That was despite how British MEPs are among some of the EFI’s most zealous supporters. The Conservative Party’s Charles Tannock was one of the group’s founders in 2006, declaring at the time that the EFI was required to counter the “black propaganda” of Palestine solidarity activists.

Mimicking AIPAC

Although the EFI has claimed to be independent of AIPAC, it is mimicking that committee’s modus operandi. AIPAC has not made details of the itinerary for this week’s visit by Congress members public. It’s a safe bet, though, that the itinerary is broadly similar to that followed by the EFI earlier this year. As well as being given a chance to marvel at the production sites for Israeli weapons, participants in that jaunt were greeted by Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, and other leading political figures.

One crucial difference between the US and Europe is that there is some degree of transparency about how AIPAC behaves in Washington. By searching “lobbying disclosure” sites, I learnt that AIPAC $2.75 million on schmoozing Congress in 2010. I could also peruse lists of laws the group has sought to tweak in its favor.

By contrast, the EFI has not signed up to a register of “interest representatives” set up by the European Commission, so we don’t know how much it spends in Brussels and other European capitals. Unlike the US, the European Union does not have a mandatory financial disclosure system for lobbyists who prowl the corridors of its institutions.

On a few occasions over the past three years, I have asked the EFI’s office and parliamentarians belonging to it for details of how its work is funded. All of my requests have either been refused or have elicited no reply.

Donors a mystery

The only “information” that the EFI has given me is that its donors are from Europe. Yet The Jerusalem Post has reported that one of the group’s key contributors is Alexander Machkevitch. When I did some research on Machkevitch, I realized he is a mining magnate with dual Kazakh and Israeli nationality. Given that neither Kazakhstan nor Israel belong to the European continent, it would appear that EFI’s staff either flunked geography at school or have deliberately tried to mislead me.

While I consider AIPAC to be dangerous and racist, American citizens are at least able to track what it is up to. There is far greater secrecy about the Israel lobby in Europe and no appetite by most journalists to expose how it is a growing force. Surely, this culture of silence should be challenged.

·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 11 August 2011

Occupation profiteer Ahava soaks up EU science grants

Not for the first time, the European Union is in denial about how it is subsidizing Israel’s crimes.

Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the EU’s commissioner for scientific research, recently acknowledged that the cosmetics-maker Ahava was allocated more than €1 million worth of innovation grants from the Union over a period stretching from 1998 to 2013. Giving even one cent to Ahava involves facilitating breaches of international law because of the firm’s unlawful activities in the West Bank.

As Geoghegan-Quinn doesn’t appear to recognize this problem, she would be well-advised to read a report, issued in May, by the human rights organization B’Tselem. It highlights how Ahava is partly owned by two Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land: Mitzpe Shalem and Qalya. Both of those settlements are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which forbids an occupying power from transferring its civilian population to the territory it occupies.

Responding to a parliamentary question, Geoghegan-Quinn effectively conceded that some of Ahava’s EU-funded research may have been undertaken in the West Bank. While Ahava is “formally established within the borders of the internationally recognized state of Israel”, she said, beneficiaries of EU grants are not required to carry out the related research in the place of establishment.

I would alert Geoghegan-Quinn to two salient facts:
1. The rules covering EU science grants stipulate that projects which violate “fundamental ethical principles” are ineligible for funding. Carrying out research in one or more illegal settlements must surely violate such principles.
2. Ahava may be able to give its offices in Holon or Airport City, industrial zones near Tel Aviv, as an address for its headquarters when applying for Euro-lolly. Yet its core manufacturing activities are conducted in Mitzpe Shalem. If Geoghegan-Quinn doesn’t believe me on this, I urge her to take a trip to the settlement, where she will no doubt be given a warm welcome to Ahava’s official visitors’ centre.

There are other questions about why any of my tax euros should be going to a private cosmetics firm. A glance at Cordis, the EU’s database on its science grants, shows that in one of the projects concerned, Ahava has teamed up with the US Department of the Interior. The objective of this scheme is to assess what impact tiny toxins (nanoparticles, as boffins call them) can have on the environment.

Correct me if I’m wrong but I never had the impression that the Department of the Interior spent too much time worrying about trees and dolphins. So what is the real agenda here?

·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 5 August 2011.

Israel lobby dictates who may run for Ireland's president

Until recently, I was convinced that the tiny pro-Israel lobby in my native Ireland was of little significance. When the first Gaza Freedom Flotilla was attacked last year, the best that lobby could do was wheel out two guys named Tom. Both Tom Carew and Tom Cooney competed with each other on the TV3 channel to see who could make the most absurd argument in support of Israel’s murder of nine peace activists onboard the Mavi Marmara.

On a quick visit to Dublin last week, I was surprised to hear that one of this wacky duo is now working for the national government. In April, Cooney was named an advisor to Alan Shatter, the Irish minister for justice and defense. A statement announcing the appointment indicated that Cooney, a law lecturer in University College Dublin, was something of an iconoclast, alluding to his track record of championing civil liberties at home and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

There was no mention of his views on Israel, a curious omission given that his new boss Shatter is a committed Zionist. Whereas the Irish government was generally more balanced in commenting about the Freedom Flotilla II than many of its EU counterparts over the past few months, Shatter was openly hostile to the effort, declaring it was “something of a mystery” to him why anyone could feel the need for a “political protest” against the Gaza blockade. Worryingly, Shatter has been put in charge of the department of defense by Ireland’s relatively new prime minister Enda Kenny; that department has awarded contracts to Israeli weapons firms in the not-so-distant past.

My trip also coincided with a protracted debate about who should be Ireland’s next president. Even though the role of the president in Ireland is largely ceremonial and the holder of that office has no executive power, elections for the position can be vicious affairs.

According to opinion polls, the front-runner in the race (the election is still several months away) was David Norris, a scholar of James Joyce who undertook an eventually successful legal challenge against Ireland’s ban on homosexual relations in the 1980s. This week, however, Norris from the contest after it emerged he had written a letter to an Israeli court in 1997 urging that it be lenient in sentencing his former partner Ezra Nawi, who was convicted of statutory rape of a 15 year old Palestinian.

Don’t get me wrong. I am horrified by the very idea of an adult having sex with a child. Unquestionably, Norris showed poor judgment in making his appeal, particularly by writing it on official headed paper supplied by the Irish Senate, of which he is a long-standing member.

Nonetheless, there is no evidence than Norris did anything more sinister than seek mercy for somebody he loved.

It is telling that it was not child protection advocates that drew attention to Norris’ relationship with Nawi. Rather, it was Zionist blogger John Connolly, an Irish law graduate living in London.

Connolly stated that his “main problem with Norris in recent times has been his outspoken criticism of Israel”. Among the alleged misdemeanors he cited were that Norris had invited Ilan Pappé, the dissident Israeli historian, to address his colleagues in the Oireachtas, Ireland’s parliament.

Connolly’s blog post inspired journalists with the reactionary Irish Independent to delight in Norris’ difficulties. Kevin Myers, one of Ireland’s best-paid columnists, inferred that Norris wouldn’t dream of writing to Arab governments demanding that they treat gay men or lesbians fairly. This was a patently ludicrous claim as Norris has been a consistent champion of human rights throughout the world.

Despite being few in number, Irish Zionists appear to be growing in clout to such a degree they can determine who may and may not stand in elections. The conclusion that they have no qualms about undermining democracy seems inescapable.

·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 3 August 2011.

Summer reading on Palestine

What books should a Palestine solidarity activist bring on vacation?

Well, I’ve nothing against any campaigner who tries to switch off completely from his or her cause during a badly-needed break by only packing novels or glossy magazines. But I find that summer can be a good time to tackle tomes that I wouldn’t otherwise get around to reading. So in between long walks, cycling, bowling, guzzling chocolate and gazing at West of Ireland sunsets, I checked out these five titles recently:

Extreme Rambling by Mark Thomas (Ebury Press, 2011): An English comic, Thomas has proven on three occasions that it’s possible to write page-turners about international politics. Having previously explored the trade in torture instruments (As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela) and human rights abuses linked to Coca Cola (Belching Out the Devil), his new book has him walking all 415 kilometers of the wall Israel has built in the West Bank, as well as part of the unfinished route. Incensed by how families in East Jerusalem have been forced out of their homes to make way for illegal settlers, how mothers have died in childbirth because they have been blocked from reaching maternity wards and how unemployment has shot up because Palestinians are stopped from going to work, Thomas explodes the myth that the wall enhances Israel’s security.

Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights: Diaspora Jewish Opposition to Israel by David Landy (Zed Books, 2011): A friend and one-time flatmate of mine, Landy is an Irish sociologist who has studied how a network of Jewish groups critical of Israel has developed since the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in 2000. Although I struggled with the theoretical analysis that dominates its early chapters, the core findings of Landy’s research are fascinating. I was particularly struck by how he explains that rejecting Zionism can be just as agonizing for many Jews as “coming out” is for homosexuals. It’s also striking that while Landy appears broadly sympathetic to groups such as Jews for Justice for Palestinians, he doesn’t balk at berating them for being overly influenced by the Israeli left.

The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation: Repression Beyond Exploitation by Shir Hever (Pluto Press, 2010): True, the aforementioned Israeli left is generally wishy-washy and patronizing towards Palestinians. Yet Israeli economist Shir Hever provides a refreshing exception to this exceptionalism. In this mostly accessible 226-page work, he underscores how Israel has rigged the economy of the occupation so that it benefits a corporate clique.

Hamas: The Islamic Resistance Movement by Beverly Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell (Polity, 2010): I have serious reservations about this book. The authors often act as stenographers to the powerful by, among other things, describing Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Authority “prime minister” (by diktat, not election) as “internationally respected”, without addressing how he is a puppet of the International Monetary Fund, an institution controlled by the US and Europe. That said, they offer an informative account of how Hamas unexpectedly became the most trusted political party in the West Bank and Gaza in 2006.

Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel, edited by Abeer Baker and Anat Matar (Pluto Press, 2011): This is a suburb collection of essays on how Israel has sought to criminalize an entire people. The statistic that 700,000 Palestinians have been detained by Israel since it occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 may leave the reader unmoved but the detailing of individual prisoners’ experiences surely won’t. One of the most troubling facts I learned is that the Israeli authorities have decided to replicate methods with which they suppress street protests by Palestinians in the more confined space of prisons. It is hard to single out the most cruel thing Ariel Sharon did in his political and military career. Approving the use of tear gas behind bars was certainly one of them.

·First published by The Electronic Intifada, 2 August 2011.

How Greece abandoned Palestine

When Andreas Papandreou died in 1996, The New York Times noted that he often left Western governments “befuddled or exasperated” as he took positions “diametrically opposed to theirs.” Citing examples of his “maverick” behavior, the paper’s obituary referred to how the Greek prime minister granted diplomatic status to the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1981, the year he first took office.
Like most political leaders, Papandreou was a man of contradictions. He professed to despise American imperialism, while allowing the United States retain military bases on Greek soil. Yet he deserves some posthumous acclaim for saluting the PLO when it was still a genuine resistance movement and for criticizing Israel more trenchantly than any of his counterparts in the then European Community.

In recent times, the current Greek premier George Papandreou has acted as if he wishes to totally negate his father’s legacy. No doubt, Greece’s refusal to allow the Freedom Flotilla II set sail for Gaza was partly the result of pressure -- and possibly even financial blackmail -- from the US and Israel. Nonetheless, it was not an isolated occurrence but the logical consequence of a process that was already underway.

In July 2010, Papandreou Junior visited Israel barely one month after the assault on the Mavi Marmara, in which nine Turkish peace activists were murdered by Israeli forces. As an immediate response to that massacre, Greece called a halt to a joint military training exercise then being undertaken with Israel off the island of Crete. But Papandreou had no qualms about going ahead with his trip to Israel as planned.

Israel was swift to reciprocate. In August last year, Benjamin Netanyahu became the first Israeli prime minister to visit Greece. Netanyahu reportedly used the occasion to recommend that the two countries be connected by a gas pipeline. It is not known whether the two men discussed how the Leviathan gas field – the source of the energy on Netanyahu’s radar screen at the time – is located off the Lebanese coast and how Israel’s exploitation of its reserves could spark a new conflict with Lebanon.

It is known, however, that both Israel and Greece continue to strengthen their military cooperation. Codenamed Minoas 2010, the operation that was stopped at the time of the Mavi Marmara bloodbath was, in fact, resumed in October last year. Apache and Black Hawk helicopters were used in the exercise, which tested out landing and take-off procedures in mountainous areas and under several different weather conditions. In December, Flight International stated that there had been at least four such exercises between Greece and Israel over the preceding few months.

Friction between Greece’s historic foe Turkey and Israel have almost certainly helped the Netanyahu-Papandreou relationship to blossom. Papandreou is surely an astute enough politician to have scented an opportunity for Greece to replace Turkey as Israel’s most valued ally in the Mediterranean. The similarities in the men’s backgrounds could well be another factor. Both were educated at highly regarded universities in the US (Papandreou in Harvard, Netanyahu in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and despite heading parties that are nominally different in ethos, both are heavily influenced by US politics and culture.

Perhaps more significantly, the recent intensification of relations has followed several years where the two countries have worked alongside each other under the umbrella of NATO. That US-dominated alliance has formed a ring around the entire Mediterranean. Almost every country bordering that sea is either a full member of NATO or has signed up to its Orwellian-titled Partnership for Peace.

Even though there appears to be no imminent prospect of Israel joining NATO, its ties to the alliance have grown exponentially over the past decade. An Israeli-NATO agreement on sharing intelligence was signed in April 2001. Five years later, Israel reached agreement on implementing an “individual cooperation program” with NATO. Updated in December 2008, the agreement paved the way for a high number of joint operations between it and the alliance. Greece has been involved too in most, if not all, of these operations. In 2007, for example, Greek warships took part in drills in Eilat, an Israeli port on the Red Sea.

Both Greece and Israel are also participating in Operation Active Endeavor, a NATO-coordinated exercise under which ships patrol the Mediterranean. That operation was, according to the official narrative, launched in response to the 11 September 2001 atrocities in the US. But in practice its remit has expanded beyond keeping a watch out for potential “terrorist” activity on the waves. In particular, it has been used as part of a repressive agenda of helping prevent foreigners who seek to flee poverty from reaching Europe.

In March, Active Endeavor’s scope was further broadened during preparations for the war against Libya. A 24-hour airborne surveillance system was put in place as part of the ongoing operation. Despite its severe economic problems, Greece has provided a number of warplanes and ships to that war effort, in which NATO has availed of at least seven Greek airfields.

Meanwhile, the solidity of Israel’s links to NATO were underscored shortly before Gabi Ashkenazi stepped down as head of the Israeli military in February. Ashkenazi, who oversaw Operation Cast Lead, which killed 1400 Palestinians in Gaza during December 2008 and January 2009, advised NATO strategists on what tactics should be used against Afghanistan and was treated to a farewell dinner in his honor at the Brussels residence of Giampaolo Di Paolo, chairman of NATO’s military committee.

On a proportionate basis, Greece is one of Europe’s largest spenders on the military, although this expenditure is being cut as part of a wider austerity drive that mainly affects vital public services. In 2009, Greece allocated 2.54% of its gross domestic product to military spending, the highest level in the European Union. Britain was next at 2.53%.

Greece is known to have concluded deals with several Israeli weapons makers, although it has not published comprehensive details on such deals. In February, Evangelos Venizelos, the Greek defense minister, confirmed that “precision-guided” weapon kits known as SPICES (Smart Precise Impact and Cost Effective). Elisra, a subsidiary of the leading Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit, has also supplied electronic warfare systems to the Greek air force over the past decade.

It is true that Greece has combined its ever-tightening embrace of Israel with calls for the blockade of Gaza to be lifted. But it is impossible to take those calls seriously now that the Athens government has assisted Israel in thwarting protest against the very same blockade. Andreas Papandreou’s championing of Palestinian rights might have had some moral weight in the early 1980s. Three decades on, his son George has become a craven accomplice in maintaining the Israeli occupation.

·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 13 July 2011.

A reckless plan for fisheries reform

We live in an age of oxymorons. Firms that enable human rights abuses subscribe to a concept called “corporate social responsibility”. Governments that are browbeaten into strangling their national economies receive “rescue packages”. And here in Brussels political processes rigged in favour of private interests are accompanied by “public consultation”.

On Wednesday, the European Commission will publish a new proposal for “reforming” the Common Fisheries Policy. Like many other important initiatives these days, it has been formulated following a “consultation” exercise that has proven to be a sham.

One of the key recommendations of this proposal is that the capacity of Europe’s fishing fleet should be reduced through “market measures”. This will mean that vessels could buy and sell quotas for catching particular fish species. It is a system that will benefit owners of large vessels primarily, which explains why they are the only ones in favour of it.

For my sins, I have trawled (pun intended) my way through a slew of submissions on CFP reform that were sent to EU officials when they held a “consultation exercise” on this subject. These made clear that there was widespread opposition to the idea of tradeable quotas from ecologists and small-scale fishermen alike. Europêche, an umbrella group for the fishing industry, confessed it was divided. Some of its less affluent members feared a “privatisation of fishing rights leading to these being concentrated in the hands of powerful corporations, with the risk of small-scale coastal fisheries disappearing”, its paper stated. By contrast, the wealthier industry representatives in Europêche were sympathetic to the idea. So was the laconic Dutch Fish Product Board, which claimed that it’s “best to leave the reduction of existing overcapacity to the market”.

Daniel Bromley, a professor of applied economics at the University of Wisconsin, has argued that makers of international fisheries policy are in thrall to an “ownership fetish”. In a 2009 article for the journal Fisheries, he wrote: “In national financial affairs, the debate is cast in terms of ‘free markets’ versus government interference in the market. In fisheries policy, the debate is cast in terms of the documented failure of national governments to manage – assure the sustainability of – fish stocks versus the utopian vision of so-called ‘privatisation’ and the implied abdication of management. The advocacy of individual fishing quotas is the natural resource equivalent of economic deregulation dating back to the triumphalism of the 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed and it was happily announced that ‘markets had won’. In contrast to the emerging understanding in world financial affairs that ‘the market’ and its self-interested players cannot be trusted with the greater public good, quite the opposite ideology persists in fisheries policy – just leave it to the industry to bring about efficiency.”

Rather than placing its blind faith in the industry, the Commission should be pushing for legally-binding measures to reduce the capacity of the European fleet. Almost every time the future of the CFP is debated in public, an EU official will pipe up to proclaim how there are “too many boats chasing too few fish”. But that observation is simplistic and misleading as it implies that every boat is at fault, when it is the large vessels – or more accurately their rapacious owners – that have plundered fish stocks to such an extent that existence of some species is imperilled.

For much of the history of the CFP, the industry has received vast handouts in order to build new vessels that can net ever higher quantities of fish. In theory, reforms introduced to the policy in 2002 put an end to such subsidies, yet in practice they continued. Between 1994 and 2006, Spain received a cool 46% of all subsidies. The Spanish were supposed to use part of this money to reduce overfishing. Instead, it went on spanking new vessels.

Last month the Commission published a snapshot of the fishing industry for a number of EU countries. This paper said that while 66 Spanish fishing vessels with a total capacity of nearly 5,000 gigatonnes were scrapped with the aid of public subsidies in 2009, another 85 with a total capacity of 1,000 gigatonnes were built. The inference that it had trimmed capacity should be treated cautiously; Madrid supplied incomplete data to Brussels, the paper added.

One absurdity of the CFP – as revealed in a September 2010 report by the watchdog fishsubidy.org – is that the European taxpayer paid for 860 boats to be modernised and then to be scrapped between 1994 and 2006. Over half of these vessels were from Spain and France. In the case of the Spanish boat Mikel Duena Primera, there was an interval of just 17 days between funding decisions for revamping and destroying.

With the Commission itself estimating that 72% of assessed stocks in the EU’s waters are overexploited, it is surely vital that it responds with bold thinking, not by trusting the market. Fish belong to wider ecosystems; hoovering them from the oceans with wild abandon has knock-on effects for marine animals and for the complex web of nature on which the future of the humans depends. It is about time that policy-makers realised that fish require special protection, not to be treated merely as economic goods.

Albert Einstein famously defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. By that measure, the officials behind this week’s blueprint for fisheries reform are certifiably bonkers.

·First published by New Europe, 11 July 2011.

Dodgy arms dealers dictate policies

To William Hague, the wave of protests in the Middle East and North Africa this year constitute “the most important event of the early twenty-first century”. The foreign secretary’s paeans to freedom have been effusive but evasive. One salient fact that he neglected to mention in a May address to London’s Mansion House is that Britain has helped suppress some of the very same protests.

Two months earlier, Saudi troops invaded Bahrain to defend a beleaguered monarchy, bringing numerous tanks supplied by BAE Systems with them. Known as Tacticas, these tanks were made in the northern English city of Newcastle (with final assembly in Belgium). Saudi Arabia ordered over 260 of these vehicles in 2006, on the proviso they would be delivered in 2008. While the relevant licenses were issued under a Labour government, the current coalition in London hasn’t revoked any export permits for arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

BAE is a byword for dodgy deals. Early last year, it paid a fine of $400 million to avoid being sued for corruption – over sales to Saudi Arabia and elsewhere – by the US Department of Justice. A British Serious Fraud Office investigation into BAE’s Saudi connections was shelved in 2006 on the order of that other valiant defender of liberty Tony Blair.

Its tarnished reputation does not seem to bother European Union’s officials, however. The European Defence Agency has tasked BAE with drawing up a blueprint for meeting the Union’s requirements on “precision guided ammunition” by the end of this year. Precision-guided weapons are supposed to allow targets be selected with pinpoint accuracy but they are invariably used to butcher the innocent.

This is one of many troubling activities by the EDA that elicits virtually no criticism in the press. The agency is obsessed with pilotless drones – or unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) - and believes it’s imperative that they are used for everything bar washing the dishes. Research by the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, estimates that for every “militant” killed in US drone attacks undertaken as part of its “war on terror”, 10 civilians have also been killed.

An EDA paper on drones that I stumbled upon indicates that the agency’s contractors have a twisted worldview. This paper was written for the agency by BMT Defence Services, a designer of warships. It referred to scenarios BMT was studying on the use of drones and indicated that the analytical system it had devised could enable distinctions to be drawn “between friendly and potentially hostile population groups”.

Although the agency’s staff routinely reel off three-letter acronyms, only one such acronym is apt in this case: WTF. What is the real message here: that population groups opposed to the military invasion of their country can be considered as “legitimate” targets? That notion is not as far-fetched as it may seem. Israel, home to some of the world’s leading weapons firms, declared Gaza an “enemy entity” in 2007. By the end of the following year, Israel was testing out its state-of-the-art drones on this “hostile population”. The “collateral damage” included children and pregnant women.

During last month’s Paris Air Show – a jamboree for the arms industry – the EDA formally signed a cooperation accord with the European Space Agency, a nominally civilian body. At a briefing beforehand, journalists were assured that the EDA has no intention of introducing weapons into Space. Rather, the agency’s focus is on bits of debris floating around in parts of the universe and the threats they could pose to this planet.

I am sceptical of that assurance. The history of the EU’s adventures in Space are that projects that appear benign end up having other applications. In 2002, the European Commission recommended that Galileo, the satellite navigation system, should be civilian in nature. By 2008, the same institution indicated that the military would comprise about half of all clients with access to Galileo’s encrypted signals.

Moreover, some informed analysts predict that the drones so dear to the EDA’s heart will soon make extensive use of satellite technology. A 2010 study by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs argued that improved satellite communications capacities will be “absolutely essential” for drones over the coming two decades.

There is a more fundamental reason why the EDA should be regarded as sinister: it is the brainchild of the arms industry. After pushing for an agency of its type to be established for many years, weapons manufacturers saw their wish come true in 2004. BAE and its French equivalent Thales were then represented on an official working group that drafted part of the EU constitution, which was subsequently copied and pasted into the Lisbon Treaty. To their delight, that treaty allows the agency to take “any useful measure” to “strengthen the industrial and technological base” of Europe’s arms industry.

One probable consequence of that clause is that the Union’s scientific research programme will be used to develop the weapons of the future. Indeed, this may already be happening. Thales is the top recipient of grants earmarked for “security” projects under the current multi-annual programme, which runs from 2007 to 2013. While all these schemes are supposed to be non-military, there are no safeguards in place to prevent the fruits of EU-funded research being used for aggressive purposes.

The arms industry thrives on the destruction of human life and the denial of human rights. Its level of influence is pernicious.

·First published by New Europe, 3-9 July 2011