JIMMY CARTER CRITICIZES EUROPEAN LEADERS FOR NOT DENOUNCING ISRAEL'S UNJUST TREATMENT OF PALESTINIANS

The Guardian has an article by Jonathan Steele and Jonathan Freedland about former president Jimmy Carter criticizing a "supine" Europe for failing to protest the Israeli blockade of Palestinians in Gaza.

Write Steele and Freedland:

"Britain and other European governments should break from the US over the international embargo on Gaza, former US president Jimmy Carter told the Guardian yesterday. Carter, visiting the Welsh border town of Hay for the Guardian literary festival, described the EU's position on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as "supine" and its failure to criticise the Israeli blockade of Gaza as "embarrassing"."

Carter is the only American out there who is not afraid to go up against the powerful Israeli lobby and denounce Israel's unjust and criminal collective punishment of the Palestinians.

Steele and Freedland report more on Carter's speech:

"The blockade on Hamas-ruled Gaza, imposed by the US, EU, UN and Russia - the so-called Quartet - after the organisation's election victory in 2006, was "one of the greatest human rights crimes on Earth," since it meant the "imprisonment of 1.6 million people, 1 million of whom are refugees". "Most families in Gaza are eating only one meal per day. To see Europeans going along with this is embarrassing," Carter said."

Carter brings up a subject upon which European leaders such as Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown have been strangely silent. And how about the silence of former prime minister Tony Blair? He has a job of trying to bring peace to Palestine, yet he has remained incommunicado. Why hasn't he spoken up as Carter? Europe's leaders are a milquetoast bunch. They loudly protest against Iran's development of nuclear power but they are mute when it comes to Israel's enforcement of collective punishment.