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THE EU'S MOMENT OF TRUTH
Fri Sep 5, Op/Ed - New York Post

European Union (news - web sites) foreign ministers are today once again considering whether to put Hamas' so-called "political wing" on Europe's list of proscribed terrorist organizations.

The EU has until now refused to do so, maintaining the ridiculous, even obscene, pretense that Hamas' fund-raising and "charitable" arms are somehow separate from its murder and mayhem divisions.

This is despite Hamas' admitted role in the Aug. 19 Jerusalem bus bombing often called the "massacre of the children," and despite the Bush administration's efforts to freeze the U.S. accounts of top Hamas officials.

And despite the fact that even the Palestinian Authority has taken a stronger stand on this issue than the Europeans, closing offices of both Hamas "wings."

It's only within the last two months that the EU even added the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and Hamas' official "military wing" to its lists.

And France the prevailing influence in EU foreign policy has consistently opposed listing Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad as terrorist organizations.

Paris' official hostility to Israel has also manifested itself in an insistence on treating Yasser Arafat (news - web sites), not Mahmoud Abbas, as the head of the Palestine Authority and in remarks by French "diplomats" calling Israel "paranoid" and "a sh- - -y little country."

President Jacques Chirac's diplomatic adviser, Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, even went so far as making this astonishing statement to the Israeli ambassador to France: "If we find that Hamas and Is- lamic Jihad are indeed terror groups op- posed to peace, we may have to change the EU's stand."

This is remarkable, not only for its assumption that France control's the EU's position, but also its disgusting cynicism.

Indeed, France knows that Hamas and Islamic Jihad have claimed responsibility for one civilian-murdering bombing after another.

And, of course, France knows that even the narrowest definition of terrorist simply must include any group that deliberately targets innocent civilians on buses and in cafes just as it must include the men who hijack planes and fly them into skyscrapers.

But the fact that Hamas mainly murders Jews seems to give it some kind of special status in official French and therefore European eyes.

This perhaps shouldn't be all that surprising, given France's continuing tolerance of anti-Jewish violence (including attacks by Arab youths on Jewish schools this summer.)

But the EU now has another chance to show that it is more than a proxy for French ambitions, that it can rise above the fetid mire of Gallic cynicism and racial bigotry and, most important, that it takes terrorism seriously.

If the EU does not take this opportunity, it should have no illusions about its moral standing.

Out of cowardice or moral perfidy it will be choosing the side not of civilization, but of the monsters who slaughter children on buses and who fly hijacked jets into buildings.

And it will reap the consequences.