Europe: The Brussels functionaries feign innocence and ask: boycott? what boycott?

The old predispositions hardly died out. The humanistic ardor of interwar Poland vibrantly lives on in today’s Europe. So does its insidious slyness.

Sarah Honig writes @ the Jerusalem Post:

Poland made history on Monday morning, April 19, 1937. It taught the world how to implement a boycott without actually admitting that it’s doing anything of the sort.

Headliners of today’s European Union have learned the lesson well, even if few of the EU’s sanctimonious sermonizers can likely cite the source and inspiration for their very unoriginal charade.

The Polish non-boycott was no mean feat on the eve of WWII, when dark clouds of impending doom already gathered over the heads of European Jewry.  Given the bestial goings-on and the brutish anti-Jewish boycotts next-door in the Third Reich, Poland appeared positively refined by comparison – the soul of sophistication.

The Poles never sank as low as the crude and vulgar Germans. They didn’t adopt the practice of daubing storefronts with giant Jude inscriptions, smashing windows or sending out storm troopers to form scary picket lines, carry offensive signs in the formidable Teutonic tradition and warn off the super-race away from subhuman Jewish shopkeepers.

Instead, Poland’s Minister of Industry and Commence Antoni Roman issued an edict that looked impeccably non-discriminatory.  It ordered that all business signs boldly display the proprietor’s name, directly above any other incidental scrap information such as what was sold at the premises. Precise rules were stipulated regarding the size of the letters required. What could possibly be wrong with that? The measure applied to everyone throughout the republic. Surely nothing could be more equitable. No single community or grouping was targeted.

Technically this was not an anti-Judaic decree. Quite the reverse: here was an exemplary act of public service born of the public-spirited conviction that the public was entitled to know the identity of each vendor everywhere.  No way could the Polish government be blamed for the fact that Jews – estimated (depending on the location) at between one-tenth to one-eighth of the population – on the whole had surnames that instantly betrayed their ethnic extraction.  [...]

All the while, Poland – obliged pro forma by the Treaty of Versailles to treat its Jews fairly and likewise hoping not to tarnish its image in the League of Nations – could feign innocence: Boycott? What boycott? This isn’t esoteric nitpicking into an irrelevant past. The old predispositions hardly died out. The humanistic ardor of interwar Poland vibrantly lives on in today’s Europe. So does its insidious slyness.

The EU, of which Poland is a member, exudes all the insincerity (to resort to gross understatement) which permeated Poland between the two world wars. Its faceless Brussels functionaries can, with just as much guile as their Polish predecessors, feign innocence and with just as much affectation ask: Boycott? What boycott?

EU headliners react with the gruffest of righteous indignation to the very suggestion that they enable economic boycotts against the Jewish state. Their denials are vehement. How can any upstanding individual conceivably insinuate that the EU is anything but admirably civic- minded and justice seeking? Its ethical standards apply identically to all, don’t they? According to the gospel from Brussels, Israel bears the blame for the fact that the EU’s in-house red-tape entanglers must now diligently scrutinize postal codes and busy themselves with codifying detailed stringent guidelines obliging members states to clearly and prominently label all products manufactured by Jews in Judea and Samaria (including even negligible assembled components).  More.