Shurat HaDin has written to the European Union Council (EU) President, Herman Van Rompuy, and EU Foreign Policy, Chief Catherine Ashton, demanding that the EU designate Hizbullah as a terrorist organization. As it stands today, the EU refuse to proscribe the Shiite terrorist organization and place it on its blacklist of terrorist groups. In Germany alone, one of Hizbullah’s European strongholds, the Iranian backed terror group has over one thousand members.

Despite pressure from the United States and Israel, the EU has claimed that it will not outlaw the group until there is “tangible evidence of Hizbullah engaging in acts of terrorism.” Recently however, the government of Bulgaria announced that Hizbullah was behind a terrorist attack in July 2012 which killed five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver. Bulgarian police allege that the 2 organizers of the bombing were Hizbullah members from Lebanon. Last week, in a trial of a Hizbullah operative arrested for plotting a terrorist attack in Cyprus, a Lebanese suspect admitted that the terrorist organization asked him to track the arrivals and departures of Israeli airline flights to Nicosia.

In the Shurat HaDin letter to the EU officials, the organization accuses the EU of cowardice and hiding its head in the sand in the face of overwhelming proof of the Islamic extremist groups’ long term involvement in global terrorism. The EU is accused of ignoring Hizbullah’s assassination of Lebanese President Rafiq Hariri, for which several of its officials were indicted by The Hague, and Hizbullah’s on-going role in perpetrating crimes against humanity in the Syrian civil war.

Hizbullah’s terrorist attacks including:

– The 1982 and 1983 suicide bombings against the IDF headquarters building in Tyre, Lebanon, which killed 103 Israelis and 46–59 Lebanese, wounding 95 people.

– The April 1983 U.S. Embassy bombing Lebanon, that killed 241 US marines, 58 French paratroopers and 6 civilians at the US and French barracks in Beirut.

– The Hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985.

– The kidnapping and murder of numerous individuals during the Lebanon Hostage Crisis from 1982 to 1992, including the kidnapping and torture-murder of CIA Beirut station Chief William Buckley.

– The 1992 Israeli Embassy bombing in Buenos Aires, killing 29, in Argentina.

– The 1994 AMIA bombing of a Jewish cultural centre, killing 85, in Argentina.

– The 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, which killed 20.

– The 2000 kidnapping and murder of IDF soldiers Adi Avitan, Benyamin Avraham, and Omar Sawaid.

– In 2002, Singapore accused Hizbullah of recruiting Singaporeans in a failed 1990s plot to attack US and Israeli ships in the Singapore Straits.

– The 2006 kidnapping and murder of IDF soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, which precipitated the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War.

– Intentionally targeting Israeli civilians and cities with rocket fire during the Second Lebanon War.

– The January 15, 2008 bombing of a U.S. Embassy vehicle in Beirut.

– In 2009, a Hizbullah plot in Egypt was uncovered, where Egyptian authorities arrested 49 men for planning attacks against Israeli and Egyptian targets in the Sinai Peninsula.

– A failed 2011 bombing in Istanbul targeting the Israeli consul, which left eight dead.

– Bombings targeting Israeli diplomats in India, Georgia, and Thailand in 2012.

– As well as the Bulgaria attack last July.

Shurat called on the EU to outlaw all branches and instrumentalities of Hizbullah, designate Hizbullah officials as terrorist leaders and warn the Lebanese government that its involvement with the terrorist organization could result in Lebanon being designated as an outlaw regime like Iran, Syria, North Korea and Sudan as well.

Hizbullah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has stated that a European blacklist would drastically damage Hizbullah’s abilities to operate worldwide. It “would dry up the sources of finance,” he said, “end moral, political and material support, stifle voices, whether they are the voices of the resistance or the voices which support the resistance, pressure states which protect the resistance in one way and another, and pressure the Lebanese state, Iran and Iraq, but especially the Lebanese state, in order to classify it as a state which supports terrorism.”

“Clearly, there is ‘tangible evidence’ enough of Hizbullah’s involvement in terrorism. Indeed, terrorism is Hizbullah’s raison d’être. Europe, with its long history of capitulation and denial, must be compelled to designate Hizbullah” Shurat HaDin concludes.

(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)