Gloves come off: EU Parliament compares Russia to ISIS

The European Union’s quest to become a global laughing stock, continues to make progress. Members of the EU Parliament have just voted in favour of a non-binding resolution to condemn and respond to so-called ‘information warfare’.

The two targets of this attack are ironically facing each other on the battle fields of Syria. On the one side there is ISIS and on the other there is Russia, but both are equally condemned as being a danger to Europe, according to the EU Parliament’s resolution.

Specifically, the resolution targets the media outlets of ISIS and of Russia. In the case of Russia they are worried about popular news outlets like RT, and in the case of ISIS they are worried about videos of mass murder committed by crazed fanatics.

It is not the first time that such insulting and totally false comparisons have been made. John Kerry’s State Department also lumped in Russia with ISIS as the two main ‘threats’ to America.

This can mean one of two things. First of all, it may well mean that the US and now the EU do not take the battle against ISIS seriously.

ISIS is a barbaric, terrorist organisation whose methods include the beheadings of civilians including children, the mutilating of bodies, the most foul and heinous torture imaginable, the mass killings of religious and ethnic minorities, human trafficking, the enslavement and rape of women and the total destruction of the infrastructure in the territories they occupy from Iraq to Libya.

ISIS have media channels, mostly on-line, which promote such barbarity to those sick enough to be enticed by it. By contrast, The Russian Federation is one of the most civilised states in the world whose media outlets simply report on international news items of interest with a broadly Russian perspective, just as the BBC does the same with a neo-liberal British style perspective and CNN with a neo-liberal American style perspective.

The BBC is funded by a regressive tax levied on all those living in Britain who own broadcast receiving equipment, the funding method for this state owned media is simply not fit for its purpose. RT cannot claim to be funded in such an archaic manner.

If the EU Parliamentarians who voted in favour of this resolution actually believe what they say, they truly must not understand the real threat of ISIS and the fact that it is Russia that is helping the Syrian Arab Republic in the battle to rid this plague from the face of the earth.

One could also take another interpretation. If members of the EU Parliament actually do understand what ISIS is and the threat its members represent for the peoples of the world, and still put Russian media on the same level as those glorying in ISIS violence, they must truly be insane.

If Russian media was encouraging young men to strap bombs on their bodies and blow up hundreds of people in airports, theatres, metros and buses, they’d have a point. But Russian media is doing no such thing and never has done. This fact is surprising to no one other than those in the EU Parliament who seem to not actually grasp the realities of the world they apparently live in.

Every time someone in a major European city walks into a crowded public place, there is tragically a chance that ISIS will have one of their minions come to blow it up, taking as many lives as possible in the process. The danger of anyone being inspired by Russian media to do this, is literally zero.

It is downright ludicrous to compare RT’s CrossTalk or Sputnik’s World In Focus to videos of prisoners being burnt to death in cages or drowned alive by ISIS savages.

The EU Parliament talks about ‘disinformation’ from Russia but does not explain how such a thing even works or what it looks like. They claim that Russian media is a ‘danger’ but fail to even posit a hypothesis as to what this means. French MEP Jean-Luc Schaffhauser has said he knows not whether to laugh or cry. I’m not sure either.

Adding to the chorus of opposition to these mad measures was Spanish MEP Javier Couso Permuy. He said:

“This report is insane. It fosters hysteria against Russia and neo-McCarthyism in Europe. It’s a caricature of Russia. This is a dangerous report. It’s headed at confrontation and it’s an assault on freedom of information. To put terrorist groups like Daesh (ISIS), which disseminates live videos of torture and murders, on the same footing as a member state of the Security Council and other multilateral organisations which we have a grievance with, is an insult to the intelligence of Europeans.”

Indeed, to imply that the ordinary person living under the EU cannot tell the difference between standard, international style reportage and analysis from sources like RT and videos of mass beheadings, is the biggest insult to the people of a continent whose intelligence is presumed by the EU to be superior to those in every other part of the world. It’s racism on top of hypocrisy.

The people watching RT or listening to Radio Sputnik know exactly what is going on. They are informed individuals who want their information from a variety of sources, and ultimately, they draw their own conclusions.

I can assure you, they are not ISIS recruits. They may, however, be recruits to Eurosceptic parties who will expose the corruption and lack of transparency of the EU, forcing democratic political change. This is the real danger for the Eurocrats. They are more afraid of losing their pensions than they are of ordinary European losing their lives in the next ISIS attack, God forbid.

The people are intelligent enough to realise this and they won’t pay much attention to the mad words of a dying political class.

In the end the resolution passed with 304 votes, although it should be noted that when the no votes (179) are combined with abstentions (208), this total far outpaces those who voted in favour of the ridiculous resolution.