Dark Days for the world? Or throwing light on Europe's black record?
“President Trump’s announcement on Jerusalem has a very worrying potential impact,” EU’s foreign policy chief, Frederica Mogherini, said in Brussels. Making a surprise, unannounced visit to the EU Commission’s press room, she forecast that “it has a very fragile context and thus the potential to send us backwards to even darker times than the ones we are already living in.”
What on earth did she mean?
What are the darkest days of Europe’s post-war history? Has she forgotten? Oil is blacker than midnight.
Well she has an excuse. She was only a few months old at the time of the Yom Kippur war. That took place in October 1973. It was the year of blackest Blackmail.
Europe is still held hostage. Its Foreign Policy is still owned by the oil sheiks.
Proof? The Saudis and others turn the oil spigot off at will. The supply diminishes, the price rockets. The European consumer consistently pays six or eight times the free market price for petroleum. Or twenty times on occasion, a 2000 percent price hike! (Where a non-cartel oil producer sells on the free market a highly profitable price lies between between five to ten dollars a barrel.)
If the EU had a self-respecting Foreign Policy it would defend its citizens from such predatory international cartels as OPEC, now working in cahoots with Russia. Global cartels would not be artificially hoisting energy prices. They would not be attacking the European economy like blood-sucking leaches.
Second proof. The EU now feels confidence enough to bring anti-cartel measures against American-based modern industries such as Microsoft and Apple. But what about oil? For that the EU External Action Service has no fuel in its tank.
The high cost of imported energy amounts to two or three times the entire EU budget. It could be a fraction of that if the EU had a real Foreign Policy. Europeans would get a boost on a prosperous economic up-curve.
Third proof. The Community system has the power potential to stop international cartels. Action depends on the will of its foreign policy operators. At the start of the EU with its European Coal and Steel Community, ECSC, the Commission, then called the High Authority, dismantled the greatest threat to world war. Even in the early months of its action, it was able to dismantle the steel, coal, finance and armaments cartels that were the cause not only of WW2 but WW1. Robert Schuman created the ECSC and Euratom to enable Europe to be energy-independent. Today’s EU leaders think they know better.
In August 1973 Saudi King Faisal warned USA and the world that it would use its Oil Weapon to break any country's independent foreign policy supporting Israel. Then came war.
Following the October 1973 Egyptian attack on Israel, Arab nations were surprised then shocked to see Israel was not crumbling like tissue paper. In fact Israel was winning.
That was when the Arab OPEC countries attacked Europe. The Arab League told the Europeans, North Americans and Japanese that if they did not immediately cease from supporting Israel they would get not one drop of oil. On 17 October 1973, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries OAPEC, announced it would impose a monthly 5 percent cut in oil production until Israeli forces
"are completely evacuated from all Arab territories occupied in the June 1967 war, and the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people are restored."
Those who turned against Israel would get oil.
The European economy went into a nosedive. Some countries like the Netherlands and Denmark were totally dependent on Arab oil. They were only saved from utter ruin by emergency European measures and sharing, thanks to the European Community’s single market established in 1953.Did the Europeans stand up with back straight and tell the sheiks where to go? What did they respond honestly and frankly to King Faisal who only a few years earlier, to show his civilization, had issued a decree outlawing slavery in his kingdom? At last! For the first time in a millennium thousands of slaves gained their freedom. During the 1967 Six Day War, the Arab oil exporters had already cut oil by 60 percent to Europe. Had the Europeans learned lessons about potential financial slavery in 1973?
Hardly.
A meeting of European foreign policy chiefs just a few weeks later on 5 November 1973 issued a Joint Declaration on the situation in the Middle East.
Defiance? A search for justice and truth? None of it. It spoke of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. That was the first time they had done so. And there is a good reason why. They bought a lie to get oil. Everyone knew it was a fake, a fraud and a fib. They all knew how Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt maltreated and confined their so-called 'Palestinian refugees' like political hostages. On this Black Day Europe's Foreign Ministries should have been covered in mourning cloth.
Palestinians? Up to the Declaration of Independence by Ben-Gurion’s government in May 1948, only Jews were known as Palestinians. They were people of the British Mandate for Palestine.

Under the British Mandate, Arabs preferred to be called by their tribes, Southern Syrians, Egyptians, Saudis or Bedouins. Readers of the Jerusalem Post should know that at this time it was known as the Palestine Post.
The parents of Moshe Dayan, hero of the Six Day War, held British passports declaring they were Palestinians.
DvoraDayan, Palestinian wife of a Palestinian
DvoraDayan, Palestinian wife of a Palestinian
But the term Palestinian was not long thrown away in the dustbin of history. Nasser, the Egyptian dictator, working with the USSR Disinformation Department of the KGB pulled it out of the trash. The Arab League met in Cairo in 1964. They created the fake Palestine Liberation Organization, to foment trouble together with the Soviets’ many other anti-colonist terrorist groups. After the 1967 war when Nasser failed to drive "all Jews into the Mediterranean Sea", the brutal Egyptian-born Yasser Arafat became its third chairman in 1969.
Remember, at that time, Palestine meant the geographical area of the British Mandate. In the League’s Mandate Article 7, ONLY Jews were given Palestinian citizenship! It was agreed by the world's powers -- including the Arab States!

"Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have agreed, for the purpose of giving effect to the provisions of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, to entrust to a Mandatory selected by the said Powers the administration of the territory of Palestine, which formerly belonged to the Turkish Empire, within such boundaries as may be fixed by them; andWhereas the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country; andWhereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country; ...ARTICLE 7.The Administration of Palestine shall be responsible for enacting a nationality law. There shall be included in this law provisions framed so as to facilitate the acquisition of Palestinian citizenship by Jews who take up their permanent residence in Palestine."
Warning! Disinformation uses the same words but changes their meanings. The Palestinian National Charter or Convention glosses over any precise legal and political issues, and legitimate identity, by confounding the geographical term with broad brush appeal to the Arab nation.

There was never in history an Arab nation called Palestine or an Arab people called Palestinians. Neither was Jerusalem ever a capital of an Arab State. It is the 3000 year old capital of Israel that is today legally occupied. No “Palestinians” are mentioned in the famous 1967 UN Resolution 242. Why? No such people existed!
Jordanians, the Hashemite Arabs expelled from Mecca who illegally occupied the vast, eastern Mandate territory,  had in 1948 occupied Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem militarily and illegally. King Abdullah forbade the use of the term Palestinian in official documents.  Why? The PLO was a threat to Jordanian 'royals' too as its Charter stated:

Article 1:Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.Article 2:Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit.
It is this poisoned, drugged cake that the Europeans began to bite into when they made a Joint Declaration, under the informal, non-legal framework known as Political Cooperation.

Having seen the Europeans scattered like flocks of sheep before ravenous wolves, an Arab delegation descended uninvited on the European Summit at Copenhagen on 14-15 December 1973. I witnessed the shock of Europe's leaders! In a reference to the planned, new holocaust of Jews and the near lethal attack on the European economy, they referred to these black events with diplomatic circumlocution as the 'energy crisis'.

"The Heads of State or Government considered that the situation produced by the energy crisis is a threat to the world economy as a whole, affecting not only developed but also developing countries."
As the Arab oil exporters feared total subjection of the European economy might slip out of their religio-political control, as other energy sources became available, OPEC quadrupled the price of oil to turn open blackmail into long-term financial blackmail. Then they slapped Europe again to make sure Europeans knew who was boss. The prices were quadrupled again in 1979, reducing Europe’s huge financial surplus to desperation and impoverishment.

The other side of the ledger is bulging. The multi-trillion dollar Saudi Aramco is by far the richest company in the world. It has ample resources to pay the best public relations and media. It can easily oil the wheels of politics. Such was the way in the 1960s when PR firms recast the embarrassing terminology that the United Nations had used. Samaria (capital of the Israelites) and Judea (tribal home of the Jews) became the West Bank.
In July of the black year of 2008, the Islamist wrecking ball smashed again. It took a decade to wind up OPEC's demolition machine.
The Petroleum cartel jacked the price up to 147 dollars a barrel. It pilfered from the world economy more than ten percent of global GNP. Again the world fell into destitution. (For all the postwar decades up to 1973 when the religio-political cartel struck, oil was under two dollars!)
But recent events have cooled this hot heist. Shale oil and gas and the arrival at last of more intelligent energy sources threaten the future of the blackmailers. Hence the major changes in the Arab world.

Europeans are slow and too arthritic to escape from hostage today. Mme Mogherini’s reaction is typical of the Stockholm syndrome of captives defending the hostage-taker. US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson needs to spend more time in Brussels to bring those living in the dark into the light of day.
May the captives gain their freedom!