The ongoing capitulation by Europe to radical Islam continues apace. The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg annulled a 13-year-old decision made by the Council of the European Union to maintain Hamas on the European Union’s list of terrorist organizations. The Court explained that, while the “Council of the European Union adopted a common position and a regulation to combat terrorism” beginning Dec. 27, 2001, that decision was based “not on acts examined and confirmed in decisions of competent authorities but on factual imputations derived from the press and the internet.” The Court further explained such decisions may not be made in that fashion but must rather rely on “elements which have been concretely examined and confirmed in decisions of national competent authorities within the meaning of the Common Position.”

When the Council established the list of terrorist organizations in 2001, Hamas’ military wing, the Izz al-Din Qassam Brigades, was placed on the list. It took another two years before the political wing of the organization was added to it.

Hamas had contested the part of the common position that included “freezing of the funds of those people and entities included on a list adopted and regularly updated by Council decisions.” And while the Court annulled that position, it maintained that freeze for a period of three months, or “if an appeal is brought before the Court of Justice, until this appeal is closed.”

The Court stressed that the annulments made on “fundamental procedural grounds do not imply any substantive assessment of the question of the classification of Hamas as a terrorist group within the meaning of the Common Position.”

Perhaps the most burning question is what have the so-called national competent authorities been doing for the last 13 years? Besides its bloody track record of terrorist attacks and the indiscriminate firing of thousands of missiles into Israel, Hamas’ founding charter, “The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement,” calls for the annihilation of the Jewish State. A statement from the Prophet Mohammed provides the rationale:

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”

One suspects far too many Europeans are more than willing to ignore such evidence in an effort to be “even-handed.” The leftist BBC implies as much, noting that the terror group’s “supporters see it as a legitimate resistance movement against Israel, with whom it has fought for years.” And only hours after that ruling, the European Parliament (EP) voted overwhelmingly to recognize a Palestinian state “in principle” by a margin of 498 to 88, with 111 abstentions. The vote is the culmination of a trend that began with similar recognition by the Swedish Parliament in October, followed by similar non-binding votes in Britain, Ireland, Spain, France and Portugal, with the latter two countries passing those resolutions last week.

All of the votes passed by large margins.

The EP’s vote reeks of an illegal double-standard exposed by the United Kingdom Independence Party’s (UKIP) Member of the European Parliament (MEP), James Carver. In September, he asked the EP to recognize the Islamic State of Somaliland. In October, they replied that only individual member states of the EU can act in that capacity. Even more transparently, they insisted that the status of Somaliland should be determined via “negotiations between the authorities of Somaliland and the Federal Government of Somalia” absent any effort by the EU to “influence the outcome of the process.”

Putting their collective fingers on the scale in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, even as decades of those negotiations have never held the Palestinians to remotely the same standards of compromise as Israel? Perfectly acceptable.

A survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League reveals the impetus behind that effort. It reveals nearly one-in-four Western Europeans and more than one-in-three Eastern Europeans harbor anti-Semitic feelings.

Virulent expressions of those feelings were chronicled by the Guardian last August. They reported on a series of attacks and fire-bombings of synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses throughout Europe. Dieter Graumann, president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, illuminated the feelings of his co-religionists. “These are the worst times since the Nazi era,” he explained. “On the streets, you hear things like ‘the Jews should be gassed’, ‘the Jews should be burned’ – we haven’t had that in Germany for decades. Anyone saying those slogans isn’t criticizing Israeli politics, it’s just pure hatred against Jews: nothing else. And it’s not just a German phenomenon. It’s an outbreak of hatred against Jews so intense that it’s very clear indeed.”

Hamas was pleased with the Court’s decision. Senior Hamas official Moussa Abu Marzouk characterized it as “a correction of a historical mistake.” He added, “Hamas is a resistance movement and it has a natural right according to all international laws and standards to resist the occupation.” That would be the same Hamas reportedly repairing the “terror tunnels” used to infiltrate Israel for the sole purpose of killing as many Jews as possible. Increasingly and most ominously, it appears the EU is on board with the utterly bankrupt moral equivocation known as “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

Israeli economy minister Naftali Bennett called the Court’s annulment “immoral.” But he also offered the EU a warning. “Israel is strong and can defend itself against its enemies, but those who will suffer from strengthening terrorist groups will be the Europeans themselves,” he said. Suffer may be an understatement. Abject surrender to Islamic totalitarianism, one anti-Semitic-driven decision after another, is more like it.