Time for the truth

Colonel Richard Kemp has knowingly taken a big risk. He’s probably already surrendered a good deal of credibility by speaking out in the way he does. He might also be sacrificing much of the well-earned respect and veneration normally afforded, by general consensus, to those in a similarly distinguished position as he is. 

(30-year career in the British Army commanding front-line troops in fighting terrorism and insurgency in hotspots including Iraq, the Balkans, South Asia and Northern Ireland, Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan in 2003. From 2002 - 2006 and headed the international terrorism team at the Joint Intelligence Committee of the British Prime Minister's Office)

Col Kemp is jeopardising all that acclaim simply because he has chosen to align himself  with the most reviled rogues ever to have disgraced the planet with their execrable existence. Who? The Israelis of course. 

Why did he do that? Because he’s a heartless, soulless Nazi? 

No, because he’s a realist, as well as a vastly experienced expert on warfare rather than an emotionally incontinent CofE priest or an uncomprehending BBC journalist.

In an article for the Gatestone Institute he sets out the truth about Gaza’s Cilvilian Casualties and decries the disrespect shown to Israel’s Colonel Peter Lerner, by a TV interviewer whose line of questioning encourages listeners to believe the absurd notion that the “IDF is commanded and manned from top to bottom by psychopathic baby-killing thugs.”

“Although rarely allowed to complete so much as a single sentence, Israeli attempts to explain IDF targeting policies are inevitably dismissed as laughable fabrication.”

With few exceptions, reporters, commentators and analysts unquestioningly accept the casualty statistics given by Gaza's Hamas-controlled medical authorities, who ascribe all deaths to the IDF. Is anyone in Gaza dying of natural causes? Mass executions of "collaborators," and civilians killed by malfunctioning Hamas rockets, are all attributed to IDF fire.

Are the "overwhelming majority" of the dead really civilians? It would seem so. We see a great deal of grotesque and heart-rending footage of dead and bleeding women and children but never so much as a glimpse of killed or wounded fighters. Nor do reporters question or comment on the complete absence of Gazan military casualties, an extraordinary phenomenon unique to this conflict. The reality of course is that Hamas make great efforts to segregate their military casualties to preserve the fiction that Israel is killing civilians only. There are also increasing indications that Hamas, through direct force or threat, are preventing journalists from filming their fighters, whether dead or alive.

Please read it all.

Across the pond, Bret Stephens writes in the WSJ “Palestine Makes You Dumb’ You can access this without (£) by cunning Googling. (If I can do it anyone can.) 

He mentions a statement made on CNN by Benjamin J. Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. It echoes the views we’re currently hearing from the UK government:  “Israel has a right to defend itself but needs to do more to avoid civilian casualties.”

Stephens addresses the media’s obsession with the body count as well as the questionable accuracy of the reporting thereof.

“How does the Times keep such an accurate count of Palestinian deaths? 

"Palestinian death tallies are provided by the Palestinian Health Ministry and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs."

Hamas runs the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza! The U.N. gets its data mainly from the ‘agitprop’ Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which currently offers exactly the same percentage of civilian deaths as it offered during the 2008-09 Gaza war, 82%.

“When minutely exact statistics are provided in chaotic circumstances, it suggests the statistics are garbage. When a news organization relies—without clarification—on data provided by a bureaucratic organ of a terrorist organization, there's something wrong there, too.”

“The real utility of the body count is that it offers reporters and commentators who cite it the chance to ascribe implicit blame to Israel while evading questions about ultimate responsibility for the killing. Questions such as: Why is Hamas hiding rockets in U.N.-run schools, as acknowledged by the U.N. itself? What does it mean that Hamas has turned Gaza's central hospital into "a de facto headquarters," as reported by the Washington Post? And why does Hamas keep rejecting, or violating, cease-fires agreed to by Israel?”

Let’s at least hear some of these questions aired on the BBC, even if no-one is willing to give an honest answer.

Blaming Israel  “Because  (a) it won't accept a Palestinian government that includes a terrorist organization sworn to the Jewish state's destruction; (b) won't help that organization out of its financial jam; and (c) won't ease a quasi-blockade—jointly imposed with Egypt—on a territory whose central economic activity appears to be building rocket factories and pouring imported concrete into terrorist tunnels.”

...is either bald moral idiocy or thinly veiled bigotry.”

“To argue the Palestinian side, in this war, is to make the case for barbarism. It is to erase, in the name of humanitarianism, the moral distinctions from which the concept of humanity arises.”