British officer: Goldstone report on Israel flawed

British Colonel Declares "The IDF Did More to Safeguard Civilians Than Any Other Army"

Col. Richard Kemp, Former Commander British Forces in Afghanistan reviewed the difficulties of any kind of warfare, but emphasized the challenges faced by Israel when fighting a terrorist organization that purposefully rejects and defies international law.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1124434.html

UN Watch Statement, delivered by Col. Richard Kemp, October 16, 2009, UN Human Rights Council Special Session on Goldstone Report

"The IDF faces a challenge that we British do not have to face to the same extent. It is the automatic, Pavlovian presumption by many in the international media, and international human rights groups, that the IDF are in the wrong, that they are abusing human rights.

The truth is that the IDF took extraordinary measures to give Gaza civilians notice of targeted areas, dropping over 2 million leaflets, and making over 100,000 phone calls. Many missions that could have taken out Hamas military capability were aborted to prevent civilian casualties. During the conflict, the IDF allowed huge amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza. To deliver aid virtually into your enemy's hands is, to the military tactician, normally quite unthinkable. But the IDF took on those risks.

Despite all of this, of course innocent civilians were killed. War is chaos and full of mistakes. There have been mistakes by the British, American and other forces in Afghanistan and in Iraq, many of which can be put down to human error. But mistakes are not war crimes."

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX6vyT8RzMo[/media]

Do you consider this piece of propaganda to be so valuable that you have to spread it all over the board?
UN Watch is a front organization of the American Jewish Committee. Kemp did not conduct any investigation into what really happened.

I respect Col. Richard Kemp integrity and military understanding not the UN Watch.

In recent film "Lebanon" (which won recently a prize in London Film Festival) by Israeli director, Samuel(Shmulik) Maoz, he tells his own traumatic experience during the war in 1982:

... The following morning, when a car approaches and refuses to stop, they are ordered to blow up the car. Shmulik (the gunner) refuses to do so, and as a result some troops in their battalion are killed. A few minutes later another truck appears, and Jamil (the battalion commander) doesn’t bother with a warning but simply orders Shmulik to shoot. Shmulik overcomes his anxiety and blows the truck up… and it turns out to be an innocent chicken farmer, who is left crawling across the dusty ground with his entrails hanging out. Thus the tone is set for a truly raw and unapologetic look at the horrors of modern warfare.

Surely, a lawyer will say a war crime, a soldier will see it differently.

I'm just wondering if this report isn't a part of Netanyahu's publicly announced effort to delegitimize the Judge Richard Goldstone report. This is the way this group seems to work, I have personal experience to verify that. If you would like some truth shed on this matter, please look at the Bill Moyers exhaustive interview with Justice Goldstone at this web site:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10232009/watch.html

And also, please look at the list of names of individuals and organizations that this British Officers video comes from. Who here are you going to believe. Sorry.

From what I've seen from international news sources, the Israelis are almost always portrayed as being somehow in the wrong, when from what I can tell, they have done (almost) everything right. All the truly knowledgeable people I know pretty much agree on this.

Personally I find the anti-Semitic bias depressing, you'd think we would have learned by now.

AWARE AMI

There is no big problem to delegitimize UNHCR, a body that due its automatic Arab majority still refuse to criticize Sudan for its Darfur atrocities.

UN agency produces report which criticizes Israel and accuses the IDF of war crimes (as well as accusing Hamas of the same).
Israel is known to have a very organized propaganda machine.
A few days later UN watch, which is an anti-UN organisation promoting Israeli interests, finds someone to say Israeli Defence Force did not commit war crimes.

I'm surprised... yea, really... really... honestly.

BlueC, if you want to have Israel filed in the "just another shithole" category, be my guest. As far as I recall Israel claims to be a Western democracy and therefore it is being held to that standard, though. You may also happily denounce Sudan or Hamastan as shitholes on a talk forum without being confronted shortly afterwards by a bunch of new users who dump pre-packaged propaganda.

Israel seems to be very selective in its appreciation of the UN. It happily accepts the UN decision to create Israel as legitimate, even though the UN was hardly more than a collection of colonial powers and some unsavoury dictatorships at that time, but any criticism of Israel by the UN is automatically considered to be anti semitic. I've also failed to see any criticism of the automatic veto vote by the US in favour of Israel.

If you want proof that the Goldstone report has the ring of truth, consider the US Congress' reaction:

How does hyperbole like "the only democracy in the Middle East" give UN credibility to pick on Israel? This body has no credibility at all. Israel created not by "UN decision" which was not supported by any force but by Israelis struggle to make it true. Without the 1948 war the decision would remain dead letter.

It lost all credibility with me when the Sudanese were given the chairmanshp of the Human Rights commitee. FFS!

Is any of the controversy related to the perception that Richard Goldstone himself has potentially entered the "self-hating" category?

Israel didnt exactly show restraint in Lebanon in 2006.

Don't want to mess up cinzia's Obama thread, but did anyone notice how Israel attacked the Gaza strip to provoke Hamas on the night of Obama's election? Very cynical.