British Police Flee Pro Gaza Mob

(originally posted on February 1, 2009)




Once upon a time, the boys in blue were a force to be reckoned with. Not any more. New video footage has been released showing Police fleeing from screaming demonstrators during a pro Palestine rally in London last month.

The ten-minute amateur film shows 30 officers being chased by a crowd of up to 3,000 people.

The video, posted on YouTube, shows protesters chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ (god is Greatest) and ‘Fatwa’, which is a death threat under Islamic law.

As they walk past St James’s Palace, demonstrators threw traffic cones and stones at the police, who are seen running away from the threat.

One demonstrator shouts: ‘Run, run, you cowards. Allahu Akbar.’

A female steward tries to calm down the protesters, insisting: ‘Back, back’ as the crowd advances on the police. But she is ignored as one male protester shouts: ‘They’re going to get it.’

After coming into Piccadilly, near the five-star Ritz Hotel, demonstrators continued chanting and screaming at the Police, who then drew their batons.

Despite pleas from another officer asking the crowd to ‘calm down’, the protesters laughed at him and threw more traffic cones. One shouted: ‘You swine.’

The rally featured was one of several that grew violent, with pro Palestine supporters smashing the windows of nearby shops, and hurling things at the Police. Even after the London rallies ended, the aggression did not stop, with several Orthodox Jews in north west London being physically assaulted by men shrieking anti Israel and anti Jewish abuse.

Check out the footage and see what's become of the British bobby:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1133120/Police-ran-away-jeering-Gaza-demonstrators.html

Israel Indicted For Self Defence

(originally published February 19 at old blog site)



Excellent article here, courtesy of FrontPage magazine:




Indicting Israel for Self-Defense

By P. David Hornik FrontPageMagazine.com
Wednesday, February 04, 2009


The ceasefire announced by Hamas on January 18, never a sterling example of the genre, further deteriorated on Sunday as over 15 rockets and mortar shells were fired at Israel from Gaza. That night, when Israeli planes struck back at Hamas targets, many Palestinians reported that Israel had telephoned them warnings to evacuate. There were no casualties in the strike.


Again on Tuesday evening, after a Grad rocket hit the Israeli city of Ashkelon during the day, Palestinians in the town of Rafah on the Gaza-Egypt border received recorded telephone messages from Israel stating that “people who work in tunnels, live near them or are giving logistical help to terrorists should evacuate the area immediately.”


Israeli air strikes on the tunnels followed, again with no reports of casualties. During Operation Cast Lead, Israel reduced Palestinian casualties with such measures as disseminating warnings in leaflets or SMS messages and dropping small, harmless bombs on rooftops before attacks.


It prompted former British colonel Richard Kemp to say that

“I don’t think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare when any army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF is doing today in Gaza.”

Nevertheless, it was reported on Monday that a prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague had announced plans to investigate claims by Palestinian groups that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza by using phosphorus shells in populated areas.

In 2004 the ICC condemned Israel for building its security fence—believed by  security officials to have saved hundreds of lives—after waves of terror from the West Bank.

And the news about the ICC came hard on the heels of Thursday’s announcement that a Spanish court, after granting a petition by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, was planning to try seven Israeli security officials for “crimes against humanity” in the 2002 assassination of Hamas kingpin Salah Shehadeh.

Fourteen civilians were also killed in the strike. Shehadeh had masterminded the killings of hundreds of Israelis and was preparing a mega-attack at the time. The seven Israeli officials include a former defense minister and two former chiefs of staff.

Israel, then, is between a rock and a hard place.


From its complete disengagement from Gaza in August 2005 till Operation Cast Lead was launched in late December 2008, 6500 rockets and mortars were fired from Gaza at predominantly civilian Israeli targets with only small, tactical Israeli responses.

Yet the world went along its way. There were no Security Council sessions, ICC investigations, or threats by European countries to put Hamas leaders on trial.

The suffering of Sderot residents never became a chic cause on campuses where “the Palestinians” continued to be lionized.

Then came Operation Cast Lead, and all hell broke loose. To even mention Israel’s extraordinary measures to avoid harming civilians was to be an embattled polemicist citing esoteric facts.

But when some unclear number of Palestinian civilians—inevitably, given Hamas’s use of them—were nonetheless killed or wounded, it was Israel that was in the hot seat. Although some European leaders like German chancellor Angela Merkel and Czech foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg showed Israel some degree of understanding, by the time Israel ended the operation on January 17 its diplomatic support had dwindled to zero.


And the ICC announcement is only the most dramatic instance so far of legal fallout from the operation. The expected wave of “lawfare” against Israeli soldiers and officers prompted Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to set up a special team to defend them headed by the justice minister, with legal and intelligence experts already gathering evidence related to the fighting in Gaza.


In 2005 Israeli general Doron Almog barely escaped arrest on war-crime charges in Britain when he was warned by the Israeli embassy not to disembark from his plane at Heathrow Airport. And just last week Israeli colonel Geva Rapp had to flee Britain for fear of an arrest warrant for defending his country.


With the war also having sparked fierce anti-Semitic eruptions particularly in Venezuela and Turkey, the worldview of Israel’s outgoing government—one of the factors behind the seemingly inhuman “restraint” in the face of the rockets—appears more wobbly than ever.

It was a worldview in which Israel could expect reason and understanding from the nations in light of such facts as: Israel had withdrawn from Gaza and it was no longer occupied; Hamas is a terrorist organization that specifically targets civilians while using its own civilians for cover; and any country—yes, even Israel—has the right to self-defense.


The fact that, notwithstanding all that, the war has galvanized both heightened anti-Israeli lawfare and heightened anti-Semitic agitation has not been lost on the Israeli populace—which has, for instance, drastically cut back on tourism to once-popular Turkey. And as the rockets continue to fall, the need for a more sober outlook—one perhaps closer to traditional Jewish understandings of Israel’s role in the world—is likely to prevail in the February 10 elections.

The Voice Of Truth

Amidst all the hypocrisy surrounding Israel's strikes on Hamas last year, one person has quietly and consistently defended Israel.

Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, has stated, time and again, that Israeli actions in Gaza were ethical and necessary. Last week he told the UN that the Israeli Defence Force took more precautions during Operation Cast Lead than any military in the history of warfare.

Col. Kemp made the comment in an address to the president of the UN 'Human Rights Council', Alex Van Meeuwen of Belgium, at its special session on the Goldstone Report in Geneva. Kemp spoke on behalf of UN Watch, an NGO that monitors UN activities.

Here's his speech in full:

I am the former commander of the British forces in Afghanistan. I served with NATO and the United Nations; commanded troops in Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Macedonia; and participated in the Gulf War. I spent considerable time in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, and worked on international terrorism for the UK government's Joint Intelligence Committee.

Mr. President, based on my knowledge and experience, I can say this: During Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli Defense Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.

Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population.

Hamas, like Hizbullah, are expert at driving the media agenda. Both will always have people ready to give interviews condemning Israeli forces for war crimes. They are adept at staging and distorting incidents.

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.

More than anything, the civilian casualties were a consequence of Hamas's way of fighting. Hamas deliberately tried to sacrifice their own civilians.

Mr. President, Israel had no choice apart from defending its people, to stop Hamas from attacking them with rockets.

And I say this again: The IDF did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Busting A Middle East Myth

Next time you hear someone bashing Israel for 'stealing' the 'homeland' of the 'ancient Palestinian people', you might want to share the following declarations with them. They reveal that, far from desiring Palestine as an independent, separate home for anyone, Arabs and Muslims used to insist that the region was nothing more than part of Syria.

Though much of the world chooses to ignore it, the fact remains that Palestine was never an exclusively Arab region. No independent Arab nor 'palestinian' state ever existed in the region.

Indeed, when the distinguished Arab-American historian, Princeton University Prof. Philip Hitti, testified against partition before the Anglo-American Committee in 1946, he said:

“There is no such thing as ‘Palestine’ in history, absolutely not.”

And this is the vital point. Before partition, Palestinian Arabs did not view themselves as having a separate identity. When the First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations met in Jerusalem in February 1919 to choose Palestinian representatives for the Paris Peace Conference, the following resolution was adopted:

We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds.

In 1937, a local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, told the Peel Commission, which ultimately suggested the partition of Palestine:

“There is no such country as Palestine! ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria.'

The representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the United Nations submitted a statement to the General Assembly in May 1947 that said, Palestine was part of the Province of Syria and that, politically, the Arabs of Palestine were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity.

A few years later, Ahmed Shuqeiri, later the chairman of the PLO, told the Security Council:

“It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria.”

The reality is, that Palestinian Arab nationalism is largely a post-World War I phenomenon that did not become a significant political movement until after the 1967 Six-Day War and Israel’s capture of the West Bank.

The world can cling to the lie about Israel 'displacing palestinians' from their 'homeland' all it likes. It doesn't make it true.

If you head over to Elder Of Ziyon, you'll find a great post on the same topic - including a newspaper archive that is definitely worth checking out. Just click HERE!