Nadene Goldfoot
I'll never forget this man. He denied England's proclivity of denying Israel with lots of anti-Semitism. This one man among many went against the flow and challenges of the majority view of Israel's role in the Middle East.
He is an important man who was the commander of the British Forces in Afghanistan when he was about 52 years of age. He's the highest profiled non-Jewish advocate of Israel in regards to defense matters and "the matter in which the country's various security services and intelligence agencies go about their work of protecting a nation surrounded by enemies".
In October 2009, he gave evidence of this to the UN Human Rights Council who were discussing the infamous "Goldstone Report." The South African judge, Richard Goldstone is Jewish, but took a terrible stand against Israel in this report. "Goldstone is a third-generation South African born into a Jewish family in Boksburg near Johannesburg. He is of mixed English-Lithuanian descent; his mother's father was English and his grandfather was a Lithuanian Jew who emigrated in the 19th century." He went overboard so as to not show partiality, I guess. He was an embarrassment to the Zionistic Jews who advocate for Israel. I plotzed!
His family was non-religious, but he credits his Jewishness with having shaped his ethical views through being part of a community that has been persecuted throughout history. Goldstone has written about the role that those of Jewish heritage played in the fight against apartheid noting, subsequent to Nelson Mandela's death, that Mandela had himself observed "I have found Jews to be more broad-minded than most whites on issues of race and politics, perhaps because they themselves have historically been victims of prejudice."
Israel has urged the United Nations to cancel the 2009 report to the U.N. Human Rights Council by South African jurist Richard Goldstone that said both Israel and the Islamist group Hamas were guilty of war crimes in the Gaza conflict.
Goldstone had the chutzpa of accusing Israel of War Crimes! Aside from trusting in G-d and believing that G-d was on their side, there is the little matter of having been attacked 5 minutes after declaring Statehood on May 14, 1948, and having to fight from 1947 to 1949, then in 1956, 1967 and 1973 in wars that were outrageous. Then the 1982 war, the Intifadas, rocket, missile and mortars lobbed into Israel from Gaza daily, the fact that every school had to have bomb shelters, etc, etc, etc, and he finds Israel guilty of war crimes? The very soul of Israel, the reason of its creation, was for Judaism which is into the law of treating others as you want to be treated; the Golden Rule.
Back in 2009, Kemp's testimony went over like a wet noodle. It was warmly applauded in Israel, but dismissed as bizarre by many states, NGOs and others around the world that preferred to base their opinions about Israel on Goldstone's what they consider as "evidence." To me it was trashing maliciously, taking the word of their enemy.
To the UN listeners, it was more palatable to accept the image of Israel as the wicked aggressor, for that's how all the Middle East people were brought up to believe. They even would blame Jews or Israel for bad weather, something that certainly went on in Syria! The wanted to view the Palestinians as the helpless innocent victims of the bullying of Israelis, the far more powerful people who invaded THEIR territory.
Kemp was asked why he chose to stand alone for Israel. His reply was, "I think I've had a certain amount of experience in dealing with the IDF and also the Israeli Intelligence Services during my military career, and I developed quite a good understanding of how the IDF operates, their rules of engagement and how they fight. I was quite horrified when I left the army to see how the media accounts of what they were doing was being so distorted. I was horrified to see them coming under attack, in my view, unfairly, as a result of political bias rather than objectivity. I knew it was wrong and I felt I had to stand up and to try and redress the distortions." He also explained that many British soldier's lives had been saved by the IDF. He had lots of stories to back that up.
Kemp was attached to the Cabinet Office from 2001 to 2006, during which time he was briefly Commander of Operation Fingal in Afghanistan (between July and November 2003) with approximately 300 soldiers under his command. At the Cabinet Office he worked for the Joint Intelligence Committee and the national crisis management group, COBRA, during the period of the 2005 London bombings and a series of kidnappings of British nationals in Iraq and Afghanistan. His responsibilities included Iraq, and he made several visits to Baghdad, Fallujah and Mosul. He was promoted to the rank of colonel on 30 June 2004 and retired from the army on 30 March 2006.
Goldstone finally retracted his allegations but was too late. He had done the damage. He even apologized for his biased and unfair report. I supposed he's in the same corner as Noam Chomsky, who I think would have done the same thing as he does do the same thing without a judge and jury.
Richard Goldstone initially refused the appointment of being a leader of a mandate, calling the mandate "biased" and "uneven-handed". In January 2011, Goldstone said that UNHRC "repeatedly rush to pass condemnatory resolutions in the face of alleged violations of human rights law by Israel but fail to take similar action in the face of even more serious violations by other States. Until the Gaza Report they failed to condemn the firing of rockets and mortars at Israeli civilian centers". Following Goldstone's objection, the mandate was informally widened to cover activities by Palestinian militants as well, and the revised mandate, as quoted by the final report, became: to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after.
This seemed to validate Kemp's report. but there were those who preferred to believe only bad things about Israel and would help to spread the lies.
Alan Dershowitz found the Goldstone Report to be terrible as well. He stated:
"The Goldstone Report, when read in full and in context, is much worse than most of its detractors (and supporters) believe. It is far more accusatory of Israel, far less balanced in its criticism of Hamas, far less honest in its evaluation of the evidence, far less responsible in drawing its conclusion, far more biased against Israeli than Palestinian witnesses, and far more willing to draw adverse inferences of intentionality from Israeli conduct and statements than from comparable Palestinian conduct and statements. It is worse than any report previously prepared by any other United Nations agency or human rights group.
As Major General Avichai Mandelblit, the advocate general of the Israeli Defense Forces, aptly put it: “I have read every report, from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Arab League. We ourselves set up investigations into 140 complaints. It is when you read these other reports and complaints that you realize how truly vicious the Goldstone report is. He made it look like we set out to go after the economic infrastructure and civilians, that it was intentional: It’s a vicious lie.”2 The Goldstone report is, to any fair reader, a shoddy piece of work, unworthy of serious consideration."
Resource:
https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2021/03/braving-anti-israel-tide-colonel.html
The Jerusalem Report, June 1, 2015, p. 23-24 The Redoubtable Colonel Kemp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Goldstone
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3593975/dershowitzgoldstone.pdf?sequence=2
No comments:
Post a Comment