Col.Richard Kemp: People often ask what Britain would do if it came under rocket fire. During World War II, when the Nazis launched rockets indiscriminately at the civilian population of southern England, then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent 600 bombers to attack the German missile workshops, a raid that tragically killed over 700 innocent civilians. The Royal Air Force followed up by dropping 2,000 tons of explosives on launch sites along the French coast.
Col.Richard Kemp
More recently British forces have been fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, an enemy that uses the same criminal tactics as Hamas. Civilians are used as human shields; young children, disabled women and old men turned into suicide bombers; mosques and hospitals used to store weapons and to fire from. A Taliban bomb concealed in a school killed a Jewish soldier with the British Army in Helmand.
Like the Taliban, Hamas is part of the scourge of international jihadism that includes Hezbollah, the Islamic State group, Boko Haram, Al Nusra and al-Qaida. This violent global insurgency threatens us all. Western nations should stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel and support its right to defend its people against attack. Instead, all we are seeing from our leaders is equivocation, and sometimes outright hostility; and from the media, deliberate, widespread anti-Israel distortion.
Protecting his people, U.S. President Barack Obama sends drones to kill Islamist terrorists in Pakistan, causing civilian casualties, while castigating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for defending his own people. The failure of EU nations to reject last week’s UN Human Rights Council resolution condemning Israel for war crimes was shameful.
Such double standards and moral cowardice validate Hamas’ use of human shields, encourage other terrorist groups to follow suit and incite anti-Israel violence and the sort of vile anti-Semitic protests we see in European capitals.
If Western leaders will not support Israel’s fight against terror, how will they fight the same terrorists when they reach their own shores?
Col. Richard Kemp is a former commander of the British Forces in Afghanistan.
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Col.Richard Kemp
