Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 19 May 2020. © Richard Kemp

The World Health Organisation is launching an ‘impartial, independent and comprehensive’ investigation into the handling of the Coronavirus pandemic. That is like getting the poacher to probe the disappearance of the pheasants. The WHO itself should be under investigation for its own response, which has sacrificed medical objectivity for a Chinese dominated political stance. Hardly surprising when its director general is not a physician but a politician.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has a track record of miscalculation and misjudgement. In 2017 he appointed Robert Mugabe as a WHO Goodwill Ambassador. In a forestaste of his public pronouncements on China’s handling of coronavirus, Tedros praised Mugabe’s health policies when the reality was that he had presided over a backsliding in the country’s healthcare – not to mention his savage and widespread human rights abuses.

The WHO ignored Taiwan’s early warning in December about human-to-human transmission of Covid-19, preferring to parrot China’s denial of that fact for a month. The Canadian head of WHO’s Covid-19 response team showed his apparent contempt for Taiwan by refusing to answer media questions on its relationship with the WHO. Taiwan remains excluded from the WHO despite being one of the most successful countries in the world in containing the virus. But of course the Chinese Communist Party sees Taiwan as an enemy which it has vowed to conquer before the 100th anniversary of Mao’s revolution in 2049.

The WHO continues to repeat Chinese propaganda as though it were the truth. Despite Beijing’s cover-ups, silencing of its own Continue reading →

Article published by the Gatestone Institute, 6 May 2020. © Richard Kemp

Coronavirus has turned the world upside down. One Through the Looking Glass moment was the UN’s praise for Israel over ‘unprecedented cooperation on efforts aimed at containing the epidemic’. Those of us who follow the Middle East know that any judgement on Israel apart from outright condemnation is unprecedented for the UN.

What is not unprecedented is cooperation between Arabs and Israelis such as we see today. One hundred years ago, a Jewish microbiologist, Dr Israel Kligler, led the fight to eradicate malaria from this land. For centuries, the territory had been ravaged by the mosquito, decimating the people that tried to live there, leaving it barren and sparsely populated. Shortly before Kligler’s war on malaria, British General Edmund Allenby, speaking of his 1917-18 fight against the Ottoman Empire in Palestine, had said: ‘I am campaigning against mosquitoes’. His battle plans against the Turks were shaped above all by the need to overcome the murderous effects of malaria on his own forces.

Like Coronavirus, malaria did not differentiate between Jews and Arabs, and both communities learnt the need to work together against a disease that had for so long caused devastation to both their peoples. Despite violent efforts by Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, to prevent his people from cooperating with the hated Jews, Kligler’s endeavours enabled the land to be cultivated, populated and developed, and eventually led to the total elimination of the disease in the area.

Like al-Husseini, some Palestinian Arab leaders today seem to prefer that their own people succumb to disease rather than cooperate with Israel. While Palestinians and Israelis on the ground pull together against Coronavirus, Palestinian Authority (PA) Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh says: ‘Some soldiers are trying to Continue reading →

The ICC should be an important part of the international rule of law, but Bensouda is betraying its honorable legal tradition

Article published in The Jerusalem Post, 4 May 2020. © Richard Kemp

The Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, has contorted the jurisdiction of the court into a dangerous parody in her desperate efforts to drag Israeli soldiers and political leaders into the dock at The Hague. Now, according to a senior Palestinian leader, she has also been colluding with members of the internationally-proscribed terrorist groups Hamas and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) to achieve her baleful objective.

The ICC should be an important part of the international rule of law, but Bensouda is betraying the honorable legal tradition established by the court’s predecessor tribunals that brought war criminals to justice at Nuremberg and Tokyo after the Second World War.

The court’s founding Rome Statute allows investigations only within the sovereign territories of state parties to the treaty. But the prosecutor has unlawfully accepted delegated jurisdiction over the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza from what she calls the ‘State of Palestine.’ Palestine is not a state and never has been. Under the 1993 Oslo Accords, from which the Palestinian Authority derives its very existence, the PA was not granted any criminal jurisdiction over Israelis whatsoever nor can it transfer such jurisdiction to international institutions like the ICC.

The ICC accuses Israel of committing crimes against international law (all demonstrably fallacious) within what is an area unlawfully treated as sovereign Palestinian territory. Yet the borders of any Continue reading →