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Articles

The ban on visiting Israel is an absurdity

Royals must honour the fallen of our forgotten Middle East war

Article published in The Times, 9 December 2015. © Richard Kemp

No fewer than 16,000 British and Commonwealth troops died during the Palestine campaign in the First World War and are buried in the land where they fell. Yet a long-standing Foreign Office ban on royal visits to Israel looks likely to deny these men the honour that has been afforded to British soldiers killed in Europe, Gallipoli and other theatres of war during the centenary years. This policy must be overturned now to ensure their sacrifice is properly recognised.

Ninety-eight years ago today, on December 9, 1917, the Ottoman governor of Jerusalem surrendered the Holy City to General Sir Edmund Allenby’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force at the end of a bloody battle against the Turks that began on November 17.

The Palestine campaign has received little attention during the First World War commemorations, but was the second largest British theatre of operations in terms of strength of forces, with troops from Britain, Australia, New Zealand and India. It achieved the first defeat of a central power in the war. Continue reading →

Articles

ISIS negotiation is fool’s option but we’ll need troops on ground for victory

Article published in The Express, 3 December 2015. © Richard Kemp

THE RAF should bomb Syria without delay. We are at war with the Islamic State, a war they declared.

They have killed British citizens and intend to kill more. We must fight them relentlessly and with maximum effort.

Airstrikes alone cannot defeat an enemy that holds ground. There will have to be a major land campaign with American, British and Middle East boots in the sand.

But with effective targeting intelligence our Tornadoes can kill IS fighters and commanders with devastating precision. These will be replaced, but the intensive US drone campaign in Pakistan that decimated Al Qaeda shows what can be achieved.

Airstrikes can also destroy IS munitions and savage their economic infrastructure. Only last month in eastern Syria American tankbuster planes and ground attack gunships destroyed 116 petrol trucks that IS were using to smuggle the crude oil they depend on for funds. Continue reading →

Articles

Western kindness is killing democracy

The West can no longer afford to play the compassionate democrat when it faces an enemy which respects no ethical rulebook whatsoever

by Ari Harow and Richard Kemp

Article published in The Jerusalem Post, 23 November 2015

The horrific attacks in Paris ignited a potent demonstration of solidarity throughout the Western world. Global landmarks have been bathed in illuminated Tricolor flags, social media has been awash with tributes and moments of silence have been observed in major capitals. This determined sense of unity in the face of terrorism is entirely admirable, yet useless if it remains the sum total of the West’s response. The time has come to truly comprehend that Western democracy faces nothing less than a bitter and bloody fight to shape the future of the world. The battle against jihadist Islamism cannot be fought with demonstrations of goodwill.

Kindness and compromise is simply no match for suicide bombers. The West can no longer afford to play the compassionate democrat when it faces an enemy which respects no ethical rulebook whatsoever.

The latest Paris atrocities have conclusively demonstrated the utter folly of any attempt to appease, accommodate or “understand” the demands of Islamism. The murder of Charlie Hebdo staff in January was foolishly portrayed by some as a response to religious defamation.

In fact, the Western requirement for logical cause and effect has long insisted that terrorist attacks are a cry for justice at perceived wrongdoing. Continue reading →

MI6 building
Articles

Islamic State could attack Britain any time – and the impact would be catastrophic

Article published in The Daily Mirror, 16 November 2015. © Richard Kemp

As they did in Paris on Friday , Islamic State terrorists could attack the UK at any time.

Are we ready?

Our intelligence services do a superb job and have disrupted many attacks planned against us by Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Many jihadists are in jail. But their challenge is enormous.

Andrew Parker, Director General of MI5, recently warned that there are over 3,000 Islamist extremists willing to carry out attacks in the UK.

Few attacks are conducted by terrorists who are completely unknown to our intelligence services. It appears some of those involved in the Paris attacks were on the radar screen of French intelligence.

Surveillance is hugely resource intensive, requiring perhaps a team of 15 to 20 to monitor a single target around the clock. So the thousands of terrorist suspects have to be prioritised and Continue reading →

Articles

This is no time for fear. Islamic State must be crushed

We need to learn lessons from the 2004 Madrid attack

Article published in The Times, 16 November 2015. © Richard Kemp

The 2004 bomb attack in Madrid that killed 191 people was a strategic victory for jihadists that went far beyond the carnage on Spain’s rail network. Al-Qaeda could boast that they had changed the outcome of the general election that followed and forced Spanish troops out of Iraq. This became a cornerstone of propaganda for jihadists everywhere and an incalculable boost for al-Qaeda recruitment and funding.

After Friday’s attack in Paris there will be a desire within France for similar appeasement of Islamic State. We hear already the predictable faint-hearted warnings from those who are terrified of provoking jihadist rage by striking back.

Of course jihadists react violently to aggression against them. But the choice is to fight or to submit to terror. In the face of
blood-lust and subjugation, the cause is worth the casualties. In any case, Isis has declared war on our countries, and will
attack us whatever we do.

It is imperative that France does not succumb to the fear that cowed the Spanish electorate. They should immediately intensify air attacks in Iraq and Syria. But this is not enough. Isis must be eradicated and France cannot do it alone, or with the coalition that has won limited success with half-hearted attacks.

After 9/11 the US invoked Article 5 of the Nato treaty, which calls on every member to aid a nation under armed attack. As Manuel Valls, the French prime minister, said this weekend: “We have been hit by an act of war, organised methodically by a terrorist, jihadist army.” Continue reading →

Articles

Michael Fallon has called the lack of RAF airstrikes in Syria “morally indefensible”. Is he right?

Letter published in The Times, 6 November 2015. © Richard Kemp

For Michael Fallon to call our failure to strike Isis in Syria as well as Iraq “morally indefensible” is an understatement (thetimes.co.uk, Nov 5). It is morally bankrupt for any country to half-heartedly engage in a war. If the government perceives the threat as serious enough to require military force then it must unleash sufficient combat power to defeat the enemy as rapidly as possible and wherever they are. To do otherwise exposes our own citizens at home and abroad to lethal threat, results in increased civilian casualties on the battlefield and adds unnecessary risk to our own fighting forces.

This means greatly intensifying our feeble bombing offensive in Iraq as well as extending the campaign to Syria. If we do not have the courage and the will to do this then we have no right to be using military force at all. Mr Fallon’s estimate that Isis can be defeated in two years is baseless. The time it will take depends on many factors, the most significant being how seriously we are prepared to fight. It is also unnecessary to rely upon speculation about how Flight 9268 was downed this week over Egypt. The threat to our country from Isis is already clear enough, as the director general of MI5 warned only last week.

Le Drian
Articles

World’s Weak Response to ‘Human Shields’ Encourages Terrorists to Use Them

Interview with Richard Kemp

By Michel Gurfinkiel

French Minister of Defense Jean-Yves Le Drian recently made an essential statement about the war against terror and the difficulties it involves for Western countries. In an interview with Europe 1 focusing on the French air strikes against the Islamic State, he remarked:

Daesh [ISIS] is organized in such a way that children, women, civilians are being put on front lines. Its leadership is hiding in schools, mosques, hospitals, making the action of the coalition in Iraq and the action of France and other partners in Syria difficult, because we don’t want civilian casualties. We pay as much attention to the targets we select as to the need to combat Daesh.

This is a frank admission of the human shield tactic practiced by Islamists and its crippling effect on Western fighting.

Undoubtedly, Le Drian is aware that the United States and other Western partners in the coalition against ISIS are facing the same challenge, and that Israel faces similar difficulties when counter-attacking organizations like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and Fatah-affiliated terror groups.

What remains to be seen is whether he and the French government, now having this experience with human shields, will reconsider their foreign policy regarding Israel.

We asked Colonel Richard Kemp, the former British commander in Afghanistan and an expert about war ethics, to comment on Le Drian’s no-nonsense statement.

PJM: Do Le Drian’s remarks come as a surprise to you?

Kemp: Not in the least. The Islamic State (ISIS) is adept at using human shields and locations protected under the Geneva Conventions. They are war criminals. The comments by Jean-Yves Continue reading →

Articles

Palestinian and Western Leaders: Blood on Their Hands

Article published by the Gatestone Institute, 16 October 2015. © Richard Kemp

US Secretary of State John Kerry has shockingly justified the latest Palestinian murder campaign in Israel. His comments this week at Harvard University will encourage the continuation of violence and lead to further deaths of both Israelis and Palestinians.

Secretary Kerry’s remarks are particularly troubling because it is unimaginable that he would provide such justification other than for the killing of Israelis. His explanation for the widespread knifings, suicide bombings, shootings, arson, firebombings, vehicle attacks and lethal rock-throwing is either naive or mendacious; perhaps both. He asserts that the frustrations of Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank are responsible for the Palestinians’ murderous behaviour. Of course this is nonsense.

The reality is that this new wave of killings is a continuation of the aggression against Jews that has been going on in the territory of Palestine for many decades – since long before the re-establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 and pre-dating the first Israeli settlements in the West Bank that Secretary Kerry falsely brands as illegal. The violence is motivated by the same racist and sectarian zeal that drives the Islamic State and numerous Arab governments and jihadist groups that have sought to eradicate the presence of “infidels,” whether Jews, Christians or Yazidis, from land that they consider the exclusive preserve of Muslims. Continue reading →

Articles

‘Russia is bombing Syria to advance Moscow’s interests not to fight ISIS’

Vladimir Putin is now calling the shots in Syria, says former commander of forces in Afghanistan, Colonel Richard Kemp

Article published in The Mirror, 3 October 2015. © Richard Kemp

Don’t be fooled by Vladimir Putin’s talk of fighting the Islamic State in Syria.

Russian forces are there for one purpose – to advance Russian interests in the Middle East.

In turn this will help Putin in his quest to restore the country’s global influence and – an added bonus – to humiliate his greatest enemy, the United States.

Swarming in to a vacuum created by American inaction and indecisiveness, Putin is now calling the shots in Syria and intends to do so across the region more widely.

Already Russian generals are “coordinating” in Iraq.

Putin is determined to keep Bashar al Assad in power – or to decide who replaces him. Continue reading →