A few clips that illustrate some important aspects of the jihad against Israel. In How to Make a Hamas Hero, Rehov instructs viewers, "First, you take a nice Palestinian baby. You teach him love and values.” A clip of a Muslim cleric preaches that the Jews will hide behind a rock or a tree, and the tree will announce,"Kill the Jew."
EFRAT, Israel - President Barack Obama has called for a total freeze on all construction, including natural growth, in Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, known as the West Bank.
Such a freeze would disallow residents to add a room onto their home or prevent their children from building a home of their own in the neighborhood.
The Jewish community of Efrat in the Gush Etzion area of southern Judea, Israel's biblical heartland, is such a community.
Efrat, which was established in 1980 and is home to some 10,000 residents, is located between Bethlehem and Hevron.
Dr. Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University defends the Jewishness of Jerusalem, the Jewish capital for over 3000 years. He also defends the right of Israelis to settle in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank.
Mordechai Kedar in Al Jazeera: Jerusalem, Islam, and Settlements.
I wonder how many of you remember Azmi Bishara, the former Knesset member who walked into the Israeli embassy in Cairo in April 2007 and resigned from the Knesset after he got word that he was about to be indicted for treason for helping Hezbullah aim rockets during the 2006 Second Lebanon War. Bishara has not come back to Israel since.
UN Watch Statement, delivered by Col. Richard Kemp, October 16, 2009, UN Human Rights Council Special Session on Goldstone Report
Thank you, Mr. President.
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 Governments Joint Intelligence Committee.
Mr. President, based on my knowledge and experience, I can say this: During Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli Defence 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 Hizballah, 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 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.
Col. Richard Kemp discusses Goldstone Report on BBC, October 16, 2009.
Benjamin Netanyahu UN General Assembly
