Israel’s Voice On Britain's Iraq Inquiry Accuses Critics
Of 'Anti-Semitism'
30 January 2010By Nureddin Sabir
Israel’s voice on Britain's Iraq Inquiry accuses
critics of 'anti-Semitism'
The Iraq Inquiry, led by former civil servant John
Chilcot, was set up by British Prime Minister Gordon
Brown in June 2009 in order to “identify lessons that
can be learned from the Iraq conflict”. It began its
deliberations in November.
On 22 November 2009, as the inquiry, was preparing to
convene, a former British ambassador, Oliver Miles,
wrote an article in the Independent on Sunday
expressing concern at the fact that two out of the
five members of the inquiry’s committee, Martin
Gilbert and Lawrence Freedman, were “strong supporters
of Tony Blair and/or the Iraq war”. He also pointed
out that both Gilbert and Freedman were Jewish, and
that “Gilbert at least has a record of active support
for Zionism”.
Writing in the Independent newspaper a week later,
Richard Ingrams wondered whether the Zionists' links
to the Iraq invasion would be brushed aside. Referring
to Oliver Miles’s article and to an extraordinary
attack on Miles by The Times, in which the paper
described his comments as “disgraceful”, Ingrams said:
The ambassador's comments and the attention paid to
them by The Times may be helpful in the long run, if
only by drawing attention to the Israeli dimension in
the Anglo-U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, a dimension
that hitherto has scarcely been mentioned.
Yet it is a fact that the campaign to overthrow Saddam
Hussein was initiated, well before 9/11, by a group of
influential American neo-cons, notably Perle, Feith
and Wolfowitz (once described by Time magazine as "the
godfather of the Iraq war") nearly all of whom were
ardent Zionists, in many cases more concerned with
preserving the security of Israel than that of the
U.S.
Given that undeniable fact, the pro-Israeli bias of
Sir Martin Gilbert and Sir Lawrence Freedman, both of
them supporters of the 2003 invasion, is a perfectly
respectable point to raise. It is equally legitimate
to ask if at any point the panel will investigate or
even refer to the U.S. neo-cons and their links to
Israel. Call me snide if you like, but I very much
doubt they will.
On 28 January 2010, BBC Radio 4’s “Today” programme
reported that Martin Gilbert, whom it described as a
“proud practising Jew and Zionist”, had expressed
“deep unease” at the previous November’s articles by
Miles Oliver and Richard Ingrams.
The radio broadcast extracts from an interview given
by Gilbert to an internet radio station run by Jewish
settlers in the occupied West Bank in which he
described Oliver’s and Ingrams’s articles as “really
unpleasant”. He referred to people who questioned the
wisdom of including pro-Israel activists in an inquiry
whose purpose was to investigate an Israeli-instigated
war as “these anti-Semites”. And he said that “more
leading figures” should “speak out against” what he
described as the “crude anti-Israel feelings” in
Britain.
In the interview with the settlers’ radio station,
Martin Gilbert appeared to be aware of the logic
behind concerns regarding the role of Israel lobbyists
and agents of influence in the Anglo-US invasion of
Iraq in 2003. As an eminent scholar, he should
therefore understand why the British public should be
worried that an active supporter of Israel on the Iraq
Inquiry might not be impartial or rigorous in
scrutinizing the conduct of those who launched the
aggression against Iraq at the behest of pro-Israel
activists like himself. Instead, he chose to divert
attention with the smokescreen of “anti-Semitism”.
This subterfuge casts serious doubt about the
integrity of the Iraq Inquiry. It means that if Israel
lobbyists played a part in pushing Britain to join the
U.S. aggression against Iraq, this would probably be
overlooked by the Israeli activists on the inquiry,
who make up 40 per cent of the panel.
It also means that the Iraq Inquiry has not only been
severely compromised, but was in fact doomed before it
even started.
-- Nureddin Sabir's article appeared in Redress
Information & Analysis.
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