Tim Collins (Ex-army)
N.B. Last updated in 2010. Colonel (retd) Tim Collins OBE (born Belfast, Northern Ireland, April 1960) is a former officer in the British Army. He gained prominence around the time of the the Iraq War following an eve-of-battle speech which the media declared 'inspirational'. The speech received much praise -- not least from Tim Collins himself -- and a copy of reportedly hangs in the White House's Oval Office.[1] The speech's theme of liberation vs. conquest, and its oft quoted line ('If you are ferocious in battle remember to be magnanimous in victory'), however, appear to be borrowed from a speech by Comte de Bourmont who on the eve of the colonization of Algeria in May 1830 perorated in front of the amassed troops: 'merciless in combat, you must be compassionate and magnanimous after victory...the Arab will see you as liberators'.[2]
By 2005 he was to make a complete about-face on his assessment of the invasion, arguing it has 'acted as the best recruiting sergeant for al-Qaeda ever'. He called it a "catastrophe" and a "right-rollicking cock-up".[3]
More recently Collins has engaged in pro-Israel propaganda activities including attempts to white-wash Israeli war crimes in Gaza during its 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead.[4] The film, in which he (literally) compares bullet holes in the walls of the Israeli town of Sderot with wholesale destruction in Gaza he ends by giving Israel a clean bill of health because 'it is not as bad for instance as Fallujah, and certainly not as bad as Ramadi'.[5] The VNR was produced for the BBC's flagship Newsnight by a company called ConflictZones, yet the company has produced nothing besides this short film. Curiously, the company has no other information available on its website (which is a single page about the film) beside a generic email address. The company has also employed a domain anonymizing service to register its domain name, an odd precaution for a film-maker.[6]
Affiliations
- Royal Irish Rangers
- RISC Management
- Henry Jackson Society - Signatory to the Statement of Principles [7]
notes
- ↑ Iraq war colonel awarded OBE, BBC News, 7 April 2004
- ↑ Text of de Bourmont's speech in Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization (Harper Collins: London 2005) p.636
- ↑ Tim Collins, This is a mess of our own making, The Observer, 18 September 2005
- ↑ Celebrated Iraq war veteran's view of the Gaza conflict, BBC News, 19 January 2010
- ↑ Celebrated Iraq war veteran's view of the Gaza conflict, BBC News, 19 January 2010
- ↑ ConflictZones accessed 1 February 2010
- ↑ HJS Statement of Principles
