Arguments 'ad hominem' in defense of the Goldstone Report

Even before the Goldstone Report was released, Richard Goldstone was arguing for its credibility by invoking his Jewishness, his Zionism, his daughter's residence in Israel and his connection to the Hebrew University. It was the mirror image of the classic fallacy known as the "argument ad hominem," which is defined as follows: A substantive argument should not be rejected solely because of who has offered it.

It follows of course that an argument should also not be accepted because of who offered it.

A close relative of the ad hominem fallacy is what I have called "the argument by ethnic identity," which I have defined as follows: An anti-Israel argument is made stronger if offered by a Jew. ("See, even a Jew agrees that... ).

These are precisely the fallacious arguments being offered in defense of the Goldstone Report by Richard Goldstone and his supporters. Goldstone has even elicited his daughter's help. This is what she has said: "Had Richard Goldstone not served as the head of the UN inquiry into the Gaza War, the accusations against Israel would have been harsher." She continued, "My father took on the job for peace, for everyone and also for Israel." She told The Jerusalem Post, "My dad loves Israel and it wasn't easy for him to see and hear what happened. I think he heard and saw things he didn't expect to see and hear...."

The problem is not what Goldstone saw and heard. It's what he willfully and deliberately refused to see and hear.

Israel's military investigation: Is it enough?

In its most recent response to the Goldstone Report, the Israeli government has catalogued the investigations being conducted by the Israeli Defense Forces:

Of the 150 incidents, so far 36 have been referred for criminal investigation. To date, criminal investigators have taken evidence from almost 100 Palestinian complainants and witnesses, along with approximately 500 IDF soldiers and commanders. The Paper describes some of the challenges encountered in the conduct of the investigations, including accessing evidence from battlefield situations and the need to make arrangements, together with non-governmental organizations such as B’Tselem, to locate and interview Palestinian witnesses. To address these challenges, special investigative teams have been appointed and are currently investigation complaints arising from the Gaza Operation."

Some charges being investigated derive from the Goldstone Report. Others go beyond the report. The Israeli response explains the extensive investigatory mechanisms employed by Israel, several of which are completely independent of the military chain of command. It compares the Israeli investigatory mechanisms with those of other democratic nations such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.

It then discloses the results of investigations regarding several of the charges made in the Goldstone Report, proving by photographic and other evidence that they are unfounded or exaggerated. The investigations are ongoing.  

No other democratic country in the world, with comparably thorough investigative mechanisms, would be told that it had to do more - that a judicial investigation was also required. Neither the United States nor United Kingdom have been told that a judicial inquiry, beyond the investigations already underway, must be conducted. But the Goldstone Report demands that Israel and Israel alone must go beyond its normal investigative mechanism and bring in outside judges. This reflects yet another double standard.

For bigots, Israel can do no right

As most objective observers throughout the world marvel at Israel's efficiency and generosity in leading the medical aid efforts in Haiti, some bigots insist on using these efforts as an occasion to continue their attack on the Jewish state. Both the neo-Nazi hard right and the neo-Stalinist hard left cannot help but to demonize Israel, regardless of what Israel does.

The neo-Nazi Web site ReportersNotebook.com features a blog entitled The Zionization of Disaster Relief.  It accuses Israel of "exploiting the suffering of poor, defenseless Haitians on behalf of Israeli Triumphalism." It complains that Israel is rendering medical aid to Haiti only to deflect attention from its crimes against the Palestinians. 

The hard left, even in a Israel, complains that Israel should not be sending medical assistance to such a faraway place. Instead it should be sending it to nearby Gaza. 

Even The New York Times, in an otherwise thoughtful analysis of the controversiality of the aid among some Israelis, failed to note the difference between Israel sending its limited resources to faraway Haiti and to nearby Gaza. Haiti is not at war with Israel. Haiti has not pledged itself to Israel's destruction. Haiti has not fired 8,000 rockets at Israeli civilians. Gaza, on the other hand, has a popularly elected government that has done and continues to do all of the above. Moreover, there is no comparison between the tens of thousands of Haitians who have died from a natural disaster, and the people of Gaza who suffer far less from what is, essentially, a self-inflicted wound.

Will the next 'Underwear Bomber' succeed?

My dire New Year prediction is that Islamic terrorists may well succeed this year in blowing up a civilian airliner. They have already twice proved that suicide bombers can get through security. And those are only the successful security bypasses that we know about. Who knows how many other potential terrorists, who have been tasked to test our system, have made it through. For all we know, the Christmas Day "failure" was also a test, at least in part - a test that included the potential for catastrophic success, but designed to probe weaknesses in our airline security system. And only ten days later, another person got past security at Newark Airport and was never found. Who knows how many other people have simply managed to walk around the metal detectors or through the security exit. 

I myself saw a man run past security at Newark Airport several years ago, and when I notified security, their response was to search my briefcase and nearly make me miss my flight. There was no search for the security evader and no shutdown of the concourse.

Security at airports in many parts of the world is a cruel joke, or worse, an invitation to terrorism. In many international airports, security is no better than in the least secure country from which a given flyer begins his flight. Once in the secure area of some airports, there are no further checks when boarding a second flight.  There must be security checks at every gate, not merely at the entrance to the general boarding area.  Otherwise, passengers whose flights begin at low security airports can board planes without going through reasonable security.

Nor have we learned enough from the near successes of the shoe and underwear bombers. In both cases, we should have acted as if they had succeeded. The only reason they did not had absolutely nothing to do with our security, but rather with factors over which they have complete control, namely improving the effectiveness of their explosive triggers.

Goldstone criticizes UN Council on Human Rights

Richard Goldstone, the primary author of the infamous Goldstone Report, is now trying to distance himself from the way in which the report is being used to single out Israel for condemnation. Most recently he criticized the United Nations Council on Human Rights, which commissioned the report, for the contents of its referral to the Security Council. This is what he said: "The draft resolution saddens me as it includes only allegations against Israel. There is not a single phrase condemning Hamas as we have done in the report." 

Goldstone, as usual, is trying to have it both ways. The truth is that the report itself barely criticizes Hamas. Indeed, the summary - which was intended as a press release - is replete with condemnations against Israel but never once criticizes Hamas. Instead it gently criticizes "Palestinian armed groups," as if to suggest that these were vigilante grass roots killers who were not sponsored by and doing the work of Hamas. The text of the report devotes infinitely more space to condemning Israel than it does to condemning Hamas or even "Palestinian armed groups." It is not surprising, therefore, that the resolution of the UN Council, which is intended to briefly summarize the report, would focus its attention on condemning Israel. Goldstone, who is a savvy and experienced international diplomat, had to realize this when he signed onto the report. The crocodile tears he is now shedding, in claiming that the resolution "saddens" him, is simply another example of him talking out of two sides of his mouth.. 

Goldstone backs away from report: The two faces of an international poseur

With so much (though not all) of the civilized world justly condemning (or ignoring) the Goldstone Report for its distortion of the facts and its one-sided condemnation of Israel, Richard Goldstone himself now seems to be backing away from the report's conclusions - at least when he speaks to his Jewish audiences. 

In an interview with The Jewish Daily Forward, Goldstone denied that his group had conducted "an investigation." Instead, it was what he called a "fact-finding mission" based largely on the limited "material we had." Since this "material" was cherry-picked by Hamas guides and spokesmen, Goldstone acknowledged that "if this was a court of law, there would have been nothing proven." He emphasized to the Forward that the report was no more than "a road map" for real investigators and that it contained no actual "evidence," of wrongdoing by Israel. 

"Nothing proven"!  "No evidence"!  Only a "road map"! You wouldn’t know any of that, of course, by reading the report itself or its accompanying media release. In the text of the report itself, Goldstone neither sought to clarify nor explain what he now claims is the limited scope and legal implications of the report.  The report reads like a judicial decision, making findings of fact (nearly all wrong), stating conclusions of law (nearly all questionable) and making specific recommendations (nearly all one-sided). According to the Forward:

…the report itself is replete with bold and declarative legal conclusions seemingly at odds with the cautious and conditional explanations of its author. The report repeatedly refers, without qualification, to specific violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention committed by Israel and other breaches of international law. Citing particular cases, the report determines unequivocally that Israel 'violated the prohibition under customary international law' against targeting civilians. These violations, it declares, ‘constitute a grave breach’ of the convention." 

It is as if there were two entirely different Goldstone Reports: the first submitted to the United Nations and the second to the Jewish community. In speaking so differently to different audiences, Goldstone is reminiscent of Yasser Arafat, who perfected the art of double-speak, using bellicose language when addressing Arab audiences and more accommodating language when addressing western audiences. 

The hypocrisy of 'universal jurisdiction'

Last week, an attempt was made to get an arrest warrant issued for Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak - the former dovish prime minister who offered the Palestinians a state on all of the Gaza Strip, 95% of the West Bank and a capital in East Jerusalem - when he set foot in Great Britain. (The attempt failed on grounds of diplomatic immunity because he was an official visitor.) And now Moshe Ya'alon, an Israeli government minister and former Army chief of staff, was forced to cancel a trip he was scheduled to make in London on behalf of a charity, for fear that he, too, could face an arrest warrant. 

The charges against these two distinguished public officials is that they committed war crimes against Palestinian terrorists and civilians. Ya'alon was accused in connection with the 2002 targeted killing of Salah Shehadeh, a notorious terrorist who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Israeli civilians and was planning the murders of hundreds of more. As a result of faulty intelligence the rocket that killed Shehadeh also killed several civilians who were nearby, including members of his own family. Barak is being accused of war crimes in connection with  Israel's  recent military effort to stop rockets from being fired at its civilians from the Gaza Strip. 

The British government and British prosecutors have not supported the calls for the arrest of Barak and Yaalon. Those demanding the arrest of these Israelis are hard-left political activists seeking to invoke so-called "universal jurisdiction" against those they consider guilty of war crimes and genocide. They have absolutely zero interest in human rights, the laws of war, or in preventing genocide. Indeed, many of them supported the Cambodian genocide and have refused to condemn the Rwanda and Darfur genocides. They would never dream of demanding the arrest of Hamas murderers who target Israeli schoolchildren for suicide bombings or rocket attacks. They are willfully misusing these concepts - human rights, universal jurisdiction - to serve their anti-Israel and anti-Western ideology. What they are doing undercuts the neutrality and value of these protections.

Dishonest Intelligence

In December of 2007, I wrote an article about the National Intelligence Estimate that had just concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program back in 2003. The immediate effect of this pollyanna-ish report was to diminish the need for tough sanctions against Iran and take the military option off the table. We now know that the conclusion reached in the report was categorically false, and that those who issued the report knew it was false.

I entitled my December 2007 article "Stupid Intelligence," because as I argued in it, its author had fallen hook, line and sinker for a transparent "bait and switch" tactic employed by Iran.

The tactic is obvious and well-known to all intelligence officials with an IQ above room temperature.  It goes like this: There are two tracks to making nuclear weapons: One is to conduct research and develop technology directly related to military use... [T]he second track is to develop nuclear technology for civilian use and then to use the civilian technology for military purposes." 

It was clear to many perceptive readers of the report, and to most other intelligence agencies, that Iran had simply - and deceptively - opted for the second track, and had certainly not abandoned its nuclear weapons program.

It now turns out that at the time this "stupid intelligence" estimate was released, our intelligence agencies were aware that the Iranians were building a secret military facility buried deep in the mountains near the holy city of Qom. The United States recently disclosed the existence of this facility (after Iran was forced to acknowledge its existence) together with its firm conclusion that it could be used only for the development of a nuclear weapons program. If the intelligence community knew then what they know now, then its 2007 National Intelligence Estimate was not only stupid, it was dishonest.

Goldstone report is an ad hominem attack

The definition of the ad hominem fallacy is to respond to substantive arguments solely by attacking the person who offered them. The mirror image of this classic fallacy is to try to bolster arguments solely by praising the person who offered them. This is what is happening with respect to the notorious Goldstone report regarding Israel's conduct during the Gaza War.

Had Richard Goldstone, a distinguished judge and a prominent Jew, not been the author of the United Nations Human Rights Council report on Israel, it would be tossed in the trash barrel along with other one-sided and biased reports by this prejudiced group which targets only Israel for human rights violations. But those seeking to defend this indefensible report point to Goldstone's authorship as proof that it must have credibility. He has in effect placed his "Hechsher," that is, his religious certification of purity, on this impure report. It is appropriate, therefore, to respond to this argument by discrediting its author and his selfish motives for granting his imprimatur to conclusions which he well knows are false, incomplete, misleading and bigoted.

Indeed, Goldstone and his supporters are acknowledging to Jewish friends that he did have a motive in agreeing to head the group that issued the report. His motive, according to his supporters, was to bring some balance to a report that without his input would have been "even worse."

Goldstone's daughter, Nicole, in an obviously pained interview with Haaretz, said, "Had Richard Goldstone not served as the head of the UN inquiry into the Gaza War, the accusations against Israel would have been harsher." She continued: "My father took on the job, for peace, for everyone and also for Israel." She told The Jerusalem Post, "My dad loves Israel and it wasn't easy for him to see and hear what happened. I think he heard and saw things he didn't expect to see and hear…."

The problem is not what Goldstone saw and heard. It's what he willfully and deliberately refused to see and hear.

The Goldstone report is a barrier to peace

There are many things wrong with the Goldstone report, which accuses Israel of deliberately targeting civilians in order to punish the people of Gaza.

First, its primary conclusions are entirely false as a matter of demonstrable fact. Second, it defames one of the most moral military forces in the world, along with one of the most responsive legal systems and one of the freest nations in the world when it comes to dissent. Third, it destroys the credibility of "international human rights" and proves that this honorable concept has been hijacked for political purposes directed primarily against one nation - Israel.

But fourth, and most important, it has set back prospects of peace by making it far more difficult for Israel to withdraw from the West Bank.