Double Standard Watch: 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. He refused to watch videotapes, easily accessible on the Internet, that show conclusively that Hamas terrorists routinely fired rockets from behind human shields. He refused to credit eyewitness reports published by reputable newspapers, and even admissions by Hamas leaders. He willfully refused to listen to the testimony of one of the world's leading experts on how democratic militaries fight asymmetrical wars against terrorists who hide behind civilians. Here is what Colonel Richard Kemp, who commanded British forces in Afghanistan in 2003, told the media, but couldn't tell the Goldstone Commission  - because they didn't want to listen to him:

I think Israel has very little choice other than to carry on with its military operations until it reaches the conclusion it needs, which is to stop Hamas from firing rockets at its people in its territory. It has set out on this operation to do that and the civilian and military deaths on all sides of course are absolutely tragic. But Israel doesn't have any choice apart from defending its own people.

...From my knowledge of the IDF and from the extent to which I have been following the current operation, I don't think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare when any army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF is doing today in Gaza. However, Hamas, the enemy they have been fighting, has been trained extensively by Iran and by Hezbollah, to fight among the people, to use the civilian population in Gaza as a human shield.

Hamas factor in the uses of the population as a major part of their defensive plan. So even though as I say, Israel, the IDF, has taken enormous steps - and I can tell you about some of those if you're interested - to reduce civilian casualties, it is impossible, it is impossible to stop that happening when the enemy has been using civilians as a human shield."

When asked why Kemp was not allowed to testify, this is what Goldstone shamefully said:

...there was no reliance on Col. Kemp mainly because in our Report we did not deal with the issues he raised regarding the problems of conducting military operations in civilian areas and second-guessing decisions made by soldiers and their commanding officers 'in the fog of war.'"

But all the IDF's actions took place during the course of a difficult military operation designed to stop rockets fired from civilian areas from targeting a million Israeli children, women and other civilians. The basic flaw of the Goldstone report is that, without a scintilla of evidence, the commissioners concluded that the Israeli military action in Gaza was motivated not so much by the defense of its citizens but rather by desire to punish Palestinian civilians. Based on that unproven, untrue and biased conclusion, the commission was then able to ignore massive evidence, much of it self-proving and easily available on the Internet, that the Israeli army did everything it could to reduce civilians casualties, while engaged in a military action designed to prevent the murder of its own civilians.

Only a fool or a knave could ignore this massive evidence of Israeli efforts to comply with international humanitarian law. Only a fool or a knave would fail to see that Israel has done more to reduce civilian casualties that virtually any other country fighting a comparable war. Only a fool or a knave would allow his name to be attached to such a deeply flawed report.

Richard Goldstone is not a fool.

The Goldstone report should be rejected on its demerits. The added fact that it was authored by a self-aggrandizing Jew - selected precisely because he is a Jew with aspirations to be honored by the international community - should diminish, rather than increase, its credibility.