Goldstone investigation undercuts human rights

Richard Goldstone - the primary author of a one-sided United Nations attack on Israeli actions during the Gaza war - has now become a full-fledged member of the international bash-Israel chorus. His name will forever be linked in infamy with such distorters of history and truth as Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Jimmy Carter. The so-called report commissioned by the notorious United Nations Human Rights Council and issued under his name is so filled with lies, distortions and blood libels that it could have been drafted by Hamas extremists. Wait - in effect, it was!

One member of the group is an Hamas lackey who before being appointed as an "objective" judge had already reached the conclusion - without conducting any investigation or hearing any evidence - that Israel's military actions "amount to aggression, not self defense" and that "the manner and scale of its operations in Gaza amount to an act of aggression and is contrary to international law."

So much for objectivity.

Many human rights experts urged her to recuse herself because of her prejudgment, but she was on a mission on behalf of her "client" - Hamas.  And she did a good job as an advocate. But as a judge, she employed an Alice-In-Wonderland conception of justice: verdict first, trial to support the verdict.

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Can a state be built on a pack of lies?

The so-called "spiritual" leader of Hamas has ordered that Palestinian children are not to be taught about the Holocaust.

Younis al-Astal - who is about as spiritual as Al Capone - has declared that the United Nations' proposal to include Holocaust education in a course on human rights would constitute a "war crime."

It would be "marketing a lie and spreading it," he said. Instead, he would have Palestinian children learn only about the so-called crimes of the Israeli occupation and the self-inflicted wound that Palestinians call the "nakba." 

I am not so sure I would trust the United Nations, and especially its Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to teach anything relating to Jews, Israel or the Holocaust. That agency has been part of the problem, not the solution, by perpetuating the refugee status of Palestinians who could have been integrated into the Palestinian mainstream over the past sixty years.

By making an industry out of their permanent status as refugees, UNRWA has made peace more difficult and hatred more acceptable. The agency has turned a blind eye to Hamas terrorists who routinely used UNRWA facilities as launching sites for rockets. It has protected terrorists.  It has sought to legitimate Hamas as a social service agency rather than condemn it as a fascist group of anti-Semites who employ violence in the name of Muhammad. 

Now, perhaps in an effort to appear balanced, UNRWA has agreed to provide basic information about the Holocaust to eighth grade students.  These would be the only Palestinian students who learn about the murder of six million Jews at the hands of Hitler, since the Palestinian Authority has banned the teaching of the Holocaust to students in the West Bank.

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Will Hamas's new "Culture War" acknowledge its historic ties to Nazism?

Hamas, the terrorist organization that specializes in targeting civilians, has now decided, according to a New York Times headline, to shift "from rockets to culture war" in an effort to garner public support for its cause. Part of its ongoing public relations campaign is to portray the Israelis as the "new Nazis" and the Palestinians as the "new Jews." To bring about this transformation, it must engage in a form of Holocaust denial that erases the historical record of widespread Palestinian complicity with the "old Nazis" in perpetrating the real Holocaust. It has become an important part of the mantra of Hamas supporters that neither the Palestinians people nor its leadership played any role in the Holocaust.  Listen to Mohammad Ahmadinejad talking to students at Columbia University:

"If [the Holocaust] is a reality, we need to still question whether the Palestinian people should be paying for it or not. After all, it happened in Europe. The Palestinian people had no role to play in it. So why is it that the Palestinian people are paying the price of an event they had nothing to do with? ...The Palestinian people didn’t commit any crime. They had no role to play in World War II. They were living with the Jewish communities and the Christian communities in peace at the time."

The conclusion that is supposed to follow from this "fact" is that the establishment of Israel in the wake of the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people was unfair to the Palestinians. Central to this claim is that neither the Palestinian people nor their leadership bore any responsibility for the Holocaust, and if any reparations are owed the Jewish people, it is from Germany and not from the Palestinians. The propounders of this historical argument suggest that the West created the Jewish state out of guilt over the Holocaust. It might have been understandable if a portion of Germany (or Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, France, Austria, or other collaborator nations) had been allocated for a Jewish homeland - but why Palestine? Palestine, according to this claim, was as much a "victim" as were the Jews.

I hear this argument on university campuses around the United States, and even more so in Europe.

The truth is that the Palestinian leadership, supported by the Palestinian masses, played a significant role in Hitler's Holocaust.

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The Hampshire administration does the right thing

A substantial majority of students at Hampshire College, as well as a majority of the vocal faculty, apparently still believe that Israel is the only country in the world from which Hampshire and other universities should divest. They seem not to care about the great abuses of human rights that are occurring in Iran, which routinely hangs children and dissidents; in North Korea which tolerates no dissent; in Zimbabwe which imprisons opposition candidates; in China which occupies Tibet; in Russia which engages in brutality against Chechnya; in Venezuela and Cuba which are ruled by dictators; in Belarus which is a throwback to Stalin’s time; in Saudi Arabia which practices gender apartheid; in Egypt, Jordan and the Philippines which routinely practiced torture against dissidents, and in so many other countries around the world. 

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For the ICC to work, the worst must come first

There are efforts now underway to try to bring Israel before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague on charges of alleged war crimes. Neither Israel nor the United States has signed on to this court, primarily out of fear that its power would be used against democracies that try their best to avoid war crimes, rather than against dictatorships and terrorist nations that routinely engage in them. This has certainly been the experience with many United Nations organizations, even including the International Court of Justice, which is largely a sham when it comes to Israel and other democracies under attack. 

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The moral blindness of some "religious leaders"

Bill Moyers holds himself out to be a moral arbiter, based in large part on his commitment to Christian principles. Cardinal Renato Martino is a prince of the Catholic church and President of the Council for Justice and Peace. Former President Jimmy Carter preaches peace, based on the teachings of Jesus. Yet when it comes to the conflict between Israel and Hamas, all three are morally blind. 

In a widely watched television assessment of the recent conflict in Gaza, here is what Moyers said: "By killing indiscriminately the elderly, kids, entire families, by destroying schools and hospitals, Israel did exactly what terrorists do..." (emphasis added) Of course he also included the obligatory hedge that: "Every nation has the right to defend its people." Cardinal Martino went even further, making an obscene and historically ignorant, comparison between Israel's self-defense actions against rockets fired by Hamas at Israeli children, and the Nazi genocide against the Jews during the Holocaust. He said that the conditions in Gaza "resemble a big concentration camp."

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Israel, Gaza and International Law

The cease fire on the ground has not ended the war of words against Israel. Indeed, efforts to charge Israel with war crimes and other violations of international law are escalating. The time has come, therefore, for a common sense legal and moral analysis of the events in Gaza and southern Israel. 

Let us begin with an argument that is frequently made against Israel. It is pointed out by supporters of Hamas that the official governing authority of Gaza is Hamas, because Hamas won the election. To the extent this is true, however, it is an argument in justification of Israel's actions. If Hamas is the official government of Gaza and if Hamas ordered the firing of more of than 6,000 deadly rockets at Israeli civilians, then it follows that the government of Gaza has engaged in an armed attack against Israel under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. In other words, the government of Gaza has declared war against the government and people of Israel. This should not be surprising, since the Hamas Charter calls for the military destruction of Israel. 

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The phony war crimes accusation against Israel

Every time Israel seeks to defend its civilians against terrorist attacks, it is accused of war crimes by various United Nations agencies, hard left academics and some in the media.  It is a totally phony charge concocted as part of Hamas' strategy - supported by many on the hard left - to delegitimate and demonize the Jewish state. Israel is the only democracy in the world ever accused of war crimes when it fights a defensive war to protect its civilians. This is remarkable, especially in light of the fact that Israel has killed far fewer civilians than any other country in the world that has faced comparable threats.  In the most recent war in Gaza fewer than a thousand civilians - even by Hamas' skewed count - have been killed. This, despite the fact that no one can now deny that Hamas had employed a deliberate policy of using children, schools, mosques, apartment buildings and other civilian areas as shields from behind which to launch its deadly anti-personnel rockets. The Israeli Air Force has produced unchallengeable video evidence of this Hamas war crime.

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Israel is well within its rights

What if Israel defended its citizens the way the British, the French, the Americans and the Russians did? When German rockets hit British cities during the World War II, Prime Minister Winston Churchill retaliated by bombing German cities, killing thousands of German civilians, and promised to continue until Germany's unconditional surrender. The United States did the same following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The French did much worse in Algeria and the Russians showed no concern for civilian life in Chechnya or Georgia.

The IDF, on the other hand, has gone to extraordinary lengths to minimize civilian casualties, despite the reality that Hamas deliberately fires its rockets from densely populated civilian areas and hides its rocket launchers in schools, hospitals and mosques.

Every Hamas rocket attack against Israeli civilians - and there have been more than 6,500 of them since Israel ended its occupation of Gaza - is an armed attack against Israel under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which authorizes member nations to respond militarily to armed attacks against it.

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Israel's actions are lawful and commendable

Israel's military actions in Gaza are entirely justified under international law, and Israel should be commended for its act of self-defense against international terrorism. Article 51 of the United Nations Charter reserves to every nation the right to engage in self-defense against armed attacks. The only limitation international law places on a democracy is that its actions must satisfy the principle of proportionality. Israel's actions certainly satisfy that principles.

When Barack Obama visited the city of Sderot this summer, he saw the same things that I had seen during my visit on March 20 of this year. Over the last four years, Palestinian terrorists - in particular, Hamas and Islamic Jihad - have fired more than two thousand rockets at this civilian area, which is home to mostly poor and working-class people. The rockets are designed exclusively to maximize civilian deaths, and some have barely missed schoolyards, kindergartens, hospitals, and school buses. But others hit their targets, killing more than a dozen civilians since 2001, including in February 2008 a father of four who had been studying at the local university. These anticivilian rockets have also injured and traumatized countless children.

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