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.. 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. 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 hearÂ…." The problem is not what Goldstone saw and heard. It's what he willfully and deliberately refused to see and hear. The UN kangaroo "investigation" of Israeli "war crimes"
Just as Spain's national Court decided to shelve a phony war crime investigation of a 2002 Israeli air strike in Gaza, a group of lawyers and military experts assigned by the United Nations Human Rights Council continued its phony investigation of "the grave violations of human rights in the occupied Palestinian Territory, particularly due to the recent Israeli military attacks against the occupied Gaza Strip." The UN Human Rights Council is a
scandal. It's a successor to the defunct UN Human Rights
Commission. Both organizations have a long history of singling out
Israel for condemnation and of ignoring real human rights abusers by
the world's worst offenders, several of which dominate the Human Rights
Council and it predecessor. Bishop Tutu, the UN and 'Alice in Wonderland' justice
On March 16, 2009, a group of 16 self-described experts on "international justice and reconciliation of conflict" - including Bishop Desmond Tutu, who has characterized Israeli self-defense actions as "unchristian" - called for the establishment of "a United Nations Commission" to conduct an "independent and impartial investigation" of war crime allegations stemming from the Gaza conflict. There is of course no need to conduct any investigation into whether Hamas has committed war crimes: they readily admit - indeed they boast - that they are trying to kill as many Jewish Israeli citizens as their anti-personnel rockets are capable of killing. They also acknowledge, as a Hamas legislator did on television, that they use women and children as "human shields." The only real target of this investigation is Israel. For the ICC to work, the worst must come firstThere 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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