Robin Shepherd
Alan Dershowitz, the eminent professor of law at Harvard University, has frequently compared Israel’s predicament when faced with the institutions of international law to all white courts in the American south of the 1930s. In cases involving two white people they could be trusted to make a decent fist of a fair trial. In cases involving two black people their insoucience and arrogance would introduce doubt, though a fair trial might still be possible. But pit a white man against a black man and the latter never stood a chance. The result had been pre-ordained by the weight of the prejudices against him.
So it is with Israel in most international institutions, the United Nations in particular. So let us waste no time at all in gracing the latest UN report into Gaza with anything other than the contempt it deserves. Instead, let us focus on how one of the world’s most powerful media outlets has seized upon the report and in so doing has opened a window into the anti-Israeli mindset we are dealing with. For its sheer stupidity, the latest BBC “analysis” on the report is simply astonishing.
Attributed to Tim Franks in Jerusalem, it opens on the BBC website in some style:
“If this report is to matter,” he pants, “it will be for a number of reasons. One is its length. There have been a slew of reports into the war in Gaza. This is the lengthiest, weighing in at 575 pages.”
Did I wake up this morning in a parallel universe? Have I actually just read an “analysis” by the BBC which opens by suggesting that the credibility of a piece of writing is proportional to its length? Ok. So let’s have some fun then. Let’s check out the length of Mein Kempf (615 pages) compared, say, to On Liberty by John Stuart Mill. Sorry John, a quick search on Amazon tells me you’re 428 pages short. Fascism it is then.
I have asked this question a number of times, but I will ask it again: do these people ever stop to think about what they are saying?
But our hero is merely warming to his task:
“There is the man who wrote it,” says Franks somberly and respectfully. “Richard Goldstone is a judge and judicial investigator with an impressive record. The UN Human Rights Council, for whom he wrote this, is also no longer a body which is quite as easy for Israel to dismiss as congenitally biased. The US has recently run for, and been elected to a seat on its council.”
Well yes, since the body in question used to be run by Libya he may be granted that it is not “quite as easy” for Israel to dismiss it. But since it remains dominated by states such as China, Russia and Saudi Arabia the sense in which it is not “quite as easy” to dismiss might reasonably be compared to the sense in which it is not “quite as easy” for a nine year old boy to get the correct answer when asked to multiply three by three as it might have been if asked to add one plus one. You’d still be pretty disappointed if he wasn’t up to the task.
As for Richard Goldstone, he should be judged by the quality of what he has produced. As
Professor Gerald M. Steinberg, the head of NGO Monitor, has put it after a quick review of the report:
“The evidence, as Goldstone stated, was based almost entirely on unverifiable Palestinian claims and publications from politicized pro-Palestinian NGOs – the report cites B’tselem and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights each more than 70 times, Al-Haq allegations get more 30 mentions, and there are many more NGO co-authors.
“Human Rights Watch is referenced 33 times, including the “Rain of Fire” report co-authored by Marc Garlasco. He was HRW’s “senior military expert” (until suspended yesterday after exposure of his Nazi memorabilia fetish), but his analyses are tainted by false claims and speculation masquerading as expertise.”
But not to be deterred, Franks from the BBC, ends his hagiography of Goldstone and his report thus:
“Mr Goldstone has also shown a measure of political astuteness. This is not the first time that Israel, or Palestinian militants, have been accused of war crimes - and in Israel’s case, crimes against humanity as well. But previous allegations have quickly begun to moulder on the shelf. Mr Goldstone recommended that the Security Council require Israel, and the Gaza authorities, to report in six months about its own investigations into the alleged crimes. If they did not come up to scratch, then the International Criminal Court should become involved. Who, said Judge Goldstone, could object to that?”
I’m not sure whether my favourite part of this preposterous piece of garbage from the BBC comes in the first paragraph of the story or the last. But I do like the final sentence which, bouncing off Goldstone, reveals a complete failure ever to have engaged with the other side of the debate.
The BBC, Goldstone and the whole sorry bunch clearly live in a world of their own. I for one want no part of it.
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