Plosker - Remembering Goldstone, Forgetting Its Repudiation

Simon Plosker..
Honest Reporting/Backspin..
02 May '12..





The IDF’s closing of an investigation into a tragic incident during the 2009 Gaza conflict has been widely reported. Unsurprisingly, some media have referred back to the UN’s Goldstone Report. The Guardian writes:

A report by South African judge Richard Goldstone on behalf of the United Nations examined in detail the Samouni family incident. It concluded the deaths were the result of “Israeli fire intentionally directed at them” in breach of the Geneva conventions.

The Goldstone report said Israel had repeatedly violated international law and possibly committed war crimes during the conflict, which Israel named Operation Cast Lead. It also accused Hamas of war crimes.

No surprise that The Guardian would continue to use Goldstone as a stick with which to beat Israel. No surprise that The Guardian omitted a relevant fact that the Associated Press chose to include in its own story:

Following the war, a U.N. report accused Israel of deliberately attacking civilians in its campaign against Hamas militants. The report’s lead author, South African jurist Richard Goldstone, later questioned that finding, although the report was never modified or withdrawn.

That’s one fact that The Guardian would prefer to forget.

Link: http://honestreporting.com/remembering-goldstone-forgetting-its-repudiation/


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Weinberg - Only Israel gets Goldstoned

A Syrian man with
his face painted 'Bashar
 forever' in Damascus
yesterday.

David M. Weinberg..
A Citadel Defending Zion..
15 February '12..


The muffled and muted response to the ongoing slaughter in Syria is truly disgusting, especially when you compare it to the way in which the world hyper-actively responds to any and every Israeli minor action.

Of course, we hold ourselves to higher moral standards than those of the butcher of Damascus, and it’s no surprise or outrage that the world does too.

But still.

Bashar Assad can massacre 100 to 200 people a day, and the issue doesn’t rate much more than a mention in the daily briefings of the foreign ministry spokesmen in Washington, Bonn, Paris and London. But all Israel has to do is place a few caravans on a Samarian hilltop, and every spokesman will be sure to condemn Israel in the strongest terms snap-quick in the morning.

Assad can launch massive artillery barrages into civilian areas day after day, and the story isn’t even front page news in most world newspapers. But if one Israeli shell goes errant and hits a Palestinian or Lebanese shack despite all our prodigious cautions and safeguards – you can be sure that the UN Security Council will rapidly convene in emergency session to vilify us.

Syrian guns can obliterate a field hospital; leave the wounded bleeding to death in the streets; and rampage through hospitals shooting rebel troops, while the world merely clicks its tongue in disapproval. But if Israel tries to move 25 Palestinian squatters from a shanty village they set up in a Jerusalem national park, the global protests will be loud and vociferous.

UN Watch - 3rd Anniversary: Goldstone Report Hits Dead-Ends, But Far From Dead

UN Watch Briefing..
Vol. 338..
Jan. 13, 2012..

Yesterday marked the third anniversary of the notorious UN Human Rights Council session that created the Goldstone Report, a 500-page document that excoriated Israel—for defending itself from deadly rockets—while exonerating Hamas.

The core charges of the report—that Israel's leadership intentionally plotted to murder Palestinian civilians, and did so from racist motives—were famously retracted by Judge Goldstone in op-eds published last year in the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Overnight, anti-Israel intellectuals who had hailed Goldstone as a modern-day saint turned on him with a vengeance, especially those uneasy with their Jewish ancestry, such as Roger Cohen, Richard Falk and William Schabas.

The trajectory of the Goldstone Report as a weapon against Israel has now hit several diplomatic and legal dead ends. Nevertheless, the UN document will continue to be used against Israel in politically-motivated prosecution campaigns.

Kushner - From Israel: Keeping Afloat

Arlene Kushner
Arlene from Israel
05 December '11

Last night I attended a multi-part event at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, with the theme "Defending Israel and International Law":

It was, first, a book launch, as NGO-Monitor introduced its new book, "The Goldstone Report 'Reconsidered' -- A Critical Analysis."

Professor Gerald Steinberg -- NGO-Monitor Director and co-editor, with Anne Herzberg, of the book -- explained the genesis of this work, which has been three years in the making.

As it was also a panel discussion, the experts gathered provided additional information regarding the situation that Israel regularly confronts with regard to international law -- the situation that made the writing of this book so very important.

~~~~~~~~~~

The war in Gaza known as Cast Lead was initiated by Israel at the very end of 2008, and ran into the first weeks of 2009. It was a necessary response to the barrage of rockets -- each a human rights violation if not a war crime in and of itself -- being launched by Hamas against Israeli civilians.

As Major General Avichai Mandelblit, outgoing Military Advocate General of the IDF, explained, in this war Israel confronted asymmetric warfare. This does not mean that one side was more powerful or better equipped than the other. Rather, it means that one side played by the rules of international law and the other did not. This places the law-abiding side, in this instance Israel, in a very difficult if not impossible situation.

Hamas put civilians in the way of military targets. Either the IDF refrains from firing at the targets, or fires and runs the risk of also hitting civilians. Hamas is likely to come out a winner whatever Israel does.

~~~~~~~~~~

If Israel does fire, accusations are then leveled against Israel: Israel is aiming at civilians and is guilty of war crimes! Israel deliberately hit a UN school that had students inside! Says General Mandelblit, a war can be lost this way, whatever victories are achieved in the field. For, today fighting a war has to include the legal and media fronts as well as the military and the political.

Because of experiences in the past with regard to this sort of thing, the situation was anticipated. And so, the general, in consultation with appropriate persons within the government, made the decision that every single incident during Cast Lead in which an accusation against Israel was made had to be checked.

Said General Mandelblit last night, "This was first for ourselves, to be sure we are what we claim to be." Please mark this well, as it's a point of enormous pride and should be understood by all.

And then, of course, it's a matter of defense with regard to the legal and media fronts. The investigations prepared Israel to fight the accusations.

Brodie - A message for Abbas regarding his plans for September 2011: be careful what you wish for

Tuvia Brodie
Guest Post
05 July '11


Wading today through the howls of protest against Shurat HaDin/The Israel Law Center, and the damage caused to the "Flotilla", and Melanie Phillips advocating Israel going to the offensive, including lawfare, this piece by Tuvia Brodie arrived in a most timely fashion. Not the only way to go, but with adequate preparation ... Yosef


Almost two months ago, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas published an op-ed essay in the New York Times entitled, ‘The Long Overdue Palestinian State’.

While many readers were justifiably outraged by two untruths-- that Muslims in Israel are denied access to their Holy places, and that Arab armies in 1948 attacked (“intervened”) only after Jews expelled Arabs at Israel’s birth in order “to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel”-- the overlooked news story here was the legal twist Abbas suggested in that essay-- to internationalize the Arab-Israel conflict “as a legal matter.”

Such a suggestion contains both good news and bad news. The bad news is, this announcement reminds an observer of the malodorous 2009 UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (known as the Goldstone Report, after head-of-Mission Richard Goldstone): the Goldstone Report could serve as the foundation for legal attacks against Israel.

The good news is, If Abbas looks at Goldstone, so can Israel.

Goldstone?

The backround: for decades, the Left has tried to label Israel as guilty of human rights violations, violations of international humanitarian law, war crimes and crimes against humanity; but they didn’t get much traction. The Goldstone Report changed that because it not only appeared to validate their general claims, it gave those claims specificity and legal punch.

Shepherd - Reckless Western anti-Zionism rebounds over Libya killings

Robin Shepherd
The Commentator
20 June '11

http://thecommentator.com/index.php/article/240/reckless_western_anti_zionism_rebounds_over_libya_killings

Uproar over NATO’s accidental killing of civilians shows how short-sighted and damaging was Western fury at Israel’s operation in Gaza

So now it has come back to haunt us. One stray missile landing in a residential district of Tripoli, and NATO and its member governments (including Britain’s) could, in principle, be up on war crimes charges at the United Nations.

No-one really believes the Libyan government’s claim that 800 civilians have been killed by NATO in the operation so far, but the notion being put about by large sections of the western media that this was the first event of its kind is no less implausible. Indeed, it’s fantasy.

Accidents happen. Civilians die in combat operations conducted in civilian areas. Which means that you either refuse to countenance such operations – meaning in turn that all that terrorists and tyrants have to do to survive is embed themselves in civilian areas – or you face reality for what it is.

Here in Jerusalem on a three day trip, it has been interesting to gauge the reactions to what happened in Tripoli on Sunday morning from a people well used to having to deal with that conundrum.

The tactic of hiding inside civilian populations is routine for practically all of Israel’s terrorist enemies, from Hamas to Hezbollah. They therefore have to make a decision: either engage in the messy business of turfing the terrorists out in the full knowledge that innocents will die; or do nothing and allow them to continue their attacks unabated.

Col. Richard Kemp speaks at the ‘We Believe in Israel’ Conference

Col. Richard Kemp
britishisraelcoalition.org
23 May '11




COL. RICHARD KEMP: “DURING ITS OPERATION IN GAZA, THE ISRAELI DEFENCE FORCES DID MORE TO SAFEGUARD THE RIGHTS OF CIVILIANS IN A COMBAT ZONE THAN ANY OTHER ARMY IN THE HISTORY OF WARFARE.”

Lieutenant Paul Mervis was a platoon commander in the British Army’s 2nd Battalion The Rifles. His company serjeant major said of him: “In my twenty years in the Army, I have never met, nor am I likely to meet, a man who cared so much about his men. He fought the corner of every single one of them.”

Paul had a razor sharp intellect and devoured military books in his desire to gain ever greater knowledge of his chosen profession. According to his platoon serjeant: “He had our utmost respect as a platoon commander, but perhaps more so as a genuine friend.”

He had an infectious sense of humour, and was always messing about and joking like one of the lads – one of his soldiers said you could hear his laugh anywhere in the base in Afghanistan – usually at someone else’s expense!

He had time for everyone, and would go out of his way to help anyone he could. He made an enormous effort to get to know as many as possible of the 600 troops in his battalion. His men were always at the forefront of his mind, and although he was their commander, every man felt he could approach him and talk about absolutely everything. Although still a young man, Paul was like a father-figure to his soldiers.

On patrol near Sangin, central Helmand, on the morning of the 12th of June last year both of Paul’s legs were blown off by a Taliban bomb hidden in the roof of a school. His men worked desperately – desperately – to save his life, but he died soon afterwards.

With enormous personal courage, he had been leading his men from the front through an area known to be laced with explosives, putting himself in danger to protect the lives of his men, risking everything to safeguard the local people, including women and children, who had been so horrifically assaulted by the Taliban.

After his death, one of the soldiers under his command, Lance Corporal Joe Ellis, said: “The Merv-dog left us this morning, surrounded by his men. He will always be part of 10 Platoon – tough riflemen who were proud to be led by him.”

Lieutenant Paul Mervis was a Jewish soldier.

He grew up in London, and was educated at King’s College School Wimbledon. He spent a gap year in Israel, studying Hebrew. During his service in Afghanistan, His sister Hannah and brother Jack sent him a provisions parcel with matzah and dried chicken soup so that he could mark the Passover festival while on duty. Paul carried a 1936 issue Soldier’s Siddur which had previously belonged to Sergeant Dave Newman, a Jewish soldier who fought in the Battle of El Alamein in World War II.

It would have been equally possible for Paul to have opted to join the Israeli Defence Forces to realise his soldierly ambitions, as do so many young British Jewish men and women. In fact he did undergo training with the IDF during his gap year before joining the British Army.

Steinberg: The human rights sham

Gerald M. Steinberg
Israel Opinion/Ynet
05 May '11

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4064973,00.html

Op-ed: Goldstone travesty exposed abuse of human rights discourse for immoral goals

The travesty of the “Goldstone report” was the predictable result of the unholy alliance between the worst human rights violators – the regimes controlling Libya, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc. – and powerful officials of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who exploit the façade of moral language for immoral goals.

The leaders of this alliance abused the tragedy of the Gaza war and Judge Goldstone’s reputation in order to promote a lethal political assault against Israel. NGO Monitor, which I head, has been a consistent and substantive (as distinct from personal) critic of the Goldstone report, and the subsequent de-legitimization efforts, from the beginning.

It took Goldstone a long time, but he has finally taken a major step towards restoring his moral standing. Goldstone’s April 3 article in the Washington Post belatedly acknowledges that there was no basis for the libel accusing Israeli soldiers of deliberately killing civilians in Gaza, and that his report put far too little emphasis on the thousands of Palestinian missile and terror attacks against Israelis – each of which constitutes a real war crime.

In contrast, many others involved in this immoral farce have attacked Goldstone for acknowledging the truth. These hard-core propagandists initially embraced the Jewish judge from South Africa who attacked Israel, but have now dismissed Goldstone’s words because he no longer supports their party line. Instead of crediting him with the wisdom to see the evidence and admit mistakes, his former supporters invoke racist stereotypes of a nefarious Jewish/Zionist lobby that forced Goldstone to make statements he knew to be untrue.

Judge Goldstone’s three colleagues chosen for the 2009 UN “fact finding” mission – Hila Jilani, Christine Chinkin, and Desmond Travers – are leading this counterattack. From the outset, the blatant biases and lack of expertise on the part of those who claim to sit in moral judgment of Israel have plagued the false “investigation.” These three activists had signed open letters accusing Israel of “war crimes” before the panel was formed. In a real legal process, all three would have been forced to withdraw from any such proceedings.

Now, they have turned against Goldstone, accusing him of collapsing under the strain, while they held firm. “Had we given in to pressures from any quarter to sanitize our conclusions, we would be doing a serious injustice to the hundreds of innocent civilians killed during the Gaza conflict….”

Wiki Leaks and The Goldstone Report

Alan M. Dershowitz
Hudson New York
19 April '11

http://www.hudson-ny.org/2052/wikileaks-goldstone-report

A book about Wiki Leaks recently published in England by editors of The Guardian, sheds an entirely new light on the Goldstone report. Richard Goldstone has recently reconsidered his report's central conclusion, namely that Israeli political and military leaders specifically intended to kill innocent Palestinian civilians. But even before Goldstone's reconsideration, many objective readers of the report could not find any hard evidence to support that unlikely conclusion, for an obvious reason: No such evidence is cited in the body of the report. The best those who wrote the report could come up with was an inference that since so many civilians were killed, that result must have been intended. Recently a leader of Hamas in Gaza acknowledged—indeed boasted—that most of the Palestinians killed during Operation Cast Lead were Hamas fighters. The number of innocent civilians killed (depending on how one defines "innocent" and "civilian" in a war fought by people who are terrorists by night and civilians by day) now appears to be about 500-600. The number of combatants killed now appears to be in excess of 700. In other words, the ratio of combatants to civilians appears to be that slightly more combatants than civilians were killed. Even one civilian death is too many but such deaths are inevitable when combatants hide among civilians, fire rockets from civilian areas and use civilians as human shields—as Hamas routinely does.

The Goldstone commission adamantly refused to accept testimony that would have shown that the Israeli army took greater care to reduce civilian deaths than any other armed forces fighting comparable wars. For example, they refused to hear the proffered testimony Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan and a recognized expert on asymmetric warfare, who would have testified that:

"[F]rom 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.

The recently published book about Wiki Leaks strongly confirms Colonel Kemp's assessment.

The Guardian summarized one Wiki Leaks disclosure about Afghanistan as follows:

"We today learn of nearly 150 incidents in which coalition forces, including British troops, have killed or injured civilians, most of which have never been reported…."

And another:

"The logs disclosed a detailed incident-by-incident record of at least 66,081 violent deaths of civilians in Iraq since the invasion. This figure, dismaying in itself, was nevertheless only a statistical starting point. It is far too low. The database begins a year late in 2004, omitting the high casualties of the direct 2003 invasion period itself, and ends on 31 December 2009. Furthermore, the US figures are plainly unreliable in respect of the most sensitive issue—civilian deaths directly caused by their own military activities.

For example, the town of Falluja was the site of two major urban battles in 2004, which reduced the place to near-rubble. Yet no civilian deaths whatever are recorded by the army loggers, apparently on the grounds that they had previously ordered all the inhabitants to leave. Monitors from the unofficial Iraq Body Count group, on the other hand, managed to identify more than 1,200 civilians who died during the Falluja fighting."

In another incident, not the subject of a Wiki Leak disclosure, German forces in Afghanistan called in an air strike against two fuel tankers captured by Taliban insurgents. Between 70 and 100 civilians, including 24 children, were killed. There was an immediate attempt by German authorities to cover up the civilian deaths, but ultimately they were revealed and nominal compensation was paid.

As to the investigation of alleged war crimes, the Wiki Leaks disclosures show that:

"US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished…The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks. Six reports end with a detainee's apparent death….[T]he logs reveal that the coalition has a formal policy of ignoring torture allegations. They record "no investigation is necessary" and simply pass reports to the same Iraqi units implicated in the violence."

No "Goldstone Commissions" have ever been appointed to investigate the far greater number and proportion of civilian deaths caused by British, German and U.S. military actions—and the frequent lack of credible investigators.

Whenever efforts are made to put Israel's actions in a comparative context with other democracies, demonizers of Israel, who always impose a double standard on the Jewish state, respond by arguing "we're talking about Israel now; don't change the subject by talking about other democracies." That reminds me of a famous story about Harvard's notoriously anti-Semitic president, A. Lawrence Lowell, near the beginning of the 20th Century. In an effort to defend his decision to impose an anti-Jewish quota, he said, "Jews cheat." A distinguished Harvard alumnus, Judge Learned Hand, wrote President Lowell a letter saying that "Protestants also cheat," to which Lowell responded, "you're changing the subject; we're talking about Jews now."

You can't just talk about Jews, or about the Jewish state when making accusations of war crimes or violation of international law. Comparison is everything, especially since international humanitarian law is expressly based on how democratic nations customarily behave in comparable situations.

According to the materials disclosed by Wikileaks, Israel shines in comparison to other democracies. It has a significantly better ratio of combatant to civilian deaths; it takes greater steps to avoid such casualties, and it does a better job investigating negligent and criminal behavior on the part of its soldiers. Moreover, it is seeking to protect its own civilians directly from ongoing cross-border rocket attacks and other terrorist acts, whereas the other democracies are fighting wars of choice many miles from its civilian areas.

This is not to suggest the need for "Goldstone Reports" against Great Britain and Germany and the United States. It is to demand that a single standard be applied to all democracies.

** Alan Dershowitz is serving as an American legal consultant to Julian Assange's and Wiki Leaks British lawyers.


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The Unforgivable Maliciousness of Goldstone

Yaacov Lozowick
Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
20 April '11

http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/2011/04/unforgivable-maliciousness-of-goldstone.html

The New York Times tries to figure out what made him change his mind.(If you've run out of free access to the New York Times for the month, Haaretz summarizes the article here). The thesis seems to be that he thought that by castigating both sides, he'd promote a process of mutual reflection and eventual reconciliation; this bizarre idea stemming from a similar experience he had in South Africa as Apartheid waned.

Yet another example of how different Apartheid always was from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Mostly, however, it's a demonstration of how weirdly ignorant Goldstone may have been (and still is) about the conflict here.

He noted in Sacramento, for example, as in his later essay, that the deaths of about 29 members of one Gazan family grouped together by Israeli soldiers in a building that was subsequently bombed probably resulted from a misreading of a drone photograph. Men carrying firewood might have looked as if they were holding rocket launchers.At a debate last month at Stanford Law School, he did not excuse that Israeli killing but said that originally, “in the absence of any evidence at all, the only conclusion we could come to was that it was intentional.” Now it appeared to have been negligence due to lack of communication and verification, he said. [My emphasis].

Translation to English: we didn't know what we were talking about, since we lacked most of the relevant data, so we had no choice but to assume the worst about Israel and broadcast this assumption to the world as proven fact.

Only after the enemies of the Jews greeted this malicious accusation with the greatest of glee did it occur to the judge that he had been willingly manipulated. In my understanding of repentance, he hasn't even started the process. What he needs to do now is systematically tear down the entire edifice he built; if it take the rest of his life, so be it.

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AN OPEN LETTER TO MEMBERS OF THE GOLDSTONE MISSION WHO DISGREE WITH HIS RE-EVALUATION

A follow-on from Judge Goldstone's oped in the Washington Post and the response in The Guardian by his fellow members of the Mission.

An open letter from Maurice Ostroff

To members of the UN Fact-finding mission to Gaza

Hina Jilani, Christine Chinkin and Desmond Travers

April 18, 2011

I am astonished by the report in the Guardian of April 14 that, in response to Judge Goldstone’s recent oped in the Washington Post, you have “turned on him”, accusing him of misrepresenting facts in order to cast doubt on the credibility of your joint report. It is regrettable that you did not explain what facts you accuse him of misrepresenting, so that the reader can reach an informed opinion.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/14/un-gaza-report-authors-goldstone

I trust you will agree that every intellectually honest person will willingly review previously held convictions if and when relevant new evidence becomes available. To his credit, that is exactly what Judge Goldstone has done.

By contrast, your evident inflexible belief in the immutability of every sentence in your 500-plus page Report reflects an attitude reminiscent of those who refused to look at the evidence presented by Galileo and condemned his  heliocentrism as contrary to Scripture.

If,  as you wrote, you “find it necessary to dispel any impression that subsequent developments have rendered any part of the mission's report unsubstantiated, erroneous or inaccurate”, it is puzzling that you did not do what you find necessary by refuting the evidence that evidently influenced Judge Goldstone. I therefore respectfully ask you to please address the following circumstances.

1. Last November, when Hamas interior minister Fathi Hammad publicly admitted  that the number of combatant casualties was very close to those announced by the IDF it became obvious that your Mission was mistaken in preferring casualty figures quoted by various NGO's while summarily rejecting the detailed counterclaims by the Government of Israel.

In clause 361 of your report you stated "The counterclaims published by the Government of Israel fall far short of international law standards". In the circumstances it is fair to ask what these standards are and whether the claims by the NGO's met these standards.

The claim that the police casualties were civilians is obviously incorrect since the Gaza police incorporates the Executive Force which has been described by The Telegraph and others as paramilitary.  This is confirmed in clause 413 of your Report which states unambiguously that Executive Force members were integrated into the civil police and that members of the Force are resistance fighters. Your footnote 271 states that the Executive Force consisted of some estimated 6,800 members of the armed wings of Hamas and the Popular Resistance Committees.

2. There is also a glaring lacuna in all the casualty figures quoted, namely, the number ascribed to having been caused by Israel which may have been inflicted by Palestinians. On Feb 2, 2009 Ma'an, the Palestinian news Agency reported that a senior leader within Fatah published a list of 181 names of those in Gaza who were killed, maimed, beaten or tortured during the Israeli war on Gaza.

3. It is unfortunate that your Mission rejected my written suggestion to call for evidence from Colonel Kemp who is among the most qualified soldiers able to evaluate the circumstances in which decisions are made in the type of warfare conducted in Gaza

4. In order to arrive at an unbiased  opinion, Israel’s actions in Gaza must be assessed against the backdrop of recent developments in Afghanistan and Libya, which show conclusively that the standards by which your mission judged the Israel army’s performance in Gaza are impossible in practice. Even President Obama with his impeccable intentions has been unable to avoid extensive civilian casualties. The NY Times of Feb 19, 2010 reported that in Afghanistan the US Air Force now flies twice as many Predator drones as a year ago. They carried out more than 200 missile and bomb strikes over the last year, and the civilian casualties they caused have stoked anger and anti-Americanism. Since the start of 2009, the drones have fired at least 184 missiles and 66 laser-guided bombs at militant suspects in Afghanistan. I quote these figures to demonstrate that even with the very best intentions civilian casualties are inevitable and that the judgments made by your mission in Gaza were unrealistic.

The strikes came when troops came across people who appeared to be planting bombs, but P. W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution said officers had to keep in mind that “not everyone digging by the side of the road is automatically an insurgent.” Singer's warning emphasizes the danger of confusing genuine error with criminal intent in situations where the combatants are hardly distinguishable from civilians.

5. The above applies particularly to the tragic Samouni case with its unjustified accusations in your Report that have contributed largely to vilification of Israel in international media. Israel was accused of INTENTIONALLY bombing the Samouni house and killing its occupants with no justification whatsoever, but new evidence shows that Israeli drone photographs of a group of men carrying firewood that was incorrectly interpreted to be rocket launchers led to the bombing.  I ask you what a reasonable person have done in the heat of battle on sighting a group of what appears to be rocket launchers about to be launched?

6. As much of the Report’s conclusions are based on eyewitness testimony it should be borne in mind that many miscarriages of justice have been recorded due to incorrect eyewitness testimony. In a paper “The reliability of eyewitness reports: the effect of accurate and inaccurate information on memory and bias"  Jennifer B. Scheer wrote “A considerable amount of research has established that exposure to leading or misleading suggestions can dramatically influence the accuracy of eyewitness reports. 

http://groups.colgate.edu/cjs/student_papers/2002/JScheer.pdf

7. Although some mention is made of Gilad Shalit in the Report, the saddest failure of the UN Mission while it was in Gaza conversing amiably with the persons holding Shalit captive, was its failure to demand an end to the blatant violation of his right to Red cross visits and to receive letters as required by the Third Geneva Convention. By way of contrast, Palestinian prisoners in Israel enjoy visitation rights, including conjugal visits, access to telephones, newspapers, television and radio broadcasts, lawyers' visits and even academic studies at state expense.

I would very much appreciate a considered response. This letter is being publicized as will the response I hope to receive from you.

Sincerely

Maurice Ostroff

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The ugly truth about an anti-Israeli report at the UN - Goldstone vs Goldstone

Trevor Norwitz
The Commentator
19 April '11

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/83/goldstone_vs_goldstone_the_ugly_truth_about_an_anti_israeli_report_at_the_un


Trevor Norwitz is a lawyer who has corresponded with Richard Goldstone over several months. Here he explains how Goldstone's anti-Israeli report descended into farce.

“We know a lot more today about what happened in the Gaza war of 2008-09 than we did . . . If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”

Thus opened Richard Goldstone’s resounding Washington Post reversal in which he stated that the fundamental accusation of his Goldstone Report – that Israel deliberately targeted civilians – was based on an incomplete record and, with the benefit of hindsight, was wrong.

Thanks to a statement published in the Guardian last week by the three other co-authors of that report, we also know a lot more today about the dynamics of that group and how an eminent jurist made the tragic mistake of transferring his hard-earned reputation and good name to such a travesty of justice. (The critiques in which I and others highlight the many serious flaws in the report can easily be found online).

Following Judge Goldstone’s reconsideration, this threesome felt compelled to “dispel any impression that subsequent developments have rendered any part of the mission's report unsubstantiated, erroneous or inaccurate.” “Nothing,” they recite in unison, “has appeared that would in any way change the context, findings or conclusions of that report” (my italics).

Not the fact that, as noted by the McGowan Davis report, “Israel has dedicated significant resources to investigating over 400 allegations of operational misconduct in Gaza”. Nor the fact that Hamas has completely ignored its obligation to investigate. Nor the fact that rockets continue to fly from Gaza towards Israeli civilian targets. Nor even Hamas’ admission that Israel was right about the number of Hamas fighters killed in the Gaza operation (making it one of the most accurately targeted military campaigns in modern history, even under near-impossible conditions). In short, it appears that, for these three, nothing less than the sight of Israel’s leaders in the dock will suffice.

This is not surprising. I don’t know any of them personally and they may be perfectly charming, intelligent people who have loads of Jewish friends. It is even conceivable that the tremendous boost they gave and continue to give to Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups was not intended. But certain facts are not encouraging. One of the three, Christine Chinkin, is an academic at the London School of Economics -- an institution that is now under intense pressure for its close ties with the Gaddafi regime. She had publicly declared Israel guilty of war crimes before the fighting had even concluded, and she was so eager to be part of the lynch mob that she refused to recuse herself even when it became obvious that her presence would exacerbate the perception of bias.

The second, Hina Jilani, is a judge from a country, Pakistan, that does not recognize Israel’s right to exist and that sponsored (along with fellow paragons of human rights observance Cuba and Egypt) the resolution creating the “Fact Finding Mission” – a resolution so ludicrously one-sided that even former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson refused to have any part of it, and that Judge Goldstone felt compelled informally to broaden.

The third, Desmond Travers, is a retired Irish peacekeeper who has an interesting take on reality and has explained that Ireland (presumably including himself) is pro-Palestinian because so many Irish peacekeepers were murdered by Israel, “taken out deliberately and shot (in South Lebanon)”. All three of these people had made public statements indicating that they had prejudged the case against Israel long before their appointment to the Mission.

The only thing that gave this Mission any credibility at all, the single element that prevented this report from being automatically tossed in the rubbish-bin of history along with so many other anti-Israel (and anti-Semitic) United Nations resolutions, was the presence of an eminent, well-respected Jewish judge as its chair. One must begrudgingly acknowledge that his selection to head the mission was a stroke of genius by those seeking to delegitimise Israel. In a lucid moment, Travers gloated: “there was only one person who could have headed it up. In fact, the exposure that the report has received internationally, as you know, has been unprecedented. There has never been an effect like it before . . . I think it wouldn’t have had that effect if it wasn’t headed up by Richard Goldstone.”

Well the Israel-demonisers can no longer claim Richard Goldstone as their head, because he, to his credit, has seen and spoken the truth. After hundreds of Israeli investigations, some spurred by the report, it is clear that “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.”

Moreover it is clear that Judge Goldstone, unlike the threesome committed to the original report, now recognises the true nature of the conflict between the State of Israel and the terrorist groups operating outside of the law who are seeking to destroy it. “At minimum,” he wrote, “I hoped that in the face of a clear finding that its members were committing serious war crimes, Hamas would curtail future attacks. Sadly, that has not been the case. Hundreds of rockets and mortars have continued to be directed at civilian targets in southern Israel . . . In the end, asking Hamas to investigate may have been a mistaken enterprise.”

So how did such a distinguished jurist succumb to this sorry enterprise? There are surely many answers to this conundrum but one that was sharply illustrated by the threesome’s recent statement is that throughout the process Goldstone was surrounded by people who were virulently anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian, and whose motive was never to find the facts but to promote a political objective.

At that time, with no facts on the record from the Israeli government, it was easy for them to cloak their political objectives in the language of law, and for Goldstone (who prides himself on being an impartial judge), looking only at the record before him, to bless that approach. But today, with so much more information available, the fact that the threesome continues to adhere so adamantly to their war crimes accusations strips away the veil to reveal the ugly truth.

Having corresponded with Judge Goldstone for the past few months over areas of disagreement and common ground, I do not doubt his commitment to the rights of civilians embroiled in war, or his sincerity when he says that he was moved to tears by the devastation he saw in Gaza. But I believe that he has come to appreciate that the primary causes of that carnage are, in his words, “Hamas’s illegal acts of terror” rather than Israel’s response.

The statement of the threesome comes as no surprise, but it will no doubt further confuse many well-intentioned observers who already do not know what to make of the Goldstone reconsideration. The answer is simple: henceforth the report should no longer be referred to as the “Goldstone Report” but as the Chinkin-Jilani-Travers Report. Then it will have all the credibility it deserves.

Trevor Norwitz is a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York and adjunct lecturer at Columbia Law School. He is the author of a widely circulated critical analysis of the Goldstone Report


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How About a Goldstone Rating System for the UN?

Claudia Rosett
pajamasmedia.com
14 April '11

http://pajamasmedia.com/claudiarosett/how-about-a-goldstone-rating-system/?singlepage=true

Since Richard Goldstone published his semi-apology for the United Nations Goldstone Report on Gaza, there have been lots of suggestions about what ought to happen next with Goldstone and his voluminous, pro-terrorist, anti-Israel 2009 report. The UN ought to retract it, but won’t. Goldstone wrote that if he’d known then what he knows now, “The Goldstone Report would have been a different document” — but it isn’t. And in testimony last week to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, professed a desire to just have the whole thing go away: “We would, frankly, as I said, like to see this entire Goldstone proposition disappear.”

But it’s not disappearing. In the court of world opinion, the Goldstone Report gave a big boost to the Iranian-backed rocket-launching Palestinian terrorists who rule Gaza, and did tremendous harm to the UN’s favorite target — Israel. When Goldstone presented his findings to the UN Human Rights Council, publicly denigrating as “pusillanimous” the Israeli conduct that with hindsight he now finds reasonable, he set in motion various UN follow-ups configured to hammer away yet further at Israel. Three of his former fellow UN panelists are now clamoring for that hammering to continue.

Goldstone did not create the bigotry, rigged inquiry processes, and double standards that bedevil the UN. But he led the Gaza inquiry and give his name to a report that amplifies some of the most vile aspects of the world’s leading multilateral institution (even he refers to his Gaza product as the Goldstone Report, though its official title is “Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict”).

What’s to be done? Well, Goldstone has, in his way, set a standard so abysmal that it might actually be turned to good use. If he really wants to make amends, perhaps he’d be willing to lend his name to establish a rating system for bigotry at the UN? It could be called the Goldstone Standard, employed as a sort of reverse Michelin Guide to UN bias (no offense meant here to the Michelin Guide).

How could this work? Instead of the usual hunt for adjectives to describe the UN’s outpouring of anti-democratic, anti-American, and, especially, anti-Semitic reports, resolutions, statements, conference programs, and so forth, how about quantifying this prejudice into units, called Goldstones. From there, just assign any relevant UN product a Goldstone rating, say, from one Goldstone to five — with one being relatively run-of-the-mill UN anti-Semitism, and five being such paragons of prejudice as the Goldstone Report itself.

The advantages would be many. One of the chronic UN defenses against well-deserved criticism is that UN doings become insanely complex to describe, and tedious for the general public to follow — until they emerge in finished form, a la Goldstone Report, and wreak their damage. There are endless misleading labels and layers of complexity (the Durban Review process, for instance, which is supposed to fight racism, but has become a UN-sponsored roadshow of Israel-trashing anti-Semitism). A Goldstone rating system could provide a helpful shorthand for cutting through all that. For example, the Durban III gathering now being planned by the UN General Assembly for this September in New York could be summed up as a 5-Goldstone event. The UN Human Rights Council’s appointment of a special rapporteur for Iran would rate zero Goldstones (though, hold that thought — we have yet to see how that plays out in practice), while the torrent of resolutions condemning Israel could be assigned five Goldstones for the entire series. UN agencies could be rated, as could the UN General Assembly itself, including such maneuvers as last month’s use of the UN’s General Assembly chamber to host the U.S. premiere of an Israel-bashing commercial movie (a celebrity-studded 5-Goldstone occasion).

All this might sound a bit hard on Richard Goldstone, who must have had to scrounge up a certain amount of courage to publish his semi-apologia in the Washington Post. But that was hardly enough to undo the damage of the Goldstone Report. If he was willing to give his name to that screed, is it too much to ask that he lend his name to a rating system that might better help flush out the truth, and at least inch a bit further toward trying to make amends?

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Goldstone Retracts

NGO Monitor
17 April '11

Judge Richard Goldstone has retracted the central premise of his report, but NGOs refuse to follow suit.



Learn more at http://www.ngo-monitor.org

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Goldstone's Three Partners in Crime Attempt to Hang On: Moral Bankruptcy in Action

For Immediate Release:
Contact: Anne Bayefsky
info@eyeontheun.org
April 15, 2011
Posted before Shabbat



This article by Anne Bayefsky appears on National Review Online.

Following Richard Goldstone’s recent retraction of the central finding of his infamous report, the other three members of his U.N. committee have clearly been depressed. The committee chair had gotten all of the glory from the U.N.’s anti-Israel bloc for producing the blood libel that Israel had deliberately set out to murder Palestinian civilians, not responded to years of Palestinian terrorist attacks on its own civilian population. Their names were rarely, if ever, mentioned. The retraction threatened to wipe them completely from the history books. So in another newspaper yesterday, they demanded the recognition they feel they so richly deserve.

Christine Chinkin, Desmond Travers, and Hina Jilani published an article in the Guardian in which they reiterate their enthusiasm for their libelous conclusions and complain: “We regret the personal attacks and the extraordinary pressure placed on members of the fact-finding mission since we began our work in May 2009. This campaign has been clearly aimed at undermining the integrity of the report and its authors.” Indeed, the “integrity” of both the report and its authors is exactly what is in issue.

The lack of integrity of the report itself was apparent from the start. The mandate of the so-called investigators was set by the Human Rights Council after it had decided Israel was guilty. In its words: “The Human Rights Council … decides to dispatch an urgent, independent international fact-finding mission … to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law by the occupying Power, Israel, against the Palestinian people.” No self-respecting lawyer or professional of any kind would have taken a job defined in such a one-sided way. But these people were different, because each of them was as biased as their U.N. masters.

The “integrity” of Christine Chinkin, a law professor at the London School of Economics, was not difficult to discern. On January 11, 2009, in the midst of the Gaza war, Chinkin signed a letter to The Times newspaper which stated: “Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is not self-defence — it’s a war crime.”

Allegedly, the purpose of the Goldstone mission was to investigate whether war crimes had been committed. No democratic state governed by the rule of law would ever have appointed Christine Chinkin to a Gaza war-crimes inquiry after she had signed that letter. No lawyer being considered for a position on such an inquiry, with the slightest concern about integrity, would ever have taken the job. But then Chinkin’s lack of integrity is precisely why she was selected.

The Times letter she signed also stated: “The rocket attacks on Israel by Hamas deplorable as they are, do not, in terms of scale and effect amount to an armed attack entitling Israel to rely on self-defence. … Israel’s actions amount to aggression, not self-defence.” At the time of this statement, Israeli civilians had endured 12,000 mortar and rocket attacks over the eight years prior to the Gaza operation. This hired-gun, prepared to manufacture rules for fighting back invented only for the Jewish state, lacks far more than integrity. Her words are a catalyst for more of the same. On April 7, 2011, Hamas terrorists fired a mortar from Gaza into a school bus, grievously injuring a schoolboy who happened to be the only child on the bus. If 12,000 mortars and rockets were not enough to justify acts of self-defense, then, on Chinkin’s twisted logic, the targeting of Jewish schoolchildren by an organization publicly dedicated to genocide against the Jewish people would not entitle Israel to self-defense today either. One shudders to think how many dead and mutilated Jewish children would be enough for Christine Chinkin.

Travers and Jilani were similarly selected only because they had declared Israel guilty before they began their “fact-finding mission.” On March 16, 2009, both Travers and Jilani (and Goldstone) signed an open letter addressed to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the Security Council ambassadors calling for the very inquiry to which they were then appointed. The letter demanded the mission on the grounds that they were “shocked” by actions in Gaza, that “gross violations of the laws of war,” “gross violations of international humanitarian law,” “targeting of civilians,” and “crimes perpetuated against civilians” had been committed, and that the criminals “responsible … should be held to account.”

Travers’s “integrity” has been on display ever since. In February 2, 2010, a verbatim transcript was published of an interview Travers gave to the pro-Palestinian rag Middle East Monitor. (Muslim Brotherhood enthusiast Tariq Ramadan is their “honorary adviser.”) It includes the following Travers statement: “Do you realise now that there is a very fervid Rabbinate in the military? For the first time ever the Rabbis travelled with the combat troops and this is a new and troubling development. It is also reported that the Rabbis in the Israeli Defence Forces have on occasion challenged the authority of military commanders. This must surely be a development that has negative consequences for good order and respect for authority in the Israeli army.” Of course, it is only troubling if it’s a bad thing to give an army moral guidance and support — as chaplains embedded with the American armed forces do. Or perhaps Travers really means that there is a problem specifically with Jewish spiritual leaders.

It is hardly surprising that this former Goldstone sidekick went on to analogize Israelis to Nazis, claiming elsewhere in the interview: “Gaza has now come into the history books in the same way as … Dresden, Stalingrad. Gaza is a gulag … closed-off from food, water, air.”

As for Jilani’s “integrity” and qualifications for judging Israel’s self-defense needs, they were evident long before Gaza. She was quoted in The Jurist in 2005 as stating: “Israel is depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights using security as an excuse.” Jilani’s pro-Arab bias cuts a broad swath. She was a member of the U.N.’s notorious 2005 international fact-finding commission on Darfur, Sudan. That commission maintained that the atrocities in Darfur did not constitute an ethnic or racially driven conflict, even though it was perpetrated by Arab militias against non-Arab African tribal victims. Hundreds of thousands raped and murdered, 2.5 million displaced — but no genocide, according to Jilani and company. Their moral blindness was exposed last July when the International Criminal Court decided to proceed on the charge of genocide against Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, because “there are reasonable grounds to believe him responsible for … genocide by killing, genocide by causing serious bodily or mental harm and genocide by deliberately inflicting on each target group conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction.”

Chinkin, Travers, and Jilani are rightly worried about their reputations, just as Richard Goldstone was. Their integrity is in ruins, their faulty moral compasses exposed. But they have no one to blame but themselves.

For more United Nations coverage see www.EYEontheUN.org.

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A Goldstone in the forest

Sarah Honig
Another Tack
15 April '11

http://www.sarahhonig.com/?p=828


Rare is the high-school sophomore whose endurance isn’t severely tested by a smart-alecky teacher harping mercilessly on that standard philosophical tease about the tree in the forest falling without anyone around. Does it produce noise? Don’t sounds require receptors to be more than pulses of energy?

Or is it anthropocentric arrogance to ascribe value only to what reaches human consciousness?

No. It’s plain news-sense. What you don’t know doesn’t bother you or shape your opinions. It’s a non-event even if it happened, even if it’s appalling, even if it merits notoriety.

Given issues can be magnified – often artificially – into full-blown controversies, while genuinely scandalous developments might never arouse minimal unease. Objective importance is hardly what matters most. It’s all a function of how many folks have heard about what.

And who determines who hears about what? Sanctimonious publishers and editors – whose politics and expedient preferences are amplified by their servile scribblers and obliging talking heads. These useful mouthpieces profess to be genuinely outraged about what they want us outraged about, and they simultaneously feign disinterest in what they judge is against their interest to get us interested in. They boost their agenda and suppress what conflicts with it.

Their line becomes self-evident conventional wisdom. If our truth clashes with their purposes, it’s simply ignored – like Israel’s ever-frustrated attempts to convince the world that we’re not the monsters that decent and reputable folks in most countries are led to believe we are. It really has nothing to do with what we do or how we explain ourselves.

It’s vital to note that when pondering the partial retraction of the Goldstone Report’s excoriation of Israel by its author, Richard Goldstone.

Obviously it’d take exceptional naiveté to assume that it had never occurred to Goldstone previously that Israel was attacked and exercised its fundamental right of self-defense.

Surely Goldstone was no tabula rasa when he took up his mission from the UN’s infamous Human Rights Council. Neither we nor Goldstone were born yesterday.

All things considered, there’s no escaping the conclusion that Goldstone sold his soul to the international community’s Princes of Darkness and, for whatever personal reasons, now somewhat backtracks from his initial unconscionable choice. He was never a babe in the woods. He knew with whom he went to bed. It couldn’t have escaped the erudite judge’s attention that the UNHRC was led by the liberal likes of Libya under the tutelage of the only belatedly ostracized Muammar Gaddafi.

Goldstone did Gaddafi’s bidding and that of other no-less-dishonorable players.

It’s better that Goldstone now appears semi-repentant for his colossal transgression. Better that than to recant none of the falsehoods at all.

But we ought to note that he doesn’t exactly, and certainly not fully, accept culpability. Goldstone still manages to blame us for his role in collaborating with the forces of injustice. Had we only cooperated with his commission, says he with the wisdom of disingenuous hindsight, his findings might have been different.

This has all the hallmarks of a judge in kangaroo court reproaching the hapless defendant for not striving harder to overturn the verdict which was already stamped and sealed way before the pseudo-trial ever got under way.