How many would be alive today if Obama had not quashed Goldstone Report?

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

http://mondoweiss.net/2014/07/quashed-goldstone-report.html

The latest headlines say that President Obama has lost his patience with Israel over the wanton killings of civilians in Gaza. Obama made an “angry call” to Israeli prime minister Netanyahu yesterday, Kate Snow reported on NBC last night. “Obama gets tough with Netanyahu, for Gaza,” Haaretz says.

The White House’s readout of that phone call is frosty. Though containing the usual boilerplate about Israel’s right to defend itself, it twice spoke of Palestinian civilians.

The President also reiterated the United States’ serious and growing concern about the rising number of Palestinian civilian deaths and the loss of Israeli lives, as well as the worsening humanitarian situation in Gaza.

The obvious question raised by the president’s apparent horror with the scenes from Gaza is, Why did he quash the Goldstone Report?

[elleng]

1. For information:

The United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, known as the Goldstone Report, was a team established in April 2009 by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) during the Gaza War (January 2009) as an independent international fact-finding mission to investigate alleged violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law in the Palestinian territories, particularly the Gaza Strip, in connection with Gaza War.[1] South African jurist Richard Goldstone was appointed to head the mission.[1][2] Goldstone's work investigating violence led directly to him being nominated to serve as the first chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda from August 1994 to September 1996.

Israel refused to cooperate with the report, which was released on 15 September 2009.[citation needed] The report accused both the Israel Defense Forces and the Palestinian militants of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity. It recommended that each sides openly investigates their own conduct, and to bring the allegations to the International Criminal Court if they failed to do so.[3][4] The government of Israel rejected the report as prejudiced and full of errors, and also sharply rejected the charge that it had a policy of deliberately targeting civilians.[5] The militant Islamic group Hamas initially rejected some of the report's findings,[6] but then urged world powers to embrace it.[7]

The controversial report received wide support among countries in the United Nations, while Western countries were split between supporters and opponents of the resolutions endorsing the report.[8][9][10][11] Critics of the report claimed that it contained methodological failings, legal and factual errors, and falsehoods, and devoted insufficient attention to the allegations that Hamas was deliberately operating in heavily populated areas of Gaza.[12][13]

On 1 April 2011, Goldstone retracted his claim that it was Israeli government policy to deliberately target citizens, saying "While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee's report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy."[14] On 14 April 2011 the three other coauthors of the United Nations (UN) fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict of 2008–2009 Hina Jilani, Christine Chinkin and Desmond Travers released a joint statement criticizing Goldstone's recantation of this aspect of the report. They all agreed that the report was valid and that Israel and Hamas had failed to investigate alleged war crimes satisfactorily.[15][16]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Fact_Finding_Mission_on_the_Gaza_Conflict

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

2. There must have been a lot of pressure on Goldstoone to retract his position.

[jehop61]

3. So President Obama is to blame

Amazing spin on a conflict that's been going on for 70 years. Have you found the wrong discussion group?

[elleng]

4. Thanks!

[King_David]

5. Justice Goldstone retracted his support from the report bearing his name

The report was bogus.

[elleng]

7. 'The report concluded that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Palestinian militant groups had

committed war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity. While the report condemned violations by both sides, it differentiated between the moral and legal severity of the violations of the Israeli forces compared to those of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups.[65][66] Goldstone stated that the mission "wasn't an investigation, it was a fact-finding mission" and that the conclusion that war crimes had been committed "was always intended as conditional". He described the allegations as "a useful road map" for independent investigations by Israel and the Palestinians.[67] He later added that the mission did not conduct a judicial investigation, and stated that its findings did not amount to "the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt". He described it as a prima facie case, "reasonable on weighing the evidence" and said that the information obtained would not be admissible as evidence in a criminal court.[68] . . .

Writing in the Financial Times Italian Jurist Antonio Cassese who was the first President of the International Criminal Tribunal For the Former Yugoslavia argued that critics of the report were relying primarily on ad hominem and strawman attacks. He argued that "critics have given inaccurate descriptions of the report's findings" and that "those who claim the mission's mandate was biased against Israel seem to have ignored a significant fact: Justice Goldstone, whose mission was initially asked to look into alleged violations only by Israel, demanded—and received—a change of mandate to include attacks by Hamas." Furthermore, he argued that many critics of the report "have launched personal attacks on Justice Goldstone's character" and some critics have even gone as far as labeling Goldstone, who is Jewish, "an 'anti-Semite' of a kind who 'despise and hate our own people'".[148]

Former Canadian Minister of Justice, Attorney General of Canada, former president of the Canadian Jewish Congress and former Director of the Human Rights Program at McGill University Professor Irwin Cotler called the inquiry "inherently tainted", agreeing with Mary Robinson and Richard Goldstone that its original mandate was "deeply one-sided and flawed" prior to being broadened, and stating that the UNHRC is "systematically and systemically biased against Israel".[149] He opposed the report, which he regarded as "tainted". At the same time, he is in favor of establishing an independent inquiry into the Gaza war, saying that Israel would set a precedent if it creates such an inquiry that according to his best knowledge "no other democracy" had.[150]

Princeton professor emeritus of international law Richard Falk, appointed in 2008 by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to serve as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on "the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967", endorsed the report as "an historic contribution to the Palestinian struggle for justice, an impeccable documentation of a crucial chapter in their victimization under occupation". Writing in Electronic Intifada, Falk further commented that the report appeared to him to be "more sensitive" to Israel's contentions that Hamas was guilty of war crimes, and that the report in many ways "endorses the misleading main line of the Israeli narrative". Falk was critical of charges that the report, or the UNHRC, were biased and inferred that such criticism amounted to an attempt to "avoid any real look at the substance of the charges".[151]'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Fact_Finding_Mission_on_the_Gaza_Conflict

[King_David]

6. Goldstone Retracted his report :

JERUSALEM — The leader of a United Nations panel that investigated Israel’s invasion of Gaza two years ago has retracted the central and most explosive assertion of its report — that Israel intentionally killed Palestinian civilians there.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/world/middleeast/03goldstone.html?_r=0

[elleng]

8. 'On 1 April 2011 Goldstone retracted his claim that it was Israeli government policy to deliberately

target citizens, saying "While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee's report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy."[14] On 14 April 2011 the three other coauthors of the United Nations (UN) fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict of 2008–2009 Hina Jilani, Christine Chinkin and Desmond Travers released a joint statement criticizing Goldstone's recantation of this aspect of the report. They all agreed that the report was valid and that Israel and Hamas had failed to investigate alleged war crimes satisfactorily.[15][16]'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Fact_Finding_Mission_on_the_Gaza_Conflict

[King_David]

9. Goldsand was the only important one

The UNHRC wanted his name especially since he was Jewish .

He retracted as you have noticed above.

The whole report was in disrepute and therefore rendered useless.

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

11. What your selling smells to high heaven, king.

There were two other authors on the report.

Stop with the disinformation.

[HooptieWagon]

10. Obama needs to speak before the UN and request another war crimes report...

... if he wants to clean the blood from his hands for enabling Israel.

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

12. +1000

Kick!

[stranger81]

13. Yes, he should.

Monkeys will sooner fly out of my ass, but yes, he should.