Goldstone report unfair to Israel

[shira]

<snip>

Unfortunately, the just-released report of the U.N. Human Rights Council -- the so-called Goldstone mission report -- on Israel's three-week Operation Cast Lead in Gaza earlier this year seems to have ignored this modern-day phenomenon entirely. In so doing, it has endorsed tactics of unlawful guerrilla movements the world over that purposefully endanger the lives of their own civilians in order to protect themselves from attack.

<snip>


In an attempt to balance the report, the mission did conclude that Palestinian rocket fire into Israel constitutes war crimes. But this is largely irrelevant because the extent of the charges against Israel is so much greater and more damning. The political bias of the mission was borne out in the report, which, despite its 575 pages, failed to find conclusive evidence of Hamas' extraordinary use of civilians and civilian infrastructure for military purposes. For example, the report makes no mention of the recorded incidents of Palestinian rocket fire from school premises during the operation, despite video evidence.

The report also fails to mention that the Palestinian forces recruited children to conduct combat-support operations. A Jan. 9 report in an Arabic-language paper in Israel included an interview with Khaled, a child from Gaza. He said: "We the children ... are fulfilling missions of support for the resistance fighters, by transmitting messages about the movements of the enemy forces or by bringing them ammunition and food."

<snip>

Further, the report's accounts of some incidents are dubious. For example, in its investigation of the shelling of Al Quds Hospital in Gaza City, the commission astonishingly concluded that it was unlikely that there was any armed presence in any of the hospital buildings at the time. Yet the report itself cites a Newsweek article in which a Palestinian witness stated "resistance fighters were firing from positions all around the hospital." An article in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera corroborates this, quoting a resident of the neighborhood saying, "The Hamas gunmen had taken refuge mainly in the building that houses the administrative offices of Al Quds" and that "nurses were forced to take off their uniforms ... so they could blend better and escape the Israeli snipers."

<snip>

much more...
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-la.1.mn_commentary.newart3-2009sep18,0,4123099.story

[shira]

1. cont'd...

The Palestinian forces utilized the civilian infrastructure of Gaza so completely that IDF soldiers and commanders could never be sure that people usually considered to be noncombatants were not participating in the hostilities, and that installations typically considered to be of a civilian nature were not being used to stage attacks on them. Without this crucial context, it is impossible to understand the dilemmas faced by the IDF during the operation or the reasons why injury to Gazan civilians and damage to civilian infrastructure were incurred.

<snip>

The mission also claims it found no evidence to suggest that Palestinian armed groups forced civilians to remain within the vicinity of the attacks. But in the Corriere della Sera article, Gaza residents explicitly stated that Hamas fighters forcibly prevented them from leaving their houses and shot at Israeli forces from the same locations, telling them that they should be happy to die together with the "holy warriors."

The egregious omission or airbrushing of such information is not a matter of incompetence. These details simply contravened the political agenda of the mission, and so the investigators either overlooked them, declared them to be irrelevant or found them to be inconclusive.

The lasting legacy of the Goldstone report will be to have emboldened terrorists and illegitimate guerrilla forces at the expense of armies seeking to protect the innocent from the deliberate and murderous attacks against them. By refusing to call Hamas to account for the manner in which it deliberately endangered its own people, terrorist groups everywhere and their leaders can rest assured that they will not have to pay the consequences for such gross abuses of the laws of war. Instead, the Goldstone panelists decided to hamstring a democracy that had suffered more than 10,000 missile attacks on its citizens and to send the message that self-defense is not legitimate.

Capitulation in the face of terror is the order of the day from the Goldstone mission.

[Mr. Sparkle]

2. Jeremy Sharon has worked at a number of Israeli think tanks and served as an IDF Spokesman.

He is also a researcher and writer based in Jerusalem.

Talk about an unimpeachable source. I am surprised the LA Times printed this.

[bemildred]

3. The times printed it side by side with this one:

Goldstone report: Israel's failings

Will Israel's decades-long impunity from international law finally come to an end? That is the question facing the international community in the aftermath of the just-released Goldstone report.

Richard Goldstone, formerly a supreme court justice in South Africa and chief prosecutor in the international tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, headed a four-person United Nations mission investigating both Israel and Hamas for possible war crimes during Israel's winter attack on the Gaza Strip last winter. The mission conducted 188 interviews and reviewed more than 300 reports, 10,000 pages of documents, 30 videos and 1,200 photographs. The Israeli government barred the group from entering Israel or the Gaza Strip (it reached Gaza, ultimately, through Egypt). By contrast, Palestinian authorities, both in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, cooperated with the mission. The 575-page report concluded that both sides committed war crimes before, during and after the intense fighting in December-January.

In its findings on Israel's conduct, the report noted that the ruinous siege on Gaza, imposed long before the invasion, collectively punished its residents in violation of international law. During the attack, Israeli troops killed civilians without justification, wantonly destroyed civilian infrastructure and private homes, and used weapons illegally. Israeli troops targeted and destroyed Gaza's last functioning flour mill. Israeli armored bulldozers razed the chicken farm that provided 10% of Gaza's eggs, burying 31,000 chickens in rubble. Israeli gunners bombed a raw sewage lagoon, releasing 200,000 cubic meters of filth into neighboring farmland. Repeated pinpoint strikes on a water well complex destroyed all of its essential machinery.

These are just some of the facts that led the mission to conclude that Israel's objective in the attack was "to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-bisharat18-2009sep18,0,216231.story

They often do that sort of thing, and it seems fair enough to me.

[Mr. Sparkle]

4. It is fair, but only up to a degree, imho.

For example, would it be fair to have two sides debating whether or not the world is round, when the answer is already know ?

The report is an independent report, that deals with the facts. What Sharon did was to try and muddy those facts, a tactic used so often by the far right here. Some actions are so horrendous that you hate to see anyone try and justify them.

[bemildred]

5. I find it's better to let people make their case.

It's not that I don't see your point, but if you censor views you don't like, that just provides excuses and distractions and leads to free speech issues and so on. On the other hand, if they don't have an honest case it is easy enough to tell, and it is better for the public to learn to discriminate than for any self-appointed guradians to "protect" them. In the case of the LAT I am sure there is an element of protecting their claim to be unbiased, but I don't blame them for that, we live in litigious times.

[Mr. Sparkle]

7. It's not censorship, it is just that some views are so disgusting

that they don't belong in polite society. While they may have a right to give their views, it dose not make them any less stomach turning.

[bemildred]

9. It is censorship to keep them out of print.

Nobody, of course, is required to agree, or even to read them. I am getting on in life and my stomach is pretty strong when it comes to that sort of thing. When you live in TV-land you learn to discriminate or you get ruthlessly exploited.

[Mr. Sparkle]

11. That is a superfluous arguement to make.

Maybe i miss understand what your trying to say, but I dont think they have a right to appear in any publication. It is, as always, at the whim of the editors.

[shira]

6. fascinating - why don't you point to one thing he wrote that you believe is false

are you capable of rationally refuting the substance of his arguments?

[Mr. Sparkle]

8. I have no intention of having an argument with an extremest.

As Barney Frank once said, it would be like arguing with a dining room table.

[shira]

10. LOL.....happy delusions then!