Richard Goldstone is bringing his lies to the pages of the Jerusalem Post. The man has no shame.
Five weeks after the release of the Report of the Fact Finding Mission on Gaza, there has been no attempt by any of its critics to come to grips with its substance. It has been fulsomely approved by those whose interests it is thought to serve and rejected by those of the opposite view. Those who attack it do so too often by making personal attacks on its authors’ motives and those who approve it rely on its authors’ reputations.
There have been many, many attacks on its substance, but the well-respected jurist appears not to have noticed them. And in fact, it is the Goldstone supporters that are using the author’s motives as a means of defense: Since Richard Goldstone is Jewish and a supporter of Israel, the meme goes, the report cannot be biased. But of course, that isn’t true. Neither is Goldstone’s description of the report’s mandate:
Israel could have seized the opportunity provided by the even-handed mandate of our mission and used it as a precedent for a new direction by the United Nations in the Middle East.
This is the mandate issued on January 12:
14. Decides to dispatch an urgent independent international fact-finding mission, to be appointed by the President, to investigate all violations of international human rights law and International Humanitarian Law by the occupying Power, Israel, against the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip, due to the current aggression, and calls upon Israel not to obstruct the process of investigation and to fully cooperate with the mission;
If you read the entire mandate, there is not a single reference to Hamas. Goldstone may have been told that they would make the mandate “even-handed,” but in practice, it was not, and the report is not. To say that it is is a blatant lie. The UN Human Rights Council did not pass a resolution to send both Hamas and Israeli “war crimes” to the ICC—only Israeli “crimes” are referenced. Goldstone criticized that resolution, but so what? The barn door’s been open for months, and there are no horses left.
Even the press release following Goldstone’s appointment does not specifiy any violations by Hamas.
Today’s appointment comes following the adoption of a resolution by the Human Rights Council at the conclusion of its Special Session on 9 and 12 January convened to address “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 fact that Goldstone thought he had a mandate to investigate both sides makes his one-sided report even more reprehensible. And really, when you read this:
notwithstanding the decision of the government of Israel, we took whatever steps were open to us to obtain information from victims and experts in southern Israel about the effects on their lives of sustained rocket and mortar attacks over a period of years.
And then read this:
Some of the Israeli witnesses who testified before the committee were injured by rocket fire before Operation Cast Lead, but their testimonies were left out of the report.
Dr. Mirela Siderer, a resident of Ashkelon, was severely injured by a Grad missile and is about to undergo her eighth operation.
“I didn’t have high hopes, so I wasn’t very disappointed, but I still feel awful after reading the report,” she said. “They didn’t refer to incidents that occurred before Operation Cast Lead, including my injury.”
You have to wonder: Who does Goldstone think he’s fooling? Does he think Israelis are that stupid? To come into the pages of the Jerusalem Post and think that Israelis won’t know these stories? Or that Goldstone fell asleep when Noam Bedin was testifying?
“When I stood up and started to testify before the judges, Justice Goldstone fell asleep in front of me. It was an embarrassing moment but I continued talking, realizing that I should not have high hopes,” he added.
Really. 93.5% of Israeli Jews think that the Goldstone report is biased. Who does he think he’s kidding?
He is not lying, he lives in contradiction, it’s kind of the opposite of limbo, meaning being in two different places at once, opposing places, i. e. he believes what he says. Like a limbo this is not a good place to be, especially when the wind is blowing. The problem is that the pro Israeli blogsphere is the only one blowing the wind and we need a storm. It is obvious from his denial that some of the wind does reach him. But since his just a fig leaf it will have no impact beyond him. To the people behind the report he and his career and reputation are expendable.
According to his friends, he has ambitions to become Secretary-General of the UN, which is why he accepted the post after Mary Robinson (!) turned it down.
With the EU lukewarm to the report, and the USA’s vote against it, I think his chances are down the drain.
Kissing up doesn’t always work.
Ambition is a good motivation, made a fool out of a lot of people, but what continent is he suppose to represents? Europe is next, than the Americas, he’ll close 90 by the time its Africa turn.
“According to his friends, he has ambitions to become Secretary-General of the UN,”
Ah Richard, it profiteth a man not to sell his soul for the world, but for Turtle Bay?
(h/t to “A Man For All Seasons”)
He knows that the Joos recognize that he is lieing and that anyone who follows events would reas\lize it as well. However he is working on the P. T. Barnum principle and figuring that most Americans are too busy following “Dancing With the Stars” to bother looking for the truth. The rest of the world is already accepting the blood libels. He is actually lieing to himself to convince himself that if he “throws the Jews under the bus” the world will accept him.
“But the judge said he never had summed up before,
So the Snark undertook it instead,
And summed it so well that it came to much more
Than the witnesses ever had said.”
“The Hunting of the Snark,” one of my favorite poems (my rotisserie league team is called the Bensky Snarks) is considered a masterpiece of nonsense writing and somehow, when it comes to nonsense, Lewis Carroll was apparently prescient about the UN.