The most important sentence in this section of the Goldstone Report is this one: “Mr. Amr Hamad indicated that 324 factories had been destroyed during the Israeli military operations at a cost of 40,000 jobs” (paragraph 1009). I did a double-take when I read that: 40,000 would be astonishing in an economy like Gaza’s.

But then Kramer looked at the original source for the claim – as opposed to the testimony offered Goldstone – and discovered this:

But if you return to the report of the Palestinian Federation of Industries, it puts the job losses at these 324 factories not at 40,000, but at 4,000. That’s an order-of-magnitude misrepresentation by Hamad of his own organization’s findings. The Goldstone Mission should have wondered at the figure, checked Hamad’s testimony against the Palestinian Federation of Industries report, detected the discrepancy, and gotten it right. But it didn’t. Perhaps the mission members, hearing the word “factories,” thought that 40,000 jobs sounded credible. In fact, more than a quarter (88) of these 324 “factories” employed five people or less, and over half (189) employed from five to twenty people (Federation report, p. 12). The vast majority of these “factories” should really be described as “workshops.” Only three employed a hundred or more people.

The witness who said “40,000” was from the Palestinian Federation of Industries. In other words he lied and the Goldstone Commission looked for no corroboration of his number.

As Richard Landes shows, though, this wasn’t the only example of Goldstone’s carelessness with numbers.

I have often tried to argue that the situation is the Arab-Israeli conflict is not only exaggerated by the media, but inverted, and that statistics play a critical role in this process.

Goldstone famously told the Forward:

‘If This Was a Court Of Law, There Would Have Been Nothing Proven.â€

Really it’s worse than that. If his kangaroo commission were a court of law, he would have been suborning perjury.

UPDATE: John Bolton describes the mindset that afflicts Judge Goldstone and his ilk:

Nonetheless, human-rights activists who view their morality as higher than that of elected governments are satisfied by nothing less than prosecution. That is precisely why contemporary universal jurisdiction is so profoundly antidemocratic.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

What’s wrong with the first paragraph?

Richard Goldstone, the lead author of a United Nations report that found evidence of war crimes committed by Israel and Hamas during last winterâ€s Gaza war, challenged the Obama administration in an interview broadcast Thursday to explain what it has called serious concerns about his report.

Except as Hamas observed, the Goldstone commission did not explicitly mention that Hamas was guilty of war crimes. Besides, even if the report did mention Hamas, the mention of war crimes committed against Israel was negligible. The balance suggested in the news story was in no way reflected in the report.

The report found evidence that some Israeli soldiers had intentionally killed Palestinian civilians during the three-week conflict in violation of the laws of war. It described the Israeli military assault on Gaza as “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed 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.”

It also said there was evidence that the Palestinian militant rocket attacks on towns in southern Israel constituted war crimes.

How Goldstone could conclude that Israel’s goal was to “punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population” is beyond me. That is precisely the behavior that Israel was responding too. After eight years of provocation. (h/t OyVey Blog) And especially after Israel no longer occupied Gaza. But of course, one of the flaws, of the report was to ignore the provocations of Hamas. If he really needs an Obama administration to explain that, his willful blindness is beyond belief.

As far as evidence that “rocket attacks” against Israel are war crimes, none is needed. The action is self-evidently a war crime.

“People generally donâ€t like to be accused of criminal activity, so it didnâ€t surprise me that there was criticism, even strong criticism, and it has come from both sides,” Mr. Goldstone said in the interview. “But I do regret the extremes to which some of the criticism has gone and the fact that it has been so personalized.”

He then lashed out at his detractors, saying, “Iâ€ve no doubt, many of the critics — I would say the overwhelmingly majority of the critics — havenâ€t read the report. And, you know, what proves that, I think, is the level of criticism doesnâ€t go to the substance of the report. There still havenâ€t been responses to the really serious allegations that are made.”

As noted above, there wasn’t strong criticism from Hamas. Hamas loved the report. Goldstone is being disingenuous here. And of course, the “personalized” nature of the attacks has been in response to the smug self-righteousness he wraps himself in.

Enough time has elapsed since Goldstone released his report for plenty of substantive critiques to have appeared. Presumably, he is computer literate enough to do some searches and find those critiques and respond. The way Goldstone has wandered from media outlet to media outlet feigning outrage that someone would not take his word as gospel and asking others to point out the flaws in the report, positively begs for mockery.

And I take exception to his conclusion that many of his critics haven’t read the report. I have not read the whole report. I’ve read sections. And I’ve concluded that Goldstone drew his conclusions before his investigation and tailored the narrative to fit those conclusions. Frankly I’m offended that Goldstone’s been too lazy to seek out and respond to the substantive critiques that he – falsely – laments do not exist.

But the most damning critique of Goldstone, came from Goldstone himself. This is what he told the Forward.

For all that gathered information, though, he said, “We had to do the best we could with the material we had. If this was a court of law, there would have been nothing proven.”

Goldstone emphasized that his conclusion that war crimes had been committed was always intended as conditional. He still hopes that independent investigations carried out by Israel and the Palestinians will use the allegations as, he said, “a useful road map.”

Goldstone himself said that he proved nothing – nothing that could stand up in court – and yet he demands that Israel take his accusations as convictions that must be disproved. That Goldstone simultaneously refuses to stand by his report and demands that it be taken seriously makes his position untenable.

Finally, let’s take read a section of the Goldstone report. (.pdf) It is the part about whether Israel provided sufficient warning to civilians to get out of harms way. And nearly every single one of Israel’s efforts were deemed insufficient.

535. While noting the statements of the significant efforts made by the Israeli armed forces to issue warnings, the sole question for the Mission to consider at this point is whether the different kinds of warnings issued can be considered as sufficiently effective in the circumstances to constitute compliance with article 57 (2) (c).

536. The Mission accepts that the warnings issued by the Israeli armed forces in some cases encouraged numbers of people to flee and get out of harmâ€s way in respect of the ground invasion, but this is not sufficient to consider them as generally effective.

537. The Mission considers that some of the leaflets with specific warnings, such as those that
Israel indicates were issued in Rafah and al-Shujaeiyah, may be regarded as effective. However, the Mission does not consider that general messages telling people to leave wherever they were and go to city centres, in the particular circumstances of this military campaign, meet the threshold of effectiveness.

538. The Mission regards some specific telephone calls to have provided effective warnings but treats with caution the figure of 165,000 calls made. Without sufficient information to know how many of these were specific, it cannot say to what extent such efforts might be regarded as
effective.

539. The Mission does not consider the technique of firing missiles into or on top of buildings as capable of being described as a warning, much less an effective warning. It is a dangerous practice and in essence constitutes a form of attack rather than a warning.

540. The Mission is also mindful of several incidents it has investigated where civilians were killed or otherwise harmed and met with humiliation and degrading treatment by Israeli soldiers, while fleeing from locations about which some form of warning was issued. The effectiveness of the warnings has to be assessed in the light of the overall circumstances that prevailed and the subjective view of conditions that the civilians concerned would take in deciding upon their response to the warning.

On the other hand Col. Richard Kemp a military commander with actual experience in urban combat, reviewed Israel’s procedures for warning civilians and concluded.

The truth is that the IDF took extraordinary measures to give Gaza civilians notice of targeted areas, dropping over 2 million leaflets, and making over 100,000 phone calls. Many missions that could have taken out Hamas military capability were aborted to prevent civilian casualties. During the conflict, the IDF allowed huge amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza. To deliver aid virtually into your enemy’s hands is, to the military tactician, normally quite unthinkable. But the IDF took on those risks.

Despite all of this, of course innocent civilians were killed. War is chaos and full of mistakes. There have been mistakes by the British, American and other forces in Afghanistan and in Iraq, many of which can be put down to human error. But mistakes are not war crimes.

More than anything, the civilian casualties were a consequence of Hamas†way of fighting. Hamas deliberately tried to sacrifice their own civilians.

Mr. President, Israel had no choice apart from defending its people, to stop Hamas from attacking them with rockets.

And I say this again: the IDF did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.

(emphasis mine)

Faced with a choice of using their own judgments to condemn Israel, or take the word of an expert and exonerate Israel, Goldstone’s commission chose the former.

The chutzpah of this self-important man to claim that his critics have not read his report or addressed its substance is amazing. Those of us who have read it – or even parts of his report – are amazed at how flimsy his proofs are in contrast with the importance he and his allies attach to his shoddy work.

It’s almost as if he didn’t read his own report.

See this takedown of a similar Goldstone sobfest.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

The second is his comparison of the Israeli judicial system and that of the Hamas: Israel’s is secretive and not reliable. Hamas, on the other hand, has a fine legal system. Of course, he adds, if they wish to be reinforced by international outfits, that can also happen.

Surely you are thinking that the internationally respected Judge Goldstone didn’t say that Hamas had a fine legal system. Well actually he did. Here’s Richard Landes’s transcript, (read it along with the pertinent fisking):

CA: We talked about each side conducting their own investigations; Israel has its justice, the wheels of justice that turn. [What] would you expect really that you could get out of Hamas in Gaza.

RG: Well Hamas has courts open. There are courts in Gaza. People are convicted. Some people are, regrettably in my view, are sentenced to be executed. But if Hamas hasnâ€t got the sufficient resources, hasnâ€t got sufficient lawyers and judges, which I doubt, Iâ€ve no doubt that the international community will fill any gap that there may be in such an absence of resources.

If you read any significant portion of Judge Goldstone’s report you will understand that he wasn’t looking for the truth, he was looking to confirm his (uninformed) conclusions. it wouldn’t have taken Judge Goldstone and his commission much effort to discover how Hamas’s fine judiciary works. All they had to do was to find a New York Times article from December 29, 2008 described Hamas’s fine “open” courts:

On Monday, Dr. Ashour was not the only official in charge. Armed Hamas militants in civilian clothes roamed the halls. Asked their function, they said it was to provide security. But there was internal bloodletting under way.

In the fourth-floor orthopedic section, a woman in her late 20s asked a militant to let her see Saleh Hajoj, her 32-year-old husband. She was turned away and left the hospital. Fifteen minutes later, Mr. Hajoj was carried out by young men pretending to transfer him to another ward. As he lay on the stretcher, he was shot in the left side of the head.

Mr. Hajoj, like five others killed at the hospital this way in 24 hours, was accused of collaboration with Israel. He had been in the central prison awaiting trial by Hamas judges; when Israel destroyed the prison on Sunday he and the others were transferred to the hospital. But their trials were short-circuited.

What is “open” to Judge Goldstone, is called “summary execution” in the rest of the world.

There is quite a bit that Judge Goldstone ignored. And of course this article, in addition to demonstrating the falsity of his own impression of Hamas’s legal system, supported two more contentions of Israel’s that Goldstone refused to acknowledge.

1) Hamas terrorists don’t wear uniforms.
2) Hamas terrorists operate from hospitals.

Judge Goldstone worked from a premise that all destruction caused by Israel was arbitrary and/or unnecessary. Anything that contradicted that premise was disregarded.

The good judge was so intent on “Goldstoning” Israel he ignored the truth.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

I wrote the other day about the ludicrously biased Goldstone Report issued by the UNâ€s Human Rights Council, which accuses Israel of war crimes in last winterâ€s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. As details about the backgrounds of Goldstoneâ€s witnesses (many of them Hamas operatives, as it turns out) roll in, Tom Gross has noticed that one of them is Islam Shahwan, the same Hamas spokesman who appeared in the Israeli press (as well as the Telegraph) last summer trumpeting the news that Israeli intelligence was in the Strip distributing chewing gum to make their youth horny.

Then she goes in for the kill:

Youâ€d think the UN would have learned a thing or two about the credibility of Hamas and Al Fatah spokesmen since its experiences in 2002. That year it launched an investigation into rumours that Israel had perpetrated a massacre in the the Jenin refugee camp during a military incursion undertaken after sustaining nearly year of suicide bombings believed to have been dispatched from towns like Jenin in the West Bank. The “massacre” charges had been spread by official spokesmen and amplified by reporters like Phil Reeves of the Independent, who famously started a front page story with the sentence, “A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed.” After weeks of work, the UN ended up backing the IDFâ€s contention that about 45 people had died, most of them men of draftable age. Reeves ended up acknowledging that it has “long been obvious that [a massacre] did not occur” in an article titled “Even Journalists Have to Admit Theyâ€re Wrong Sometimes.”

Actually I do think that they’ve learned since Jenin. They’ve decided not to restrict charges against Israel to the field but adopt a commission approach so as to pretend that a process was followed rather than just making reckless charges.

And who did Goldstone ignore? As noted elsewhere, he ignored Dr. Mirela Siderer. A video or her statement is here.

Here is Goldstone’s response.

UN Watch transcribed his response to Dr. Siderer:

With regard to the statement made by Dr. Siderer, Iâ€m clearly upset that she feels humiliated by the report. She was treated in the report in no way different to that of other victims who spoke to us. She was referred to in the report as one of the people who was injured as a result of a rocket attack on a shopping center in Southern Israel. The report also refers to the fact that the evidence of the people who gave evidence to us are available on the website of the OHCHR. It is there for anybody to see.

If you can watch the video. Judge Goldstone addresses Dr. Siderer at about 1:45 into the video. (Before that he’s dismissing calls for Israel to be charged with genocide.) The equanimity with which he addresses her is chilling. He claims that he’s upset by her charges, but there’s no trace of emotion in his voice. Goldstone’s performance ought to impeach his credibility.

UN Watch provided this helpful rebuttal to Goldstone’s prepared remarks.

UN Watch Note: Dr. Siderer posed 8 simple questions. Goldstone avoided all except one, and on this was non-responsive and misleading. Dr. Siderer never said that she wasnâ€t “referred to,” but rather complained that her story was ignored, and that her name was mentioned only “in passing, in brackets, in a technical context;” and that this underscored how he overlooked 8 years of suffering of the rocket victims. Here is Dr. Siderer’s original testimony; here is Goldstone’s report. Search her name — it turns up but once, in passing, in par. 1640. Goldstone’ s claim that other witnesses were given similar treatment is manifestly false: see, e.g., the report’s repeated and in-depth discussion of witness Abu Askar. What is clear is that the report gives short shrift to Israeli suffering by its selective focus on the period of Israel’s response to the rocket attacks (Dec. 2008 and Jan. 2009), instead of to the attacks themselves (2001-2009).

In the video, Goldstone addresses Anne Bayefsky too (after dismissing Dr. Siderer)

During another NGO statement, Anne Bayefsky of the Hudson Institute slammed the mission, the report and the HRC, ending with a stunning attack on Goldstone: “There is only one question to put to you, Richard: How does it feel to have used your Jewishness to jeopardize the safety and security of the people of Israel, and to find yourself in the company of human rights abusers everywhere?”

Bayefsky was scolded by the council president, and Goldstone called her remarks “unfortunate.”

“It should not be regarded as a matter for criticism that a member of the Jewish people should criticize the government of Israel or the Israeli Defense Forces for what are seen to be violations of international law,” Goldstone said.

“The history of the Jewish people, a very sad history of persecution over two millennia, I would have thought should be an absolutely compelling reason for all Jews to speak out against injustice and the violations of human rights.”

But what Judge Goldstone doesn’t acknowledge is that much of that persecution has been justified by false claims of crimes committed by Jews – individually or collectively. He is now participating in a stacked tribunal whose job it is to declare Israel guilty. He is not honoring Jewish history; he is debasing it. (A full transcript of Goldstone’s remarks is here.)

If you need one more example of the absurdity of the proceedings it’s this:

The representatives of Libya and Iran both accused Israel of “genocide,” prompting Swedenâ€s envoy, speaking on behalf of the European Union, to intervene on a “point of order,” asking the council president to ensure speakers did not make “gross and baseless allegations.”

Cuban envoy Rodolfo Reyes Rodriguez in turn complained about the Swedish intervention, saying points of order should not be misused to curb freedom of expression.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

He cited one incident in which Israeli forces allegedly fired a mortar shell through the door of a mosque in Gaza City during a religious service attended by several hundred worshipers, killing 15 and injuring others. He said there was no evidence to suggest that the mosque had been occupied by militants or had been used to store weapons.

And indeed this is what’s claimed in the report in its “factual findings” (page 237 of the .pdf) of the case|:

835. There has been no suggestion that the al-Maqadmah mosque was being used at that time to launch rockets, store weapons or shelter combatants.465 Since it does not appear from the testimonies of the incident or the inspection of the site that any other damage was done in the area at that time, the Mission concludes that what occurred was an isolated strike and not in connection with an ongoing battle or exchange of fire.

In other words the Goldstone commission’s “factual” finding was that Israel arbitrarily fired at a mosque killing at least 15 people.

However, Jonathan D. Halevi did a little digging. There might be a reason that there was “no suggestion” that the al-Maqadmah mosque did not “shelter combatants.” The commission never bothered to ask.

Many of the questions were irrelevant and unconnected to the circumstances of the event. The commission members did not ask about armed men in the mosque, whether it was used for military purposes or incited worshippers to carry out terrorist attacks against Israel. They did not ask if there were weapons in the mosque, if armed men were operating near the mosque, whether Hamas and its Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades controlled the mosque and used it to recruit operatives, or the identity of the casualties and their organizational affiliation (including members of the al-Silawi family).

An examination of freely accessible Palestinian sources shows that the casualties in this incident were terrorist operatives and included members of the al-Silawi family, who were represented to the commission as innocent civilians.

Halevi goes on to list the active members of Hamas who were targeted and killed in the attack as Ibrahim Moussa Issa al-Silawi, Omar Abd al-Hafez Moussa al-Silawi (Abu Souheib), Sayid Salah Sayid Batah, Ahmed Hamad Hassan Abu Ita, Muhanad Ibrahim al-Tanani (Abu Islam), Rajah Nahad Rajah Ziyyada, and Ahmed Assad Diyab Tabil. The last two were 18 and 16 respectively, which shows that some of those classified as children killed by Israel were actual combatants.

So the Goldstone commission didn’t do basic research. It had a narrative – that Israel attacked and killed civilians recklessly – and couldn’t be bothered to check for anything that might contradict that narrative.

With a little ingenuity and effort as displayed by Elder of Ziyon and his fellow researchers Goldstone could have established the background of Omar al-Silawi without leaving Geneva.

In his op-ed, Judge Goldstone wrote:

I accepted because the mandate of the mission was to look at all parties: Israel; Hamas, which controls Gaza; and other armed Palestinian groups. I accepted because my fellow commissioners are professionals committed to an objective, fact-based investigation.

I noted yesterday that this was dishonest, as Mary Robinson declined to head the commission on grounds that its mandate was one sided. Judge Goldstone’s failure, in this case, to ask the necessary questions or to do the requisite research to establish his facts, shows that Mrs. Robinson was correct. He was effectively charged with establishing Israel’s guilt, and he discharged his duties accordingly.

Crossposted at Yourish.