As noted yesterday, Richard Goldstone has recanted and regretted much of his report issued on behalf of the United Nations Human Rights Council accusing Israel of serious war crimes during the Gaza war.
So how do we cleanse the world of the putrid stench of the Goldstone Report?
It cannot be done.
The notion that Israel committed war crimes and deliberately targeted civilians lives on in the public consciousness, and in articles like this one from anti-Israel law professor George Bisharat published in the LA Times in September 2009, Goldstone report: Israel’s failings:
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.”
Bisharat’s article has been republished far and wide. And repeated with variations on a theme by Bisharat in other newspapers and in speeches since then.
Bisharat is not alone. Using the Goldstone Report to delegitimize Israel and to put Israel on the defensive has become a cottage industry spanning the full breadth of the Islamist-Leftist Anti-Israel Coalition.
Jon Podhoretz (h/t Instapundit) suggests as to Richard Goldstone:
It would be right for world Jewry that his name be hereafter summoned as we summon Benedict Arnold’s, or Tokyo Rose’s.
It’s too late to unring the bell, and as we all know, in this world there is no office to which Israel can go to get back its reputation, certainly not the vile U.N. Human Rights Council:
The council has criticized Israel on 27 separate occasions [since its creation in June 2006], in resolutions that grant effective impunity to Hamas, Hezbollah and their state sponsors. Obsessed with condemning Israel, the Council in its first year failed to condemn human rights violations occurring in any of the world’s 191 other countries. In its second year, the Council finally criticized one other country when it “deplored” the situation in Burma, but only after it censored out initial language containing the word “condemn.” It even praised Sudan for its “cooperation.” In its third year,
The Council’s fixation with Israel is not limited to resolutions. Israel is the only country listed on the Council’s permanent agenda …. Moreover, Israel is the only country subjected to an investigatory mandate that examines the actions of only one side, presumes those actions to be violations, and which is not subject to regular review.
The U.N. Human Rights Council is not a human rights council, it simply is an anti-Israel forum which uses useful idiots like Richard Goldstone for cover and legitimacy. The Goldstone Report was the crowing achievement of the U.N. Human Rights Council.
The U.N. Human Rights Council, created in the hopes of curing the ills of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, should be eliminated. That would be the fitting response to the Goldstone Report and its aftermath.
We cannot eliminate the putrid stench of the Goldstone Report, but we can eliminate the putrid organization from which it grew.
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Comments
The term "UN Human Rights Council" is an absurd contradiction.
"We cannot eliminate the putrid stench of the Goldstone Report, but we can eliminate the putrid organization from which it grew."
Amen. Time for the US to cut all UN funding until this occurs.
Don't forget–first we had the "Jenin" massacre in which the UN ignored that Israel sacrificed its troops to fight in an urban setting under rules so mindful of civilians no other force could imagine using these tactics.
Perhaps we should start a nationwide refusal to pay the percentage of our income taxes which fund the entire damned UN.
Sober-thinking news junkies like us will feel vindicated. Hopefully, those on the left with any intellectual honesty will admit they were wrong.
The problem is with the great majority of people who are too busy to follow the news as closely … or who aren't interested in the fine details.
A stain like this can be lightened a bit with repudiation/recantation … but it will still be visible. After countless stains over time (even if all are scrubbed and lightened by being proven false) the busy person who only has time to quickly form opinions on the issues of the day will look at Israel and see the stained narrative. It will be a false narrative, but they won't know that.
Think of a grossly biased story in a newspaper followed by a retraction. A tiny fraction who were influenced by the story will ever see the retraction.
That's why I always harp on talking to young people. There's still a chance with them. For each one you positively influence, you influence many more … their friends and their future children, etc.
That's why I told my daughter in the very short amount of time she'll allow me to talk to her about politics, that a great rule of thumb is, whatever any UN organization says about Israel, you can be almost certain the opposite is true.
I hope Mr. Bisharat will kindly spend as much time condemning the Muslims killing Palestinian-Christians(fathers religion) and /or all ME or African Christians, as he has obsessing over Israel.
Progspeak/ Devil's Dictionary for "Caucasians, Asians, conservative blacks/ Latinos, Christians and Jews":
1. Peoples who by genetic and culturally enlightened condition must be racists, transgressors, and the ones responsible for others' bad behavior; 2. stuckees who can never be victims, discriminated against, or justified in defensive or retributive action; 3. late 20 to 21 c. scapegoats for failed subcultures, self-flagellating western media and academics, and flogger US Democrat overseers.
There is no OxyClean miracle stain remover for social and personal smears. Personally, I'm surprised by how the Palestinian PR machine has outflanked Israel's these past several decades. While tribalism often leads to blinkered and corrupt group-think, solidarity can have a positive, salutary effect on solving problems, and in the case of Israel and the Palestinians, many smart, liberal Jews have identified with the so-called underdogs and championed their cause without considering how the Palis aren't winners by their own deeply hostile values and destructive devising.
And remember, "sort of runic," that when it comes to Israel "disproportionate" is a synonym for "effective."
I used to think it was just right-wing lunatics who said, "Get the US out of the UN and the UN out of the US."
The UN is a completely worthless organization filled with criminals and directed by communists. The US should withdraw from it forthwith and it should be thrown out of this country. They could set up camp in North Korea, a place where all their hopes and dreams have been realized.
Goldstone having a change of heart does not invalidate the goldstone report. Depsite the name it was the work of more than one person (four principle authors in fact, and who knows how many support staff). The biggest extent of Goldstone's change of view should be a footnote and perhaps a renaming of the report since he clearly wishes to distance himself from it.
In terms of future lessons the most obvious should be that if Israel wants to be treated fairly by the UN they should cooperate with such investigations instead of stonewalling. If Goldstone is correct, it was precisely Israel's intransigence that led to the report being one sided. You can't blame a court for a suspect who refuses to defend themselves.
"So how do we cleanse the world of the putrid stench of the Goldstone Report?
Ii [sic] cannot be done."
It doesn't stink up the world I traverse because I never let it in. As bad as Goldstone did to Israel and Jews generally, and he reeks (not the world, Goldstone), as bad or worse has been done to me, and no one is asking how that damage can be undone. The damage is permanent and ultimately fatal. I'm still here for now, nonetheless. So are Jews and Israel. More Jews in the world now than before the Nazis tried to exterminate them, I'm glad to say. And Israel is able to take down the Iranian nukes with software, glad to say. One takes one's knocks — and who doesn't receive them? — and moves on in this world or into the next, as destiny ordains. Character, not longevity, is the measure of life. Not one of us has a guarantee of anything other than God's love, which is sufficient unto the day.
Oh, that's lovely– if you don't join in the kangaroo court, you're just proving you're guilty.
Never mind that the guy points out the mandate they were operating under was skewed against Israel– Charley Brown has to take a swing at that football every time, or it's his own fault he's guilty.
"You can't blame a court for a suspect who refuses to defend themselves. "
Presumption of innocence?
Presumption of innocence when the other party celebrates war crimes?
"Presumption of innocence?"
Yeah and when a bunch of damning evidence comes in and the suspect refuses to rebut any of it?
Yeah and when a bunch of damning evidence comes in and the suspect refuses to rebut any of it?
Wow, thanks for the wildly inaccurate characterization of the situation.
Let me quote Goldstone:
Some have charged that the process we followed did not live up to judicial standards. To be clear: Our mission was in no way a judicial or even quasi-judicial proceeding. We did not investigate criminal conduct on the part of any individual in Israel, Gaza or the West Bank.
So a 'fact finding' committee, formed on a mandate that is OPENLY STACKED AGAINST ONE SIDE, and the side it's stacked against not going along with the farce is the same as not defending yourself in "the" court of law.
Future hint for fact finding committees: do your own dang research and don't complain when the chosen loser refuses to play.
You also ignore:
Indeed, our main recommendation was for each party to investigate, transparently and in good faith, the incidents referred to in our report. McGowan Davis has found that Israel has done this to a significant degree; Hamas has done nothing.
So, why does the UN hold muslims as 'more equal' than any other? Progressive Revelation..
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,807188-1,00.html
Monday, June 06, 1955
….
"Bahais think of their religion as an advance on all others because it encompasses them. They see all great religions and their founders as essentially one. They concentrate their own efforts not on individual salvation but on the achievement of universal peace. “We are one up on Christianity,” says white-haired Leroy loas (pronounced Iowaas), a retired Chicago railroad manager, who serves as secretary general of the international council at Haifa. “Christ never mentioned universal peace in his teachings.” Peace-striving Bahais plug for internationalism (the U.N.) and against treaty arrangements “based on force” (NATO)."
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the trojan horse for islam is this international shadow organization that claims to be the religion of the 'mahdi'
Seems to be working out that way..
Professor, the title of this post was three words too long.
Large in the UN founding was an FDR whiz kid, who had accompanied FDR to Yalta as an analyst of the Stalin positions. This young man was the toast of the foreign policy establishment and was slated to be USA's first ambassador to the fledgling UN. Then an allegation was made, by Whittaker Chambers, that the young man was a soviet agent. Long/short, the famous 50s sensational spy trial of Alger Hiss ensued and Hiss, one could say the spirit of the UN up to that point, was convicted and sent to prison.
The story is re ''what has always been wrong with the UN'' –it has always been the structure set to catch the nations as they become exhausted fighting totalitarian subversion and are reduced to being happy for any peace on any terms, under a unity-controller –a new world order, if you will.
Israel, with its allegiance to something other than the works of the UN man, is dangerous on several counts –an institutionalized respect for the UN antithesis (that is, national independence and cultural individualism), and the fact of the Jewish people's time-tested cohesiveness predating recorded history, all within a small isolated nation's clear success (except for the endless war, the exception ruled by the proof) at this stubborn and unlikely being the UN-man antithesis, almost cannot help but mark Israel for endless UN-man attack as an independent entity.