Richard Goldstone – the primary author of a one-sided United Nations attack on Israeli actions during the Gaza war – has now become a full-fledged member of the international bash-Israel chorus. His name will forever be linked in infamy with such distorters of history and truth as Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Jimmy Carter.
The so-called report commissioned by the notorious UN Human Rights Council and issued under his name is so filled with lies, distortions and blood libels that it could have been drafted by Hamas extremists.
Wait – in effect, it actually was!
One member of the group is a Hamas lackey who before being appointed as an “objective” judge had already reached the conclusion – without conducting any investigation or hearing any evidence – that Israel’s military actions “amount to aggression, not self defense” and that “the manner and scale of its operations in Gaza amount to an act of aggression and is contrary to international law.”
So much for objectivity. Many human rights experts urged her to recuse herself because of her prejudgment, but she was on a mission on behalf of her “client” – Hamas. And she did a good job as an advocate. But as a judge, she employed an Alice-In-Wonderland conception of justice: verdict first, trial to support the verdict.
Other members were accompanied on their investigations in Gaza by actual Hamas activists who showed them only what they wanted them to see. The group was eager to find or manufacture “evidence” to support what the Human Rights Council itself had directed them to find, namely that Israel committed “grave violations of human rights in the occupied Palestinian Territory, particularly due to the recent Israeli military attacks against the occupied Gaza Strip.”
This conclusion too was reached before any investigation. No wonder so many prominent human rights experts, including Mary Robinson, refused to participate in this mockery of human rights, declaring that it was “guided not by human rights, but by politics.”
No wonder so many nations that are dedicated to human rights – nations such as Switzerland, Canada, Japan, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands – refused to go along with the politically motivated witch hunt. They should also refuse to accept the politically motivated, entirely preordained conclusions of the biased report.
As I wrote before the “Kangaroo Court investigation” began:
The UN Human Rights Council is a scandal. [It has] a long history of singling out Israel for condemnation and of ignoring real human rights abuses by the world’s worst offenders, several of which dominate the Human Rights Council and it predecessor.
As Hudson Institute scholar Anne Bayefsky recently noted: “The Council has adopted more resolutions and decisions condemning Israel than all the other 191 UN member states combined…. The more time the Council spends demonizing Israel, the less likely it becomes that it will ever get around to condemning genocide in Sudan, female slavery in Saudi Arabia, or torture in Egypt.”
The very idea of the UN Council conducting an “independent” or objective investigation of Israel is preposterous.
A careful reading of the official media summary – the widely quoted press release – of the report itself reveals the bias of its members and discredits the entire enterprise.
The summary never criticizes Hamas. It downplays the rockets deliberately fired by Hamas at Israeli civilian targets in Sderot and other towns and cities, blaming them on generic “Palestinian armed groups.”
It faults Israel more than Hamas for using human shields. It cites the admission of Hamas leader Fathi Hammad, who boasted:
For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel, and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahideen and the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahideen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: “We desire death like you desire life.”
But it concludes that “it does not consider [this admission] to constitute evidence …”
It ignores videos, which constitute hard evidence, that clearly show Palestinian terrorists firing rockets from civilian areas, including schools. This is part of a pattern of ignoring evidence that undercut its predetermined conclusions and exaggerating – sometimes manufacturing – evidence that supported it.