On one hand, I am not even remotely surprised by the outcome of the Goldstone report. I would even venture to say that jews like Goldstone as so worried about being perceived by the world as pro-Jewish that they go to extra lengths to prove their impartiality. And Mr. Goldstone, I would like to congratulate you on a job well done. No one will ever accuse you of being pro-Jewish -- except for your daughter, sweet, naive thing. Get a life.
Once again, Israel has been condemned based on the most flimsy evidence. Goldstone relied on many unreliable witnesses to form the basis of his report. The Goldstone "Fact-Finding" Mission (0f the Human Rights Council HRC) essentially prejudged Israel's "guilt" from the start. The HRC didn't even wait for the investigation to begin before declaring Israel has caused "massive violations of human rights.”
It's true that the Palestinians and Hamas were determined to be equally guilty, but frankly, that's the biggest insult of all. To even suggest that Hamas and Israel are anywhere near the same moral and legal plane is simply obscene.
The Goldstone Mission's one-sided mandate focusing overwhelmingly on Israel ignored all the evidence of Hamas' human rights violations, past and present. It is interesting to note that the starting point of the commission's investigation was considered so unbalanced that one of the candidates, Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland turned down the top job stating that the mandate was "guided not by human rights, but by politics."
Several western democracies -- including the European Union, Japan, Canada and Switzerland -- refused to endorse the mandate for the “fact-finding” mission out of concern that it was flawed and biased.
You think we would be used to it by now, but we aren't. Even Ha'aretz, Israel's very liberal newspaper, said that the 'UN report accusing Israel of war crimes is prize for terror'.
The biggest question for me is a question that was also asked by Aluf Benn: "In the wake of the Gaza probe, how can Israel go to war again?" And it's a very good question. We don't go to war because we don't have anything better to do on any given day. We don't go to war to keep our soldier population numbers manageable. And we don't go to war to stimulate our economy. We go to war so that we can continue to live. It's an existential thing. Nothing more and nothing less. I would like to see what any other civilized Western country would do if they were placed under the same circumstances.
The Human Rights Council has consistently discriminated against Israel. It has condemned democratic Israel more often than all the other nations of the world combined. This is not conjecture -- it is recorded fact.
The biggest shame of this matter is that because Goldstone is Jewish, any protest of bias will be be met with the international response: "it was written by a Jew. What more do you want? Even other Jews think that Israel is guilty." And with that said, there is no where to go. The world doesn't believe in self-hating Jews; they don't understand the concept. They simply see those Jews as Jews brave enough to break rank.
I am not suggesting that because he is Jewish he had to be blindly supportive of Israel. What I am suggesting is that being Jewish he should have either declined the job or done it fairly instead of trying to prove how open-minded and un-biased a Jew he could be. Instead he chose to be willfully blind and we will suffer the consequences. Happy New Year Mr. Goldstone.
The biggest shame of this matter is that because Goldstone is Jewish, any protest of bias will be be met with the international response: "it was written by a Jew. What more do you want? Even other Jews think that Israel is guilty." And with that said, there is no where to go. The world doesn't believe in self-hating Jews; they don't understand the concept. They simply see those Jews as Jews brave enough to break rank.
I am not suggesting that because he is Jewish he had to be blindly supportive of Israel. What I am suggesting is that being Jewish he should have either declined the job or done it fairly instead of trying to prove how open-minded and un-biased a Jew he could be. Instead he chose to be willfully blind and we will suffer the consequences. Happy New Year Mr. Goldstone.