Tainted Saints

 The United Nations General Assembly has voted in favour of resolution endorsing a UN-sponsored report into war crimes committed during Israel’s war on Gaza.

The Goldstone report, which accuses both Israel and Hamas of war crimes, was endorsed by the assembly on Thursday by a margin of 114 to 18, after two days of debate. 

Forty-four member-nations abstained from voting.

The report, which was compiled by a panel led by Richard Goldstone, a South African judge, had already been endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council, which sponsored the fact-finding commission.

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On Tuesday, November 3, Congress is poised to vote on H.Res.867, which calls on the “President and the Secretary of State to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the `Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’ in multilateral fora.’ ”  

The Resolution instructs the Obama Administration to prevent further consideration of the Goldstone Report (as it is informally known) in any international body.  For Congress to do so, without a hearing where Judge Goldstone can testify and based upon a Resolution rife with factual errors, makes a mockery of assertions by the United States that fundamental protections of human rights laws law apply equally to all. It leaves the United States, and especially Congress, without a thread of moral authority. [more...]

[Move over, Jonathan Kozol – Richard Goldstone is my new hero… -Ed.]

Richard Goldstone, the jurist who authored a UN report accusing Israel of war crimes and crimes against humanity during its war on Gaza, has challenged the US to justify its claims that his findings are flawed and biased.
 
Goldstone told Al Jazeera on Thursday that he had not heard from the administration of Barack Obama, the US president, about the flaws Washington claims to have identified in the report.

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…The order from Binyamin Netanyahu follows a special cabinet meeting on Tuesday to discuss Israel’s response to the UN’s Goldstone report, which condemned Israel’s actions during the 22-day war on Gaza earlier this year.

The meeting also called for the formation of a special committee to deal with the international legal consequences of the report and the prospect Israeli officials could face war crimes trials abroad.

The Israeli government contends international law needs to be amended in order to fight global terrorism…

[So they were “fighting global terrorism” when they slaughtered those women and children in Gaza. Just like we’ve been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last 8 years. Netanyahu is putting Obama in a very uncomfortable position, which I suspect is intentional…

The terrible irony here is that Richard Goldstone, in addition to being a highly respected jurist, is also a Zionist Jew, whose view of war crimes was shaped by the Holocaust. – Ed.]

This year has seen a dramatic shift in American Jews’ attitudes toward Israel. In January many liberal Jews were shocked by the Gaza war, in which Israel used overwhelming force against a mostly defenseless civilian population unable to flee. Then came the rise to power of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, whose explicitly anti-Arab platform was at odds with an American Jewish electorate that had just voted 4 to 1 for a minority president. Throw in angry Israelis writing about the “rot in the Diaspora,” and it’s little wonder young American Jews feel increasingly indifferent about a country that has been at the center of Jewish identity for four decades.

Read entire article here…

After weeks of attempted suppression of the U.N.’s Goldstone report by the U.S., Israel, and Western Europe, the Human Rights council finally agreed to refer the findings to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague if Israel and Hamas don’t conduce credible investigations in 6 months. Such a referral could result in individual members of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) being charged with war crimes.