Goldstone impeaches self

Stephanie Guttman noted who Judge Goldstone listened to.

I wrote the other day about the ludicrously biased Goldstone Report issued by the UN’s Human Rights Council, which accuses Israel of war crimes in last winter’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. As details about the backgrounds of Goldstone’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:

You’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 IDF’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 They’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, I’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 wasn’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 Sweden’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.