Wednesday 30 September 2009

Fighting Goldstone.

As predicted the UN Human Rights train is rolling. It's destination predetermined by those that control the railroad. It is steaming ahead carrying Israel, inevitably, to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Along the way it is picking up passengers that will be condemned when the train reaches its final station.
Israelis dare not travel for fear of summary arrest and being placed in the cattle car to a fate that singles out the Jews from any other nation or race.
And as the cattle cars, full of protesting Jewish victims, rolls under the gate of the final destination they will see the sign has been changed.
No longer 'Arbeit Macht Frei'. Now the sign reads 'Our Facts Will Imprison You'.
The Jew, again, denigrated and condemned by those with a passion to elicit a judgment against Israel that they dare not apply to any other country or people.
The Jew, in the form of Israel, is to become the eternal pariah.
As in the past, they have recruited their kappo. In this case a learned and respected jurist of the Jewish faith to be their front man. Whether through an academic sense of justice, ego, or ambition, Richard Goldstone took the path where others feared to tread.
However this ends, he will forever be portrayed as a modern day Judas.

A report has been delivered that is rife with deliberate avoidance of fairness and balance, a carefully pre-selected time frame that eliminates any explanation, defence, or historic perspective that would justify Israel's actions in Gaza, and false conclusions that condemns Israel for crimes not committed.

Richard Goldstones statement to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on 29 September is fraught with disingenuous comments.
He said that his committee had accepted their brief 'out of a deep concern for the hundreds of civilians who needlessly died'. Yet his committee gave only token attention to the eight years of thousands of rocket and mortar attacks coming from Gazan territory into Israel's civilian population. Israelis lined up to give their narrative. Goldstone refused to accept their evidence.

They pre-decided to select the time frame of 27 December 2008 to 18 January 2009 to avoid having to seriously consider the historic background of the Gaza conflict. By doing so they eliminated the need to pass judgment of eight years of war crimes and human right abuses by the Hamas regime in Gaza.
Their clock only started ticking when Israel retaliated in self defence.

Richard Goldstone lied when he told the world that his committee had been instructed 'to investigate all violations of international law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza'.
This is not true.
In Article 14 of the UN HRC decision to appoint the committee it clearly instructs them 'to investigate all violations of international law by the occupying power, Israel, against the Palestinian people due to the current aggression'.
What further proof is needed to show such one-sided and biased instruction?

In advance of the committee's work one of the jurists, Professor Christine Chinkin, an expert in international law, signed a petition published in the British Sunday Times that determined, prior to any fact-finding mission, that Israel had committed war crimes.

When the commission was presented by a law suit calling for her dismissal as a biased juror it was summarily dismissed.
There is no difference between Chinkins bias and that if the UN Human Rights Council.
The identity between Goldstone and the Council is this predisposition is absolute.

Let me go back one further step. The first station on the journey to Geneva and The Hague was the one that called for the investigation. Thirty three countries participated in the vote to establish the mission to Gaza. One country only voted against. That was Canada. Not one western democratic country supported the decision. The vote was made up entirely of third world and Islamic countries. Needless to say, many have the most atrocious record in human rights abuses.

Mary Robinson, a darling of the UN Human Rights Council and no great friend of Israel was asked to chair the committee in its fact-finding mission to Gaza. She refused saying that it was 'guided not by human rights, but by politics'.

The Goldstone report, a result of the Missions investigation, is less a fact-finding exercise and more of a lie-finding one.
The committee found time to ask inane, one sided, often irrelevant questions of witnesses while refusing to admit eye-witnesses to Hamas terror attacks or to listen to expert witnesses who are able to clarify the actions of the IDF in Gaza. Experts such as Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan and an expert in warfare in urban conditions such as Gaza. Failure to consider his statement, or those of Israeli victims of Hamas aggression against civilian targets, or even for the Goldstone committee to look into the massacre by Hamas of Fatah Palestinians in Gaza during the conflict, amount to a massive suppression of evidence.

Palestinian testimony was taken under the watchful eye of Hamas minders. Goldstones committee seemed oblivious that such 'evidence' is surely tainted with fear of retribution.
Neither did the committee consider it beneficial to conduct such interviews in privacy.
On the other hand the report declares that Israel may penalise witnesses. What one-sided cant!

A glaring fault is the UN Human Rights Council constant referral of Hamas as the Gazan authority. Despite the established fact that Hamas is internationally condemned as a terror organisation Goldstone never uses the 'terror' word and refers to Hamas as a civil authority.
This is vitally important for, by doing so, it can refer to Israeli attacks against the Hamas infrastructure as attacks against civilian targets and, therefore, war crimes.

Neither, in the eyes of the Goldstone committee, are there any Palestinian terror organisations. Occasional reference is made to 'armed groups' though none are given an identity.
Goldstone, it seems, has never heard of Islamic Jihad, the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade, Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigade, the PFLP, and others. To Goldstone, Hamas does not participate in any armed, military, or terror, activities. They are a civilian authority in their white-wash of Hamas in Gaza. This gives them the loophole to portray Hamas as an innocent civil force for good.

In their questioning of Palestinians they never ask if any members of the family belong to any terror organisation, whether homes were used as storage facilities for weapons, whether any member of the family belonged to 'armed groups' , or were actively fighting in the conflict.
All were innocent civilians or, as on one family case, farmers.
Until, that is, one turns to the facts given by the IDF, in advance of the UN Human Rights investigation and freely available, that several were wanted terrorists guilty of numerous actions against Israeli civilians and against IDF soldiers.
Of course, it is not convenient for the Goldstone committee to consider IDF statistics as reliable.
It does not fit into their pre-arranged concept of 'fact-finding'.

His definition of witnesses as 'credible and reliable' cannot be dismissed even when clearly identified as being members of Palestinian terror organisations.

Goldstone does not consider properties hit or destroyed as having been used for terrorist activities. All are civilian in nature.

Neither does Goldstone take into consideration that certain buildings could have been hit by a misdirected missile.
In his book, 'Israel went out of its way to deliberately target civilian infrastructure and collectively punish the people of Gaza'.

Israel may yet answer the Goldstone Report point by point. It is certain that Hamas, the Gaza authority, will not be held to any accountability.

The perpetrators of the UN Human Rights Council report will not be satisfied with a reading of the report to the UN Security Council.

They want that train to keep rolling until it arrives at The Hague, the doors of the cattle wagons are opened, and the Jews of Israel are herded into the Auschwitz dock of perpetual discrimination.

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