About Us

IMRA
IMRA
IMRA

 

Subscribe

Search


...................................................................................................................................................


Sunday, April 17, 2011
THE GOLDSTONE REPORT WAS SIGNED EVEN BEFORE THE INVESTIGATION WAS CARRIED OUT

THE GOLDSTONE REPORT WAS SIGNED EVEN BEFORE THE INVESTIGATION WAS CARRIED
OUT
(Article by Ben-Dror Yemini, Ma'ariv, 15.4.11)
http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART2/232/763.html?hp=1&cat=479

Judge Goldstone has already apologized for the tendentious report that he
published, but his mission colleagues are refusing to toe the line. So it
is with those in love with the libel of 'monstrous Israel."

The principal claim of the Goldstone Report, it must be recalled, is that
Israel intentionally killed civilians. Killing for the sake of killing.
There is almost 600 pages of nonsense in the report. But it seems to me
that this claim, not by chance, garnered the greatest attention.

How does one check such an intention? There are many methods. One of them,
for example, is to check the proportionality. If in a given conflict a
thousand civilians were killed but only ten soldiers, there are serious
concerns that the goal was to kill civilians and not soldiers. Collective
punishment. This is what the Goldstone Report claims. Goldstone recanted.
"If I knew then what I know today, the Report would be different," Goldstone
wrote two week ago and dropped a bomb.

Let us leave goldstone for a moment. Hundreds of thousands of articles have
already sought to analyze his rationale. It is difficult to forgive him for
his libel. In any case, he deserves forgiveness. He recanted.

The problem is with those who are in love with the libel. They are
insistent. Such as these are Goldstone's friends on the mission.
Yesterday, they issued a statement in their home newspaper, The Guardian,
which continues to push the libelous Report.
http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART2/232/763.html?hp=1&cat=479

Time and again journalists have asked Goldstone regarding the killing of
civilians by Israel, in comparison, for example, to the American army. At
first, he told Channel 2's Yonit Levy, "I did not investigate the actions of
the American army in Iraq." A fair answer.

A few weeks later, the same Goldstone told Bill Moyers on PBS that, "The
American military took extreme measures to avoid harming civilians. "It
seems that in the meantime, he had managed to carry out an investigation
even though nobody heard about it.

Let's get real; it is clear that Goldstone has no idea. He was asked to
provide the State of Israel's head, to announce that it was a monster and
this is what he did. His colleagues on the mission and other useful idiots
from Israel and around the world aided him in shaping this libel. Not all
of their claims are mendacious. But when one takes events on a micro level
and inflates them to monstrous proportions, the result is that Israel is a
monster.

In order to check the claim of intentional killing, it is possible to
isolate a range of conflicts in the past two decades in which there were
Gaza-style clashes. A state versus a militant, semi-military entity. Thus
Russia versus the Chechens, the US against jihadist organizations in
Fallujah, Sri Lanka against the Tamil Tigers and Pakistan vs. the Taliban in
the Swat Valley.

And indeed, in all of these conflicts, the quantity of civilians that were
killed in proportion to the number of fighters was much greater, both
relatively and absolutely, than the clash in Gaza. Tens of thousands were
killed in Chechenya and Sri Lanka, and thousands were killed in the US and
Pakistani conflicts in Fallujah and the Swat Valley. Only Israel, alone,
hit far fewer civilians.

There is no reason for the UN Human Rights Council to send flowers to Israel
for scrupulously guarding human life. But the same Council did send flowers
to Sri Lanka, which a few months after Operation Cast Lead, crushed the
Tamil Tigers amidst the mass killing of tens of thousands of innocent
civilians. These are the facts; they are as clear as day.
http://www.suite101.com/content/unhrc-vote-a-clash-of-civilizations-a121580

But Goldstone's friends on the mission are insistent. The truth is that
they were insistent even before they were appointed to the mission. Or, to
be more precise, they were included on the mission because their views were
known in advance.

Christine Chinkin published a letter in The Times in which she claimed that,
"Israel's actions are not self-defense but war crimes."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article5488380.ece

The other two, Hina Jilani and Col. Desmond Travers, signed an open-letter
calling for an investigation in light of the war crimes that were
perpetrated during Operation Cast Lead.
http://www.eyeontheun.org/view.asp?l=47&p=984 This is the background to the
statement that they published in their home newspaper yesterday. They will
not give up the libel.

Search For An Article

....................................................................................................

Contact Us

POB 982 Kfar Sava
Tel 972-9-7604719
Fax 972-3-7255730
email:imra@netvision.net.il IMRA is now also on Twitter
http://twitter.com/IMRA_UPDATES

image004.jpg (8687 bytes)