I previously posted about the latest rash of scandalous photos coming out of Afghanistan showing U.S. military atrocities under Obama’s command, and wondering if the media would pick up on it the way they did when it was Bush’s army… Well, here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting: yes, one of the U.S. media, Rolling Stone, [...]
Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the Atlantic, cast a spotlight on yet another disgustingly overt example of pure bias in the mainstream media, particularly at the anti-Semitic Reuters newswire. He points to a Reuters news item which contains the following despicable sentences: Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian [...]
In the [sparse] reporting of the Palestinians’ massacre of the Fogel family, several newspapers stand out with their distorted sense of “balance”, i.e., where they feel overwhelmingly uncomfortable describing the barbarity of the Palestinians without at least taking a swipe or two at the Israelis, no matter how patently irrelevant or disgustingly disrespectful it comes [...]
UN Goldstone Report Gathers More Critics
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The United Nations’ anti-Israel, biased Goldstone Report is still generating press.
In the latest news, the Washington Post is reporting that the United States has rejected a UN proposal to compel Israel and Hamas to conduct internal investigations in response to their travesty of a report, under threat of facing possible prosecution in an international court.
Susan E. Rice, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations said that the U.S. has long had “very serious concerns” about the mandate that the United Nations Human Rights Council gave to Goldstone, calling it “unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a television interview also came out swinging, saying that “this report is tendentious and biased, that its end result was determined before it started. This is a kangaroo court that decided to convict Israel in any case.”
He also made the following insightful comments:
First of all, this is a prize for terrorism and encourages terrorism. There is something much deeper here. See what happened with the disengagement. They told us that if we left, some said there would be peace. Some said that if there wasn’t peace, at least we will have international legitimacy that if they fire one missile, we would be able to strike at them with full force. They fired one missile, two missiles, three missiles, 1,000 missiles, 2,000 missiles and in the end, the State of Israel, when it could take no more, acted and it acted in the most measured way we knew. We could be compared to other countries that acted when it was attacked by many missiles. The second thing is that they certainly need to understand that there is a threat to democracy here. If the terrorists, these war criminals, both fire at civilians and hide behind civilians, this is a double war crime. If they receive a prize and the attacked becomes the aggressor, then it will also happen to you. NATO is fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and Russia is also fighting in various places. The countries that are fighting terrorism must understand that this report hurts not only us but them as well. It hurts peace. It hurts security. Therefore, this report is harmful and biased and we reject it outright. There must be a very strong response by the responsible countries in the world.
Dan Kosky also writes a great piece in the Guardian pointing out the glaring bias with the report. Here is the bulk of his piece (since virtually all of it is great reading) :
Richard Goldstone’s long-awaited report has confirmed suspicions that his investigation is guided by an agenda to isolate Israel. The farcical investigative process has produced a report which vilifies Israel but helps little in better understanding the Gaza conflict.
Much was rightly made of the investigation’s one-sided mandate, which erased Hamas’s culpability. Panel member Christine Chinkin, branded Israel’s Gaza operation a “war crime” before the inquiry had even begun. As a result, the Israeli government rightly recognised the warning signs and stayed away from the Goldstone process.
Equally worrying for the sceptics was the lack of transparency throughout the inquiry. Hand-picked “witnesses” were invited without explanation to testify before the mission. A hearing in Geneva, billed ostensibly as an opportunity to hear Israeli voices, became a cover for representatives of radical NGOs to spout propaganda with little direct significance to the conflict in Gaza.
Most notable was the appearance via video of Shawan Jabarin, director general of al-Haq, a Ramallah-based NGO which spearheads lawsuits against Israeli officials in courts across the world. Jabarin’s contribution over events in Gaza is overshadowed by evidence that he is “among the senior activists of the Popular Front terrorist organisation”. Al-Haq’s allegations are cited at least 30 times in the report, but the critical context of his background is hidden.
Grave doubts over the investigative process have been realised by the mission’s conclusions. These strengthen the game plan designed to condemn Israel. The report is replete with dubious statistics and sources. Casualty figures are quoted from the Gaza based Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), a politically motivated organisation, which consistently refers to terrorism as “resistance”. PCHR’s faulty statistics include senior Hamas military figures such as Nizar Rayan and Said Siam, as civilians.
Yet it is perhaps what is missing which is most telling. Reading the report, one would be unaware of Hamas’s human-shield strategy, a significant contributory factor to the civilian deaths in Gaza. Goldstone prefers to ignore the obvious. Although he states: “Palestinian armed groups were present in urban areas during the military operations and launched rockets from urban areas”, he avoids the logical conclusion of the massive use of human shields. Of course, admitting that Hamas endangered Gazan citizens would provide an alternative to Israeli guilt. Yet, rather than state the inconvenient truth, the report reinforces preconceived Israeli culpability.
Goldstone is similarly evasive over the unreliability of key “eyewitnesses”. Like the flood of NGO publications in the immediate aftermath of the conflict (particularly those by Human Rights Watch, of which Goldstone was a board member) Goldstone’s so-called investigation is largely reliant upon “eyewitness” Gaza testimony. The report applies entirely illogical reasoning, failing to elaborate on “a certain reluctance by the persons … interviewed in Gaza to discuss the activities of armed groups”. This observation provides a glimpse of the dangers faced by those speaking out against the regime in Gaza, yet Goldstone omits to mention how Hamas intimidation undermines witnesses and with it the very foundation for his conclusions.
The last paragraph wonderfully highlights the double-standard to which Israel is held:
Of course, these are the same battle dilemmas facing UK and US armies in foreign fields. Until the issues are seriously addressed or, alternatively, forces in Afghanistan and Iraq are subjected to similar scrutiny, Goldstone and the NGOs and UN frameworks which threw their weight behind his mission will justifiably be viewed with suspicion.
This double-standard spotlight is similar to a piece by Alan Dershowitz that I mentioned in my previous post on the subject, which included:
If the methodology and conclusions of this infamous report were ever applied generally to democracies seeking to combat terrorists who hid behind civilians—as in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq—it would constitute a great victory for terrorism and a defeat for democracy. But not to worry. The report is not intended to establish general principles of international law, applicable to all nations. It is directed at one nation and one nation only: the Jew among nations—Israel.