JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

10/19/09 02:53 PM

I wonder if Richard Goldstone will approach matters differently in the future, now that he realizes he was played for a sucker by the U.N.H.R.C., which really should stand for “Unified Neanderthal Human Rights Criminals” (For that matter, Hamas probably stands for “Homicidal Anarchist Muslims Abandoning Sanity.").

10/19/09 03:41 PM

Why does the overwhelming majority of American Jews appears to continue its support of the anti-Israel U.N.? Why does the same majority reject such champions of human rights as John Bolton?
Is this not a perversion of reality?

10/19/09 07:01 PM

The U.S. should not pull out of the UNHRC but should cancel all funding of this committee until it becomes a fair and balanced organization.  The funding should be cancelled and not just withheld until in the future it can be donated once again.

10/20/09 08:16 AM

Mr.Go;dstone in my opinion is a good candidate for the Judenrat. Too bad for him it is not 1940’s. I share Mr. Shuster’s question about the support for John Bolton.Being originally from the Soviet Union, I do not understand the hypocrisy of the liberal american jewish establishment

10/26/09 06:46 PM

A remarkable conversation with Judge Goldstone - Rabbi Brian Walt - 10/19/09 - Excerpt: “Last night Judge Goldstone spoke to about 150 rabbis in a conference call that we, Taanit Tzedek Jewish Fast for Gaza [ http://fastforgaza.net/ ], organized. It was a remarkable conversation with a true moral hero of our time. As I listened to Judge Goldstone I was so moved by his courage in taking on the assignment as head of the Fact Finding Mission and his clear commitment to apply the same standards to Israel that he applied in South Africa, Yugoslavia, Rwanda and all over the world. You can listen to a recording of the conversation on our website [ http://www.fastforgaza.net/audio/goldstone-10-18-2009 ].” http://rabbibrian.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/a-remarkable-conversation-with-judge-\goldston/ / / For transcript of call: http://fastforgaza.net/resources

10/26/09 06:52 PM

B’Tselem [The Israeli information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories]:
“Israel must investigate army’s conduct in Operation Cast Lead
B’Tselem is persistently advocating for Israel to implement the principal recommendation of the Goldstone report and mount an independent investigation into suspicions that Israeli forces breached international humanitarian law in Operation Cast Lead.” http://www.btselem.org/English/Gaza_Strip/20091019_BTselem_position_on_the_Goldstone_commission_report.asp

10/26/09 07:47 PM

Probably the best and most detailed examination of the flaws in the Goldstone Report, revealing its dishonesty in excruciating detail, its failure to exercise proper standards for legal investigations of testimony in criminal matters, its own manifest bias, etc., etc., is that of
http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/search/label/Goldstone Report

I recommend it to readers.

Among the many who contacted the Goldstone Commission when it was conducting its investigation and presented evidence on behalf of the IDF was Lt. Col. Jonathan Halevi (res.).  As he did with all others who did this, Goldstone ignored Halevi’s evidence, or rather, referred to it in passing in his report at one or two points, dishonestly, as if it supported his conclusions. 

(Goldstone of course has since contradicted his own report and insisted it was not really a proper legal “investigation,” merely a preliminary and hasty “fact-finding mission” - but what kind of “fact-finding mission” rejects all evidence from one side of a dispute?  He even says, in an interview with the Jewish Forward, that he would not be surprised if his conclusions in the Report are shown to be baseless in court trials.  Nevertheless, he continues to push for Israel to be condemned in the U.N. on the basis of his Report.  He devotes next to no attention to Hamas war crimes in the Report, but pretends to be hurt that the U.N. ignored his minimalist criticism of them altogether in their resolutions.  Thus he speaks out of both sides of his mouth, on every issue.)

Lt. Col. Halevi, however, has published elsewhere his analysis of the Goldstone Report and its flawed treatment of evidence.  See his detailed analysis at
http://jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DRIT=1&DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=442&PID=0&IID=3086&TTL=Blocking_the_Truth_of_the_Gaza_War

The same is now also available at
http://www.spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=6073

No knowledgeable Jew - or non-Jew for that matter - can therefore support the Goldstone Report.  (The reference to non-Jews is proven by Bolton’s comments in the JTA article above, the open criticisms by the U.S. administration generally, or by any of the Western democracies who refused to endorse the UN HRC resolution on it, as well as by leading experts on the problems liberal democracies face in fighting counter-terrorist wars such as Col. Richard Kemp, ret., former Commander of British forces in Afghanistan, and Major General Jim Molan, ret., Chief of Operations for the Iraq Multinational Force in 2004-5.)

Even less can knowledgeable and decent Jews or non-Jews enroll themselves as useful idiots with and further the agenda of those bloodthirsty groups and authoritarian states seeking to delegitimize Israel completely, trying to make it a pariah state, and to kill Jews, whatever their views may be about the Report itself.  Goldstone’s willingness to play this role, knowingly and intentionally, utterly compromises any claim to Zionist beliefs or ethical stature he might wish to make.  In the same way, as the above links demonstrate, the nature of the Report itself utterly compromises any claim he might make to judicial expertise or stature.

“Michael Levin,” or Mahmoud al-Havoun, cites B’Tselem.  But Mahmoud fails to note that B’Tselem itself has emphasized in its statements that the Report is obviously highly biased and one-sided, and that B’Tselem does not endorse the Report as it stands.

In an article by Haviv Rettig Gur, published in the Jerusalem Post on Sept 30, B’tselem’s executive director Jessica Montell is quoted as follows:

“There’s no question that the HRC, which mandated the Goldstone [fact-finding mission into the Gaza fighting], has an inappropriate, disproportionate fixation with Israel,” she said, adding that the Council was “a political body made up of diplomats, not human rights experts, which means that the powerful states are never going to come under scrutiny the way the powerless will. So China, Russia and the US will never have commission of inquiry, regardless of how their crimes rank relative to Israeli crimes.”

Furthermore, the Goldstone Report itself, which was presented in its final version to the Human Rights Council on Tuesday, is “disagreeable” and mistaken in some of its gravest accusations against Israel, she believes. These include the claim that Israel intentionally targeted the civilian population rather than Hamas, and the “weak, hesitant way that the report mentions Hamas’s strategy of using civilians [in combat].”

But, she added, Israel could have avoided such a report had it conducted “a thorough investigation” of Cast Lead itself, something which B’Tselem continues to urge on Israel’s leaders.

End quote from the Jerusalem Post.  But even the link provided by Mahmoud contains the statement by B’Tselem that the Report was strongly one-sided and biased.  Mahmoud somehow did not see those passages, and fails to point them out.  This proves his unreliability, if not plain dishonesty, just as Goldstone, in his frequent claims that critics have only attacked him, but have not dealt with the actual details of the Report itself, is not being honest.  See the above links, of which Goldstone knows because his attention has been drawn to them.  He just continues to pretend that they do not exist and thus he need not respond to their serious evidence and criticisms.

10/26/09 08:15 PM

One last brief point.  Grigory refers to Goldstone as similar to those tragic figures who served in Judenräte, Jewish Councils, under the Nazis.  The analogy is deeply unfair to those Jewish leaders of the Nazi period, although these misrepresentations have been made so often that they tend to gain currency and credibility amongst those unfamiliar with, or reluctant to face, the realities of the Nazi universe.  We are alive now: they are dead (some committed suicide when they could no longer endure their impossible situation, others were beaten to death by Nazis or killed in death camps).  We can criticise them; they cannot defend themselves.  They tried to make the life of Jews in ghettos bearable even in the face of Nazi brutality and random murder (in which they themselves might well be beaten up or killed by Nazi officers), to provide some work, to sustain voluntary and religious associations, to distribute rations that were intentionally one-third normal daily sustenance, designed to weaken fatally and slowly to starve to death hundreds of thousands of people.  Hannah Arendt began this tendency (in Eichmann in Jerusalem) to blame the victims, which she even dared to make out were more guilty than the Nazis themselves.  This is such a desecration of the truth and unjust smearing of their lives it must be named as such.

10/27/09 06:22 PM

Grigory, I do not mean to reproach you directly in regard to the issue of the Jewish Councils of Nazi-occupied Europe, and I apologize if you are offended; I actually agree with your basic sentiments concerning the UN and the American Jewish community, but just wish to rectify a widespread but unfair opinion about those tormented Jewish leaders under the Nazis.  Obviously there is a lot that can be said about them, but this is not the place. 

Perhaps a better analogy might be with the Yevsektsiya, the Jewish Communists appointed by the Soviet government to govern the Jews of the USSR in the early years of the Communist revolution: they brutally suppressed all manifestations of Jewish religion and institutional identity, closing synagogues and yeshivas, putting rabbis in prison or executing them, “purging” even secular Jewish leadership and ensuring that there would be no Jewish education of the next generation.  The reason this is a better analogy to Goldstein is that the members of the Yevsektsiya voluntarily and eagerly undertook to destroy Jewish communal autonomy, culture and traditions.  They endorsed the anti-Jewish agenda they enforced.  The leaders of the Jewish Councils under the Nazis did not endorse Nazism and were not willing collaborators but actually sought to preserve Jewish life, community existence and religious institutions despite the Nazis and even against the Nazi will. 

Goldstein, whatever may be his disclaimers, has effectively and knowingly made himself an eager and entirely voluntary collaborator with the anti-Zionists, using their double standards to delegitiimize the Jewish state and even its right to any self-defense at all.  He is remarkably soft on terrorist enemies of Israel, in contrast.  So to the degree that any comparisons are justified, he is like the Yevsektsiya, not like the Judenräte.