Editorials
Geneva, September 30, 2009 — Submitted to the UN Human Rights Council yesterday was a 575-page “report” fit for the garbage can. Better yet, for the shredder.
Focusing on Israel’s war in Gaza, the document is a transparently biased hatchet job, written at the behest of an organization whose sole bent has been to portray the Jewish state as the world’s worst human rights abuser.
The U.S. must use all moral authority and diplomatic suasion to quash this dangerous piece of work. The Obama administration accepted that responsibility in assuming membership on the council on the promise of reform from within. Now, American diplos must deliver.
The report, authored by Richard Goldstone, finds Israel guilty of war crimes on the grounds, essentially, that Israel took on Hamas after the terror group had rained thousands of missiles onto Israeli soil.
It fails to mention that Israel’s terrorist enemies seek to eliminate the Jewish state.
It relies on Palestinian witnesses who testified under duress – fearing to tell the truth about what they saw.
It asserts that Israel “deliberately” terrorized civilians – despite the fact that the country’s defense forces, in stark contrast to Hamas, went out of their way to avoid killing innocents.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner yesterday condemned the report’s claim that the Israeli military intended to terrorize. He attacked Goldstone’s failure to hold Hamas to account for using Palestinian civilians as human shields. And he exposed Goldstone’s outrageously lopsided call on Israel to stop using certain munitions – while saying nothing about Hamas’ indiscriminate firing of rockets.
The council, whose members include Cuba, China and Saudi Arabia, will now consider acting on the report, with many urging referral to the Security Council for prosecution by the International Criminal Court. The U.S. must lead the opposition – and must win.
The document must not stand. No one can more eloquently explain why than Dr. Mirela Siderer, a physician who was wounded, along with 100 patients, when her clinic was struck by a missile fired from Gaza.
She told her story to Goldstone’s commission and confronted him yesterday, asking:
“Judge Goldstone, in a 500-page report, why did you completely ignore my story?”
“Why are there only two pages about Israeli victims like me, who suffered thousands of rockets over eight years?
“Why did you choose to focus on the period of my country’s response, but not on that of the attacks that caused it?
“Why did you not tell me that this council judged Israel guilty in advance, in its meeting of last January?
“Why did you not tell me that members of your panel signed public letters judging Israel guilty in advance?”
“Where were you when Gaza attacked my medical clinic, in violation of international human rights and humanitarian law? Where was this council? Why were you all silent?”
Nobody answered. Because there is no decent response.
