Goldstone - a Man Detached from Reality

I have tried to fathom out what drove a man like Richard Goldstone to take up the poisoned chalice of the UN Human Rights Council mission to Gaza.
I pondered how such an eminent person could lead such a blatantly biased committee. I was angered by the false conclusions of his 'fact-finding' mission, by his refusal to listen to expert and non-partisan military and legal witnesses, by his dismissal of brutal and continuous Hamas war crimes against Israeli civilian targets, his total ignorance of the Hamas slaughter of fellow-Palestinians during the Gaza conflict.
Yet, despite this and more, Goldstone insists that he performed in an even-handed manner.

I read his report. I heard his recent protestations against the growing criticism of him and his work.
My examination shows that he is a man detached from reality, both political and military, that surrounded the Gaza conflict and its subsequent consequences.

A man detached from reality is a man detached from the truth.

To highlight Goldstone's detachment from reality let's go back to the beginning.
Richard Goldstone prides himself as being the leading jurist in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in his native South Africa. While turning up evidence against the De Klerk regime he did not consider investigating the crimes committed by the ANC.
He used the same biased tactics in investigating the Gaza conflict. he refused to address the nature, actions, charter, and violent history of Hamas. He respectfully addresses them as 'the Gazan Authority' thereby refuting the internationally accepted claim that Hamas is recognised as a terrorist organisation.
Equating Hamas with Israel in his even-handedness portrays, yet again, that he is out of touch with reality.

He fails to list the evident crimes perpetrated by Hamas against Israeli civilians over an eight year period. In deference to his Hamas hosts in Gaza he failed to produce the evidence of how Hamas used Palestinian civilians as human shields and civilian infrastructure, including the Shifa Hospital, as their command and control centers and as part of their weapons and explosive storage. He even omits the Hamas slaughter of fellow-Palestinians during the Gaza fighting.

Ignoring these crimes, Mr. Goldstone, does not mean they did not occur.
Ignoring these crimes, Mr. Goldstone, shows your lack of even-handedness.
Ignoring these crimes, Mr. Goldstone, is a deliberate dereliction of your duties.
Ignoring these crimes, Mr. Goldstone, displays your detachment from reality and the truth.
Based on this alone, your findings are flawed and biased.

But let us go deeper. Let us go back to the origins of your iniquitous mission.

Richard Goldstone likes to tell the world that his instructions were to carry our a fact-finding mission to investigate potential misdemeanours on both sides or the conflict.
This is clearly incorrect.

His mandate clearly states that it was 'an urgent fact-finding mission to investigate all violations of international human rights law by the occupying power, Israel, against the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian territory, particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip, due to the current aggression.'

Note the language. This mandate prejudges everything in a blatantly biased fashion. It prejudges only one side as the aggressor. It failed to instruct the panel to investigate any Hamas or Palestinian crimes.

Either Goldstone is lying, or he is out of touch with reality, when he claims to have received an even-handed brief.

Professor Chinkin rejected Israel's claim that it acted in self defence. She then disqualified herself from the panel when she publicly accused Israel of war crimes while the conflict was raging and before the outset of the mission.
Goldstone should have demanded her dismissal. He did not., thereby approving and heading a biased committee that was ready to prejudge Israel according to their official brief.

Leading figures such as Mary Robinson and fellow South African, Desmond Tutu, both refused to head this committee in the certain knowledge that it was a biased and political mission.
Goldstone proved he was our of touch with reality by not appreciating this vital point and by accepting the chairmanship.

Goldstone showed no understanding or appreciation of the events that forced Israel to take the actions it did in self defence.
His mandate was deliberately timed to avoid confronting uncomfortable issues like eight years of Hamas rocket and mortar fire against Israeli civilian targets.

Goldstone blames Israel for not opening up to his prejudged mission. He now accuses Israel of being guilty for the biased text of his report by not cooperating with him and his fellow members.
Yet he had applications from numerous organisations, individuals, witnesses, and experts, all anxious to plead on behalf of Israel. They were either turned down or ignored by Goldstone.

Goldstone saw many destroyed or damaged buildings in Gaza. That, for Goldstone, was sufficient to accuse Israel of 'deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure and causing collective punishment'.

Goldstone did not investigate if these buildings were in the heartland of Islamic terror. He did not question if prolonged and intensive fighting had taken place there. He did not reason that many buildings had contained Hamas or Islamic Jihad armed fighters, weapons, explosives, or had been booby trapped. His lack of military expertise did not prevent him from accusing Israel of war crimes simply based on his vision of structural damage.
For Goldstone, damaged buildings equals war crimes.

His 'fact-finding' mission heard heresay that was written as evidential proof of war crimes. One family were reported to be farmers when members of this family were poster boys for Izz a-Din al-Qaddam Martyrs Brigade and armed terrorists.

His witnesses gave their evidence with the Hamas minders breathing down their necks. Yet Goldstone found no defect in this method of collecting evidence.

The Goldstone Report demands that both sides must submit to an independent enquiry and report back to the United Nations within six months or face potential prosecution at the International Criminal Court at The Hague.
Goldstone knows that non-state actors, such as Hamas, can be guilty of serious crimes against human rights and clearly defined war crimes yet receive a free pass. They cannot be brought to justice according to United Nations definition. Only Israel can be dragged to the dock.
In a previous article I have written about the Nazi-style legal system employed by the United Nations.
Here we have it in all its disgusting glory.

How much further proof do we need to show that Richard Goldstone acted outside the norms of reality? We are now in an unreal Kafka-type existence where the victims will be put on trial by the murderous dictators and terrorists.

Richard Goldstone cannot see how adversely he has affected the Middle East peace process. The 'moderate' Mahmoud Abbas and his Fattah party is under pressure from a rampant Hamas who see the Goldstone Report, backed by all their majority supporters in the United Nations General Assembly, as part of their ongoing war against the Jewish state who they see as an abomination.

As mentioned earlier, Goldstone's lack of reality failed to see that his report would turn into a political and legal weapon against Israel by the Human Rights Council of which he was a head.
He recently said that he was 'saddened' by the fact that Hamas crimes were not addressed in the continuing attack against Israel.

He really did not want it to end this way, but it is, Mr. Goldstone, and it is all because you are out of touch with the reality of our vicious world.

It is us, in Israel, that must pay the price for your detachment from reality and your blindness to the truth.

The United Nations apply a Nazi legal system on the Jews.

It is becoming common practise for nation states and non-nation actors to apply legal means to achieve political results.
Known as 'lawfare' these methods have been increasingly applied against Israel.
They are being used as yet another weapon in their armoury to eliminate the Jewish state.
As such, their roots reach back to wartime Germany. Their ultimate application is eerily similar to that created by the Nazis.

Back in the dark days of European history Nazi Germany operated a legal system that gave legitimacy to the machinations of the Third Reich.
The raison d-etre for the Nazi anti-Semitic programs were to remove a stain to world peace, namely the Jews, and to create a new world order.
When Hitler condemned the Jews for all of the world's woes German jurisprudence rubber stamped the measures demanded by its leaders.
The Jews, they claimed, were guilty of the most heinous crimes against humanity and laws were established to deal with these Jewish criminals.
It became legal to deprive Jews of work, to make them wear the Yellow Star, to herd them into Ghettos, to deprive them of their property, to transport them to the death camps, and to execute them.
This was all performed under a veneer of a legal respectability, that everyone involved in this genocide was obeying his duty in law and, therefore, upholding the legal rulings that applied in the territories controlled by Germany.
Records were kept at each stage of the deligitimisation and extermination of the Jews. These records showed that the law was being enforced. The book-keeping was part of the legal system that proved, in Nazi eyes, that everything was being done in a legally-acceptable and systematically transparent manner. German courts upheld the fragmentation of Jewish society and its elimination as required by Nazi law.

Few dared question whether the Jews were truly guilty as charged. The law, and the resultant punishment, took its course - and the rest is history.

At various stages of the 'legal' genocide of the Jews, whether in the Ghettos or the concentration camps, the Germans employed Jews to enforce their actions.

The horrors of the Holocaust should have buried the notion that Jews are the enemy of the world and are easy prey to fanatics and their supporters.
Sadly, the old hatred was merely dormant. It has re awoken in a different form and has found itself coalescing under the auspices of the United Nations.

The year is 2009 and it is happening, again, before our very eyes.

The United Nations is enacting a Nazi-style legal system.

It began before the United Nations Human Rights congress in Durban that decreed that 'Zionism is Racism'.
Israel had already been targeted by member states for accusations and deligimisation.
Just as perversely as the European Jews were the victims of the evil Third Reich and their anti-Semitic supporters so now the Jewish state is solely and exclusively being dehumanised, sentenced, and condemned by nations guilty of the worst crimes against humanity.

Massacres and genocides by brutal dictators have largely been ignored. Only the Jewish state has had laws and rulings applied against it that do not apply to other members.

These rulings were not made in order to have Israel reform itself to the fictitious demands and, therefore, feel at ease among the league of nations. They are biasly enacted to turn Israel into the Jewish pariah among the nations.

The United Nations Human Rights Council, hatched in a Wannsee-type conference in Geneva this year by malevolent instigators, shrewdly selected a naive jurist to be their Jewish Kappo.
Richard Goldstone thought he had been elected to uphold the law. In his academic simplicity he assumed that he would apply universal jurisprudence. Instead, he became a prisoner to the imposition of Nazi-style justice.
His victims - the Jews of Israel.

The year is 2009 and it is happening, again, before our very eyes.

His report, replete with documented evidence, eye witness testimony, statements of legal requirements and recommendations that fit neatly into the prescribed illegality of the guilty party will be brought to the United Nations General Assembly.
Lengthy discourse will inevitably condemn Israel.

The parties who are truly guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, the very ones who are creating the lawfare against the Jewish state, get a free pass.

The United Nations has become a chamber akin to the Third Reich.
As in Nazi Germany, there will be one or two brave voices that will attempt to rescue Israel, but these will be minority individuals battling against a Nazi-like system determined to enforce The Final Solution of the Jewish Nation.

The year is 2009 and it is happening, again, before our very eyes.

The ones perpetrating the campaign against the Jewish state are, as with the Third Reich in the 30's and 40s, those guilty of the worst crimes today. They include Libya, the Hamas-led Palestinian protest, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, China, Egypt, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan.

Those that support the Goldstone Report and the current UN motions against Israel do so in the same spirit of evil intent as Nazi Germany, or assume that the blood libel against Israel must be true. Just as there were those who gave lip service to the thought that Jews were capable of the crimes imposed on them by the Nazi laws so today some assume that Israel deliberately targeted and massacred innocent people in Gaza.

The inversion of Nazi-type justice imposed on the Jewish state while defrauding Israel by portraying it as a Nazi-type regime is meant to isolate, deligitimise, and eventually eradicate the Jewish state.

Israel, as with the Jews in Nazi Germany, finds itself in the harsh spotlight of those who would do us harm.
The report is not an end in itself just as the Nazi judgments were not an end in itself but plainly the beginning of the end for European Jewry.

The intent, the destiny decreed by the perpetrators, is the same.

The year is 2009 and it is happening, again, before our very eyes.

Goldstone - Attorney for the Prosecution.

Richard Goldstone earned a reputation during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission findings in South Africa.

There is little truth and zero reconciliation in his recent adventure in heading the UN Human Rights Council campaign in Gaza. On the contrary, the result of his botched activities has relit the blaze anew in the region.

His South African Commission was charged with granting amnesty for crimes and human right violations during disturbances in his homeland.

Not only is there no amnesty in his committee's brief into the Gaza conflict. The ultimate aim, since its inception, was to brand Israel as the guilty party to the conflict.

It is enlightening to learn that Bishop Desmond Tutu, the instigator of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, was one of the candidates who refused to head this biased committee.

It is not the purpose of this article to question the motives of why Richard Goldstone accepted the poisoned chalice. It is sufficient to examine his code of conduct and behaviour during the enquiry.

We are told to respect Goldstone as an international jurist of impeccable character. His role as head of the United Nations Mission to Gaza is clearly one of Prosecution attorney against the State of Israel. His actions, lack of desire to question and probe witness statements falls abysmally short of a neutral investigator in search of facts and the truth.

Indeed, his findings read like the case for the prosecution.

Where was the impartiality that the world expected of him? Where was the balance to counter his fellow committee members who had displayed premeditated bias against Israel leading into his commission?

On these counts he failed. Therefore, his code of conduct must be brought into question.

When his co-jurors refused to ask pointed questions of witnesses why did Goldstone not demand answers to key questions? Questions like, "Do you, or your family members, belong to a terrorist organisation?" Was your property used for the storage of weapons and explosives?" "Were you, or any member of your family active in terrorist or armed acts against Israelis, either military or civilian"? "Was there any military or terrorist activities in or near the vicinity of your property?"

Not only were these questions not asked, the committee accepted eye witnesses as being 'credible and reliable'.

When such eye witnesses are people who are proven to belong to organisations like Islamic Jihad and the Izz a-Din al-Qassam then one must query the motivation of Goldstone.

Clearly his findings portray the attorney for the prosecution.

When Goldstone reduces the background to the conflict, rejects Israeli eye witnesses, almost dismisses Hamas human rights abuses, fails to even mention repeated Hamas massacres against Palestinians it is patently obvious there is an agenda at work that is certainly not Truth or Reconciliation.

The fighting within Gaza has stopped but rockets are still being launched into Israel. Seven hundred and twenty rockets have been fired at southern Israel during 2009. Where is Goldstone's UN Human Rights Council investigation against Hamas for these international war crimes?

Israel completely withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2004. The irony for the UN HRC is that the only remaining Israeli in Gaza is being held illegally and against his will by Hamas - yet another profound human rights abuse that is worthy to bring Hamas to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Gilat Schalit is being held, with no access by any human rights NGOs or the International Red Cross and no trial for more than three years.

His case received barely a mention in the Goldstone Report. Why, if Goldstone's brief was not to be the prosecution attorney against Israel.

Highlighting the suffering of the people of Sderot, Ashkelon, Ashdod, southern Israel and, of course, the fate of Gilat Schalit would embarrass the case that the UN HRC is trying to build up against Israel.

And Goldstone played his role perfectly in downgrading these issues.

It is precisely the fate of Gilat Schalit that the UN Human Rights Council should be advocating. His rights have been horribly abused for two thousand days. His rights have been abused further by being so ignored by the 'holier-than-thou' human rights organisations who are really politically motivated and only apply human rights abuses when it suites their cause.

Goldstone would have been advised to follow the Jewish calling that 'Justice, justice, shall you pursue' and not rush to judgement based on dubious eye-witness testimony obtained in tainted circumstances.

Has Goldstone conducted a deliberate, in depth, investigation, as he was duty bound to perform, his reputation would be intact today -even if he would prove Israeli war crimes.

Instead he is complicit in a conspiracy to drag Israel, and Israel only, into the International Criminal Court.

True, he has demanded that Israel refute his allegations within six months. Again, the actions of a prosecuting lawyer.

He did so, he claims, to avoid criminal charges being brought against Israel. I ask if he is being naive, or malicious?

It is clear to everyone in Israel that Israeli military personnel and politicians will be victim to impeachment in a number of European countries as a result of his report even if Israel rebuts his report in full.

Not only did Goldstone act as the prosecuting attorney against Israel, he became the fall guy and judge, by virtue of his report, that condemns Israel to a guilty verdict obtained by stealth by the UN Human Rights Council.