21st Century Blood Libel

I. The Goldstone Report was commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council following Israel's military action in Gaza. The Council's objective was the political defeat of Israel by gutting any lawful exercise of the country's right of self-defense.

The Council set a mandate to focus only on Israel and its predetermined violations of international law. The Council selected investigators who had already publicly expressed the view that Israel was guilty.

This video contains footage of the Council's consideration of the Goldstone report. Lining up to congratulate Goldstone are some of the world’s leading human rights abusers. They understood the report as granting a license to declare Israel guilty of a "holocaust," "concentration camps," "genocide," and "crimes against humanity."

Also in the video are statements by Israel's accusers which illustrate the political agenda behind the Goldstone mission.

The video includes Anne Bayefsky's response to Goldstone during his "dialogue" with states and non-governmental organizations at the Council, and Goldstone's Israel/South African apartheid analogy as an answer to her cricitism. While the President of the Human Rights Council castigates Bayefsky for her remarks, he has no difficulty thanking Israel's attackers for their hate-filled demonization of the Jewish state.

Watch video, here

(Via: Eye on the UN)

II. Listening to member states in their eagerness to condemn Israel, one keeps hearing

"Israel guilty of a "holocaust," "concentration camps," "genocide," and "crimes against humanity."

However, a few days later, Richard Goldstone sat with the very obliging Fareed Zakaria where the following exchange took place:

ZAKARIA: When you look at these crimes against humanity, these war crimes, how do they compare? You have a long career. You've seen many of these kinds of things, investigated some. Where does this stand? How should we think of it?

GOLDSTONE: Well, you know, I don't like making comparisons because each situation is so different. But certainly one can compare what has happened here to situations that I've investigated in the former Yugoslavian genocide. One doesn't here in respect of Gaza get anywhere in my view anywhere near that sort of situation.

It's very different. Many people are comparing what's happening in the occupied territories to apartheid South Africa. I don't like that comparison. There's some similarities, but there are more differences.

The the testimony of the author himself, who wrote what amounts to a harsh prosecutorial indictment of Israel, severe enough in its findings to merit being labeled as a "blood libel" (a judgment I concur with), objects to comparisons --equivalences-- suggested between the events he investigated and such enterprises as genocide, holocaust or apartheid.

So one wonders if even one of those who rushed with such glee to condemn Israel of genocide and what not, actually read the report or even paid the scantest attention to what Goldstone was saying (as perfidiously slanderous as it is).

And what kind of moral weight, then, would we give a commission that does not even bother to read the reports it has initiated in the first place.

It appears that facts, records, legal opinions are of little use for the UNHR Commission.

UPDATE: Richard Goldstone himself now seems to be backing away from the report’s conclusions