Michael Rivero Yet Again Us Media Portrays Israel as Victims of Evil Palestinian Rock Throwers
(Photograph past Robin Holland)
This week on the Periodical, Bill Moyers spoke with Justice Richard Goldstone, a respected figure in international law who headed the controversial UN Human Rights Council investigation into Israel and Hamas' actions during military operations in Gaza that began last December.
While the resulting 'Goldstone Study' ended that both sides had committed state of war crimes and, potentially, crimes confronting humanity, it was especially harsh in its condemnation of the State of israel Defence Forces (IDF) for their actions in Gaza, saying that they were "a deliberately disproportionate assail designed to punish, humiliate, and terrorize a noncombatant population, radically diminish its local economic chapters both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an e'er increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability."
Last calendar month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech to the Un in which he argued that the report was unfair and morally misguided. The released text of the speech says:
"For viii long years, Hamas fired from Gaza thousands of missiles, mortars, and rockets on nearby Israeli cities. Yr after year, as these missiles were deliberately hurled at our civilians, non a single United nations resolution was passed condemning those criminal attacks. Nosotros heard zippo, absolutely nada, from the Un Man Rights Council, a misnamed institution if e'er there was one... Faced with an enemy committing a double war crime of firing on civilians while hiding backside civilians, State of israel sought to conduct surgical strikes confronting the rocket launchers. That was no easy chore because the terrorists were firing missiles from homes and schools, using mosques as weapons depots and ferrying explosives in ambulances. Israel, past contrast, tried to minimize casualties past urging Palestinian civilians to vacate the targeted areas... Never has a land gone to such boggling lengths to remove the enemy'due south noncombatant population from harm's way. Still faced with such a clear example of aggressor and victim, who did the United nations Human Rights Council decide to condemn? State of israel. A republic legitimately defending itself from terror is morally hanged, fatigued and quartered, and given an unfair trial to kicking. By these twisted standards, the UN Human Rights Quango would have dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war criminals. What a perversion of truth, what a perversion of justice."
On the Periodical, Justice Goldstone addressed critics of the report and described his experience conducting the investigation in Gaza:
"I would like to see [critics'] response to the substance [of the report], particularly the attack on the infrastructure of Gaza, which seems to me to be absolutely unjustifiable... I saw the destruction of the only flour-producing manufactory in Gaza. I saw fields plowed up past Israeli tank bulldozers... I had to accept the very emotional and difficult interviews with fathers whose little daughters were killed, whose families were killed... Information technology was a very difficult investigation which volition give me nightmares for the rest of my life."
Beak Moyers then asked Goldstone why he considers Israel'due south actions to have been state of war crimes. Goldstone said:
"[In] humanitarian law, really primal is what'southward known equally the principle of stardom. It requires commanders, troops, all people involved in war to distinguish between civilians and combatants, and so there'due south a question of proportionality. One can, in war, target a armed forces target, and there can be what'south euphemistically referred to as 'collateral damage,' but the collateral damage must be proportionate to the armed services aim. If you tin take out a munitions manufacturing plant in an urban area with a loss of 100 lives, or you can use a flop twice at large and take out the aforementioned mill and impale 2000 people, the latter would exist a war crime. The former wouldn't... We found that [Hamas'] firing of many thousands of rockets and mortars at a civilian population to constitute a serious state of war crime, and we said perhaps crimes confronting humanity... It's hard to bargain equally with a state party with the sort of sophisticated ground forces State of israel has, with an air force and a navy and the well-nigh sophisticated weapons [and] with Hamas using really improvised, imprecise armaments. Information technology'south hard to equate their power."
Click here to review the Goldstone study and some of the voices responding to information technology.
What do you recall?
Source: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2009/10/were_war_crimes_committed_in_g.html
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