Sure, sure, there were “politics” involved and politics is petty, but that’s precisely the point. Consider the timing. On one level it might have been designed to influence the Afghan decision. In other words: Nobel Peace Prize Winner Calls For Troop Surge is going to look paradoxical to some, perhaps even the current “decider”.

On the other hand I wouldn’t down play the worldwide reaction to he sickening virulence of American Obama-haters. The worldwide web circulation of pictures of thuggish goons carrying guns (yes I know it’s legal, it’as also incredibly stupid), haters screaming down dissenters from their talking points at Townhalls, the kind of violence in the rhetoric of the anonymous cowards who spill their bile–behind their cowardly anonymity–in the comments section.

Finally I think it was the Hitler mustaches on the Obama posters. Norway is a nation that was invaded by and lived under Hitler’s rule. Sweden was threated into neutrality. I wouldn’t blame them for wanting to rebuke these hysterical whiners trivializing Nazism before they unleashed some nut with a gun who took their frothings seriously. (Of course they could just be jealous of the attention given to the Danes).

But all in all I think you can pat yourself on the back, haters, you’ve just won your man (you know you love him–you’re obsessed with him!) a Nobel Prize.

*And by the way I don’t think it matters when the voting took place the hate has been goin on since he became the frontrunner for the nomination. And it could always have changed, It ain’t over til the fat man squeals (you know who I men).

.

You might have missed it and I didn”t find it on line (if you have a link send it to comments), but last Saturday the Wall Street journal was the first major U.S. daily I know of to report on doubts over the Lockerbie prosecution and conviction.

Most U.S. media covering the British hand-off of al-Meghari, the Liban convincted of blowing up Pan Am flight 103 oveer Lockerbie Scotland in 1988, never showed any curiosity about the substance of the appeal of his conviction which a Scottish judicial review called “a miscarriage of justice”. It was a terrorist crime, no doubt, but did we get the right terrorists. I don’t know for sure, but I think these things matter. But in fact I didn’t even see any mention in the coverage that he maintained his innocence. (His Tripoli hero’s welcome was no less shameful because those who chreered him did so–I think–because they believed he did it).

But he’s maintained his innocence and the Wall Street Journal reporter Cassell Bryan Low tells us he’s continued to try to” clear his name”. Dropping his appeal appears to bea condition of his release but he’s been releasing document the WSJ says, including the appeal brief. Check out the links to the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books in my previous post onthe subject for a review of the Lockerbie evidence and tell me there isn’t there isnt reasonable doubt. .

I got a very interesting Blackberry communque from my friend David Samuels, whose work you probably know fro, The New Yorker, Harpers etc and his two books The Runner and Only Love Can Break Your Heart.

I think it’s an astute and sohisticated analysis of the way the fog of intelligence can obscure even the fog of war:

Tuesday, October 6, 2009, 10:06 AM
>> Its not implausible, as you know.
>> Intelligence is murky and terrorists are connected to each
>> other in operational ways the same way that thieves are.
>> They inhabit a milieu where they get orders for certain
>> types of merchandise. The nature of a secret world made up
>> of overlapping clandestine networks who often use some of
>> the same people for their logistics (clean weapons,
>> passports, undetected passage across borders) gives rise to
>> competing theories whenever an action takes place. I
>> believe for example that one of the most startling examples
>> of this kind of cross-pollination was how Terry Nichols
>> learned how to make a high-yield fertilizer bomb. I find the
>> circumstantial evidence of an Al Qaeda connection pretty
>> convincing. But that doesn’t mean that Nichols was an Al
>> Qaeda operative, or that Ramzi Yousef gave instructions for the
>> bombing of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City. It means that
>> Nichols entered a milieu where he met some people who
>> helped him get better at his job of making bombs.
>>
>> Similarly, I do believe that the Libyans were involved in a
>> support capacity for the Lockerbie bombing and may have
>> known something of the actual plan. The fact of SOME Libyan
>> involvement naturally gave rise to competing theories about
>> method, author and motive as it always does. At some point,
>> someone put a heavy finger on the scales in favor of the
>> Libyan theory and to the exclusion of evidence of a much
>> deeper degree of Syrian involvement through Ahmad Jibril’s PFLP-GC.
>> To say that this was an intelligence call made for political
>> reasons is to describe something normal that happens every
>> day. Just look at your posts on the 2007 NIE.

>> As far as James Baker and George HW Bush were concerned, I
>> would imagine this was a simple act of the realpolitik on
>> which both men prided themselves. The finger on the scales
>> in favor of Khadafy and against the Syrians would have been a
>> no-brainer. Khadafy was crazy and had killed lots of
>> Americans in the 80s. And the Syrians weren’t directly
>> responsible for Lockerbie – in the sense that they didn’t order the
>> bombing or carry it out. Their crime was hosting Jibril’s PFLC-GC,
>> whose German cell built the bomb for the Iranians and handled
>> much of the logistics. The involvement of Jibril’s group probably
>> gave some part of the Syrian security apparatus a degree of advance
>> knowledge at least the outlines of the plot- which the Libyans probably
>> also had.
>>
>> In exchange for a free pass on Lockerbie, which Syria didn’t
>> plan or execute, and which only served that country’s
>> interests in a tangential way as part of its relationship
>> with Iran (dude, here’s the phone number of my friend who
>> can score you that coke), Hafez al-Assad sent 30,000
>> soldiers and some rusty tanks to join Bush’s grand coalition
>> to take out Saddam. Remember how important Arab backing was
>> for the first Gulf War as opposed to the second? Well, how
>> do you think we got it? As far as the dynamic duo of Bush and Baker
>> war concerned, the Syrians more than made up for the solid they
>> did for Iran by letting Jibril off his chain with the solid they did for us in
massaging the optics of the Gulf War coalition.
>> Seen from this angle, Lockerbie was actually a blessing for the US
>> because it put the wily Hafez al-Assad
>> in our pockets on the cheap while giving us powerful evidence
>> we could use if he ever let his Palestinians off the leash
>> again to disrupt the US project to create a Palestinian
>> state that started at the Bush-Baker peace conference in
>> Madrid. Interestingly, Assad mostly kept his word and didn’t let
>> his Palestinian clients disrupt Oslo.
>>
>> The real moral failure that came about from cooking the Lockerbie intelligence
>> was not framing the Libyans – who were probably accessories to
>> the crime – or letting the Syrians off scott-free
>> (the Syrians paid us back big time, in the currency of our choice)
>> but letting the Iranians off the hook for the premeditated mass killing of Western civilians
>> – a success that no doubt encouraged them to bomb the Jewish community center in
>> Buenos Aires and which may culminate someday in their use of
>> a nuclear bomb against Israel or innocent civilians elsewhere.
>> But there was no way to connect the Iranians to Lockerbie
>> without bringing forward the evidence that Jibril’s PFLP-GC
>> executed the crime. Where the connection between Jibril and
>> Syria is very public and easy to make, the Iranian
>> connection is much harder to prove – and so the public case
>> against Iran would have wound up being a case against Jibril
>> and Syria. So one can argue that Bush and Baker in fact cashed in
>> the Lockerbie card for the most they could get, like the
>> skilled Texas Hold’em players that they were.
>>
>> I would also speculate that a dose of the shitheel
>> antisemitism in which Baker specialized probably also
>> contributed in some small degree to the ease with which
>> blame was shifted away from the Syrians and Jibril. The
>> Israels were quite vocal about blaming the Syrians and their
>> Palestinian proxies, and Baker must have enjoyed telling
>> them that their tribal enmities would no longer stand in the
>> way of America’s larger interests in the Arab world -
>> including the Gulf War coalition and Baker’s pet project of
>> rapproachment with Syria.

I think the shameless U.K. government should make u for its shameful deal by allowing the appeal to procede. History and justice demand it.

..in a highly respected U.S. publication.

You may wonder why I may seem obsessed with the doubts over the guilt of al-Meghari the Libyan convicted of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 whose wreckage was scattered over Lockerbie, Scotland along with the remains of 259 passengers and crew including 189 Americans and 66 children of all nations.

What surprizes me, although I guess it shouldn’t, is that so few reporters or media seem to care about the doubts I’ve reported on in two previous posts, most comprehensively detailed in The London Review of Books September, 24 issue. People can’t live with uncertainty! They crave certainty more than they crave truth. Even if it might mean giving mass-murdering terrorists a free pass.

Now at last a serious U.S. publication has aired the doubts. In the current issue of The New York Review of Books Malise Ruthven carefully explains why the case against the Libyan was far from solid and has been falling apart ever since his conviction,

More rapidly since 2007 when the key witness who supposedly linked the Libyan to a bomb component admitted he’d committed perjury at the trial, and an exhaustive 800 page review of the case by a Scottish judicial commission concluded that “a miscarriage of justice may have occurred”. And yet I saw none of this in any of the reporting on the Libyan’s release here in the states.

Why frame the Libyan when so much evidence pointed to a Syrian based terrorist group? The most plausible answer suggests Ruthven and the London review is that the crime was subcontracted by Iran to a Syrian terrorist group to get revenge for the accidental shootdown of an Iranian airliner by a US warship five months before the Lockerbie bombing. And that by the time of the trial, the Gulf War coalition was gathering and surprize, Syria was on board and Libya was supporting Saddam. I don’t know how much truth there is to this, But nobody seems concerned about finding out. In fact one of the conditions for al-Meghari’s release was that he drop his appeal of his conviction, an appeal in which some uncomfortable facts may have come out, uncomfortable for the UK and maybe the US.

That yes there was a corrupt deal behind the release, but it involved bargaining not over oil but over historical truth–and justice for the families of the victims, many of whom are suing now to find the truth. It may be the last chance given the refusal of the most of the mainstream media to care.

Just in case you had doubts on the bankruptcy of the 2007 U.S. N.I.E. on Iran, and, in particular its dubious assertion that Iran had ceased working on nuclear warheads in 2003 (see post below), check out this report on British intelfrom The Financial Times. (h/t The Daily Beast

*By the way I want to make clear i don’t support a military attack on Iranian nuclear facilities with all the potential apocalyptic consequences that are likely to ensue. I support measures that will bring to power a non-genocidally minded regime in Iran.

Will all the pundits who relied on the discredited 2007 NIE on Iran now admit that they were wrong? That they bought into and kept citing, without any serious questioning, the now clearly politically skewed analysis in the so-called National Intelligence Estimate of that year? You remember: the considered consensus wisdom of the entire U.S. intelligence community, which misled the world into believing there was nothing to worry about Iran’s nuclear program, that it had virtually ceased. When, in fact, out of the three components of a nuclear weapons program, at most one might have been suspended, if that.

Will the congressional intelligence committees demand to know how such a deliberately misleading report was being leaked and fed to the public by half-baked pundits even after (we now learn) some part of the “intelligence community” knew — before the the NIE was issued — about the secret nuclear fuel facility we’re now reading about?

What took them so long? Or if there were reasons to keep silent about it, why issue a report that deliberately misled the world into the opposite conclusion? The NIE now appears to be a deliberate LIE — deliberate disinformation, disingenuously written by its authors, who should be hauled before the committees and asked how they could have made such fools of the “intelligence community” and those who took their report seriously.

After all, it was not without consequences. The report essentially bought the Iranians two years of non-interfering in their obvious (to everyone but the “intelligence community”) drive to build nuclear weapons.

Who chose the authors of the LIE? How much did they get paid for distorting intelligence, betraying their trust, our trust (those who had any left after an unbroken record of intelligence community bungling)? Why do we still trust anything that comes out of the “intelligence community” since they are almost always wrong?

Just to review the bidding: there are three components to a nuclear weapons development program. The most difficult is manufacturing the highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium fuel. The second is engineering the warhead itself, now no problem thanks to Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan, who sold the information to North Korea and Iran. And finally there is the delivery system, the missiles which, just yesterday, Iran demonstrated their successful development of.

I have argued in the past that in some ways, in the sick mind of the deniers holocaust denial is the next step in the evolution of evil.

Not only do the deniers lie about the holocaust, they lie about their denial. Almost without exception they know it happened and they’re glad it happened, and they want it to happen again. And they think they’ve found a tactic that will help.

In the absence of that they’ve found a way to add insult to injury in a viciously evil way: by branding the dead non-persons and calling the survivors (and every other decent person on earth) liars.

Accepting them as merely sick, pathological or insane is unacceptable. Nobody has articulated the larger geopolitical consequences of tolerating such lies and the license them to prepare for a second holocaust while denying the first than Bibi Netanyahu in his UN speech yesterday. he makes the point that it doesn’t merely affect Jews but disgraces and endangers the rest of the world as well.

I urge you to read it in its entirety. It’s link to the UN lie about Gaza is bracing truth-telling.

Obama’s UN speech defined him as a solutionist. I envy him. I wish I were a solutionist. Do you know the word? I’ve often referred to “the American belief there’s a solution to every problem,” but I didn’t coin the word “solutionism” — although I wish I had.

I’m not sure he invented it, but the first of the some 4000-plus Google entries for “solutionism” (now 5000-plus since Obama’s speech — coincidence?) comes from my friend Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic*, writing about the Mideast. He calls solutionism “America’s national religion”: the compulsion to believe that, with good will and good faith, a solution to everything — even ancient hatreds — can be found. Maybe it’s because we’re too young a country to have experienced ancient hatreds, although we brought a lot over with us. Ancient hatreds will trump good will and good faith every time.

It’s this really very admirable “solutionism” that Obama demonstrated at the UN. The optimistic belief that with good will and good faith there’s a solution to every international problem, just as there’s a solution to health care somewhere in the 500 amendments to the Senate bill.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s better to have a solutionist as president that a bitter misanthropic anti-solutionist like myself. But solutionists are optimists about human nature, despite the evidence in front of their eyes. I know every last shred of optimism about human nature I ever had was shredded ever further by my observation of commenter culture where the twisted face of hatred hides behind the cowardly mask of a screen name.

Seriously though, it just confirmed my feeling that the worst instincts drive out the best, especially when you think no one knows your name. The way a mask — of nationalism, ideology, religion, bigotry and above all else self-righteousness — can conceal and reveal. And we expect the Afghans to all get along? As someone put it, “What planet do you live on?”

The planet of solutionism headquartered at the UN is, in fact, a writhing, seething sea of ancient hatreds. Was it Yeats who said, of the Irish problem, “big hatred, little room”? No solutionist he, although a century later things finally seem to have quieted down a bit.

They don’t seem to go away. the doubts about whether the real mass murderers have gone free amidst the uproar of the freeing of the convicted Libyan. He may be guilty as charged.

But see if you feel as strongly about that after you read the September 24, issue of The London Review of books in which Gareth Peirce makes the case that released Libyan al-Megrahi was framed and Ahmad Jibril, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command was behind it.

It’s a sober evidence-backed, non conspiracy-theory investigation-of-the- investigation that all too many want to sweep under the rug. It in no way denies Libyan invovlement in murderous terrorism. In fact tht invovlement made it all the more easy to in the blame them for highly complicated, intelligence-related reasons we may never completely learn the truth about.

The indispensable Tom Gross gives a comprehensive–sickening–round up of its flaws and bias here.*

It’s like the lie of the Jenin “massacre” all over again.

*Apologies for non-working link above. I am reprinting Tom Gross’ summary of some of the articles in his post, plus, at the bottom you’ll find a working link to another site summarizing objections to the report:

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

ISRAEL: “THIS REPORT WAS CONCEIVED IN SIN”

Israelis across the political spectrum have reacted with fury to the outrageously biased report of a UN “fact-finding” mission in Gaza mandated by the horribly misnamed UN Human Rights Council and headed by South African Judge Richard Goldstone.

Goldstone denounced Israel for “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” and urged the Security Council to refer the matter to international war crimes prosecutors.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry said it was “appalled” by the UN report which was based almost exclusively on unverifiable testimony by Hamas sympathizer groups in Gaza.

Government spokesman Mark Regev said: “This report was conceived in sin and is the product of a union between propaganda and bias.” Israel’s Foreign Ministry launched a special webpage in an effort to rebut the allegations by the Goldstone committee: www.mfa.gov.il/gazafacts.

Referring to the upcoming speech of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in New York, Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin said: “The same UN that allows the president of a country to announce on a podium its aspiration to destroy the State of Israel has no right to teach us about morality.”

—————————————————————

CANADA, JAPAN, SWITZERLAND AND THE EU REJECT GOLDSTONE REPORT

Numerous states – including Canada, Japan, Switzerland and the European Union – refused to support the Goldstone mission before it even began, so slanted was the make-up of its team that included such anti-Israel bigots as London School of Economics Professor Christine Chinkin. (Goldstone himself served as a director of the anti-Israel group Human Rights Watch*.) Even so, Goldstone’s insistence that Israel be referred to the International Criminal Court is a very dangerous development for those who believe Israel should survive.

A special session of the Human Rights Council has been called for September 29 in Geneva, at which the Palestinians are expected to begin the process aimed at bringing the matter to the ICC.

* Goldstone was a director of Human Rights Watch (HRW) at the time HRW appointed Marc Garlasco its senior analyst. Garlasco, who authored the HRW report from which Goldstone “borrowed” so much “information,” was suspended last week after it was disclosed that he is an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia, and had said in an online posting that SS uniforms were “so cool.”

Even before his Nazi-link revelations came out, there were serious concerns about Garlasco. He appears to have played a major role in the later discredited allegations that Israel killed Palestinians on a Gaza beach in 2006 – allegations which The New York Times took seriously at the time and splashed all over its front page, even though it was later established that the Palestinians died after stepping on a Hamas shell. For more, see here: www.israpundit.com/2006/?p=1480. Goldstone relies on Garlasco’s supposed “military expertise” in his report.

(As reported last month in these dispatches, another senior HRW staff member – deputy director Joe Stork – hailed the “achievement” of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes for providing “an important boost in morale among Palestinians.”)

Among other “experts” cited by the Goldstone report was the Central Commission for Documentation and Pursuit of Israeli War Criminals.

—————————————————————

EVEN MARY ROBINSON DENOUNCES GOLDSTONE’S REPORT

Even longtime critic of Israel, Mary Robinson, denounced Goldstone’s mandate as “not balanced, because it focuses on what Israel did, without calling for an investigation on the launch of rockets by Hamas” at Israeli civilians. She added that it was “guided not by human rights, but by politics.”

—————————————————————

THE GUARDIAN AND OTHERS PLAY THE JEW CARD

Both The Guardian and The New York Times-owned International Herald Tribune made sure to emphasize on their front pages that Goldstone is a Jew, as if this would somehow excuse his extreme prejudice against Israel. (Throughout history those prejudiced against Jews have used individual Jews to do their “dirty work” for them in slandering or denouncing other Jews. This was particularly so during Roman times, the Spanish inquisition, Stalinist Russia, and Nazi Germany).

What The Guardian and others fail to tell their readers is that the UN Human Rights Council has adopted more resolutions condemning Israel than all the other 191 UN member states combined. But then, of course, the more time the Council spends demonizing Israel, the less likely it will ever mention the more than one million displaced people in Somalia this year, the more than one million displaced people in Pakistan this year, the 300,000 Tamil civilians now rotting in northern Sri Lanka, the systematic daily rape of male and female pro-democracy activists now occurring in Iranian prisons, the atrocious treatment of the leader of the Iranian bus workers union who has just had his tongue sliced off so he could no longer lead vocal protests against the regime, and so on.

***

Readers of Goldstone’s report may be surprised to learn that “individuals and groups, viewed as sources of criticism of Israel’s military operations were subjected to repression by the Government of Israel.” This is complete nonsense, of course, and pretty rich coming from a UN Human Rights Commission whose members include states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where protesters face more than just repression if they dare challenge their governments.

—————————————————————

EX-HA’ARETZ EDITOR: GOLDSTONE’S REPORT IS “CHILLING AND MISGUIDED”

The extent of Goldstone’s undermining of the state of Israel has been too much even for the Israeli hard left.

David Landau – who was the editor in chief of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz from 2004 to 2008 at a time when the paper veered to the far left and who famously told Condoleezza Rice that the U.S. should “rape”* Israel to force it out of the West Bank) – yesterday wrote an op-ed for The New York Times in which he described Goldstone’s report as “chilling and misguided.”

(* For background on his “rape” remarks, please see: www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/000913.html)

Landau told New York Times readers: “The [Goldstone] report stunned even seasoned Israeli diplomats who expected no quarter from an inquiry set up by the United Nations Human Rights Council, which they believe to be deeply biased against Israel.”

“Judge Goldstone has thwarted any such honest debate – within Israel or concerning Israel. His fundamental premise, that the Israelis went after civilians, shut down the argument before it began.” (Full article below.)

(It is regrettable that in his article Landau makes no mention of key issues such as the false claims by Hamas to NGOs which gullible Goldstone and his team lapped up.)

—————————————————————

WILL OBAMA NOW LET GOLDSTONE INTO AFGHANISTAN?

Ari Shavit, one of the leading columnists for Israel’s left-wing Ha’aretz newspaper, writes:

“Some two weeks ago American airplanes fired on two oil tankers in northern Afghanistan. It was a German officer who’d asked the U.S. air force to attack the tankers in the middle of the night, in a populated area. The attack was successful – the two tankers were hit, went up in flames and were destroyed. But the overwhelming American-German air attack killed some 70 people. Some of those brought to hospitals were severely injured – with mutilated faces, burned hands and charred bodies.

“One way or another, it’s clear that the United States and Germany are responsible for an extremely brutal attack. Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway also bear responsibility for the massacre as NATO members.

“Obama would probably be the principal defendant in this case. He was the one who believed in the war in Afghanistan and intensified it. As U.S. commander-in-chief, he bears direct responsibility not only for the deaths of those who were burned with the tankers, but the death of many hundreds of innocent Afghan civilians.

“If there are is such a thing as an international community, international law and universal ethics, they must seriously consider putting Obama on trial for his responsibility for severe war crimes.

“Absurd? Yes, it’s absurd. Only when Israel is involved is international judgment administered out of context… As long as Judge Richard Goldstone doesn’t probe the United States, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka or Turkey, just as he probed Israel, he is not a moral figure…”

Tom Gross adds: there have been dozens of cases where over a hundred civilians have died in a single airstrike in Afghanistan. This is why Israel avoided such airstrikes in Gaza and bravely sent its own soldiers into battle in a desperate effort to root out Hamas terrorists while avoiding harm to civilians. In other conflicts around the world, such as the ongoing conflict in Yemen against the country’s Shia population (in which 80 children and women were killed in a government airstrike on Saturday alone), or the Sri Lankan assault on its Tamil population earlier this year or the ongoing wars in Somalia, Congo and elsewhere, far more people have been killed.

—————————————————————

U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT: “GAZA REPORT UNFAIR, LENIENT WITH HAMAS”

The Associated Press reports:

The Obama administration sharply criticized a UN report Friday alleging that Israel committed multiple war crimes in Operation Cast Lead this year. The State Department statement ended nearly a week of muted reactions to findings already rejected by Israel.

The U.S. State Department said the conclusions of a UN commission headed by South African Justice Richard Goldstone were unfair to Israel and did not fully deal with the role in the conflict of the Palestinian group Hamas. It said the United States objected to a recommendation that Israeli actions be referred to the International Criminal Court.

“Although the report addresses all sides of the conflict, its overwhelming focus is on the actions of Israel,” spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters.

“While the report makes overly sweeping conclusions of fact and law with respect to Israel, its conclusions regarding Hamas’s deplorable conduct and its failure to comply with international humanitarian law during the conflict are more general and tentative,” he said.

Kelly said that the United States wanted to keep discussion of the report within the council and had “very serious concerns” about a recommendation that it be raised at other bodies, including the International Criminal Court.

—————————————————————

SUSAN RICE: U.S. HAS “VERY SERIOUS CONCERNS” ABOUT GOLDSTONE’S “UNBALANCED, ONE-SIDED AND BASICALLY UNACCEPTABLE” MANDATE

The Washington Post reports:

Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, rejected a UN proposal to compel Israel and Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls the Gaza Strip, to conduct credible investigations into war crimes during last winter’s war in Gaza or face possible prosecution by an international prosecutor.

She said it has long had “very serious concerns” about the mandate the Human Rights Council gave to Goldstone, calling it “unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable.” Israeli officials have said the mandate was biased against Israel.

“Our view is that we need to be focused on the future,” Rice told reporters outside the Security Council. “This is a time to work to cement progress towards the resumption of negotiations and their early and successful conclusion and our efforts, and we hope the efforts of others will be directed to that end.”

—————————————————————

HANIYEH: WORLD MUST BACK GOLDSTONE’S REPORT

The Palestinian Ma’an news agency reports:

Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh yesterday urged world powers to embrace the new report on alleged war crimes committed during Israel’s recent war on the Gaza Strip.

“We hope the report will not be doomed to the fate of the dozens of reports that [Israel] has condemned for decades,” referring to the report of the fact-finding mission led by Justice Richard Goldstone.

Haniyeh specifically asked the Arab League and European countries to use all means to make sure the report is brought to the attention to the UN Security Council and then referred to prosecutors.

The Hamas leader was speaking to a mass prayer session and rally in Yarmouk Stadium in Gaza City, shortly after dawn on Sunday morning, the first day of the Eid Al-Fitr holiday at the end of the month of Ramadan. Some 30,000 men, women and children filled the football pitch. Palestinian and Hamas flags flew from the goal posts.

***

Tom Gross adds: In remarks made in Gaza, a senior Hamas official is also reported to have thanked Goldstone for giving “ammunition to our supporters in the West”.

—————————————————————

SHIMON PERES: THE GOLDSTONE REPORT “MAKES A MOCKERY OF HISTORY”

Israel’s generally dovish President Shimon Peres has joined criticism of the Goldstone UN report, saying it “legitimizes terrorism” and “ignores Israel’s right and obligation to defend itself.”

Peres said it “makes a mockery of history” and that “it does not distinguish between the aggressor and the defender.”

A visibly angry Peres added: “War is crime and the attacker is the criminal. The Hamas terror organization is the one who started the war and also carried out other awful crimes. Hamas has used terrorism for years against Israeli children.”

“The report gives de facto legitimacy to terrorist initiatives and ignores the obligation and right of every country to defend itself, as the UN itself had clearly stated.”

The criticism aimed at Israel, he added, “failed to supply any other way for Hamas fire to stop. The IDF’s operations have boosted the West Bank’s economy, liberated Lebanon from Hizbullah terror and allowed Gazans to resume normalcy.”

“The Israeli government withdrew from Gaza and Hamas began a murderous rampage, firing thousands of shells on women and children – innocent civilians – instead of rebuilding Gaza and caring for the population’s welfare.”

—————————————————————

EX-ISRAELI JUSTICE MINISTER: “IT IS A POLITICAL REPORT DISGUISED IN A LEGAL CLOAK”

Former Israeli Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann also criticized the report, saying “it is a political report disguised in a legal cloak, but it is legally unfounded.”

“What this report really means is that Israel is the only country in the world which is not allowed to defend itself against acts of terror. Israel is the most threatened nation in the world and yet it makes the most effort to avoid harming innocent lives.

“Any comparison of Israel’s fight on terror with recent conflicts in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan etc. immediately shows that Israel holds itself to the highest ethical standard.”

—————————————————————

AVIGDOR LIEBERMAN: “THE UN DIDN’T LET THEMSELVES BE CONFUSED BY THE FACTS”

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that “The Goldstone Mission was established for the express purpose of finding Israel guilty of war crimes and to that purpose the members of the Mission didn’t for one moment let themselves be confused by the facts.”

“The whole purpose of the report, from the moment it was decided to write it, was to destroy Israel’s image through the agency of states to which the concepts of ‘human rights’ and ‘ethical warfare’ are totally foreign.”

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“IT’S A GOOD THING THAT THE UN WASN’T AROUND DURING WORLD WAR II”

Max Boot writes on the website of the magazine Commentary:

After reading the Goldstone Report on human-rights abuses committed during the Gaza War all I can say is, it’s a good thing that the United Nations wasn’t around during World War II.

I can just imagine it producing a supposedly evenhanded report that condemned the Nazis for “grave” abuses such as incinerating Jews, while also condemning the Allies for their equally “grave” abuses such as fire-bombing German and Japanese cities.

The recommendation, no doubt, would have been that both sides be tried for war crimes, with Adolf Hitler in the dock alongside Franklin Roosevelt.

Actually, that may be giving the UN more credit than it deserves. To judge by the evidence before us, the likelihood is that the UN in those days would have devoted far more space to Allied “abuses” than to those of the Axis and would have recommended that FDR stand alone before the world court.

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“THE UN REPORT COULD HAVE BEEN DRAFTED BY HAMAS EXTREMISTS. WAIT, IN EFFECT, IT ACTUALLY WAS!”

Alan Dershowitz writes:

Richard Goldstone has now become a full fledged member of the international bash-Israel chorus. His name will forever be linked in infamy with such distorters of history and truth as Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Jimmy Carter.

The so-called report commissioned by the notorious United Nations Human Rights Council and issued under his name is so filled with lies, distortions and blood libels that it could have been drafted by Hamas extremists. Wait, in effect, it actually was! UN members were accompanied on their investigations in Gaza by actual Hamas activists who showed them only what they wanted them to see.

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Michael Freud writes in The Jerusalem Post:

Even for a body with a steady and dependable record of demonizing Israel, the UN has truly outdone itself this time. Mustering all the righteous indignation at its disposal, the world organization has deemed itself morally fit to accuse the Jewish state of “actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity” during last winter’s conflict in Gaza.

… Israel’s assault, the report concludes, “was directed at the people of Gaza as a whole,” which is about as close as you can come to depicting a country’s actions as Nazi-like without actually using the “N” word.

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HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR ASKS GOLDSTONE: HOW DARE YOU ACCUSE US OF CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY?

Solly Ganor, a survivor of the Dachau death camp, who moved to Israel after the war, writes an angry open letter to Goldstone which I attach below.

I also attach a piece from The Los Angeles Times which says that “the Goldstone mission report has endorsed tactics of unlawful guerrilla movements the world over that purposefully endanger the lives of their own civilians in order to protect themselves from attack.”

The Goldstone mission ignored numerous media reports by Palestinians stating that Hamas held them as human shields, for example a Newsweek article in which a Palestinian witness said “resistance fighters were firing from positions all around the Al Quds hospital” and an article in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera quoting a Gaza resident saying, “The Hamas gunmen had taken refuge mainly in the building that houses the administrative offices of Al Quds; the nurses were forced to take off their uniforms so the gunmen could blend better and escape the Israeli snipers.”

Other eye-witness accounts from European newspapers quote Gaza residents saying Hamas fighters forcibly prevented them from leaving their houses and shot at Israeli forces from the same locations, telling them that they should be happy to die together with the “holy warriors.”

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For those who want to read more about the Goldstone report, there is a good round-up with various link: The_Goldstone_Report_Rewarding_Palestinian_Terror.asp">.

[All notes above by Tom Gross]

I’m surprized nobody else commented on this. “SMEARED FOR LIFE” was the front page headline on the Saturday, September 19 New York Post.

The front page contained an explanatory sentence: “The men wrongly accused of gang-raping a Hofstra student will never fully shake the stigma. ‘My name is forever tarnished,’ said Stalin Felipe. “I’ll always have to explain it,” he added in the story inside.

Well, yes.