Britannia Radio

April 4, 2011

Op-eds and features

Goldstone's mea culpa has come too late Just Journalism Executive Director Michael Weiss analyses Richard Goldstone's retraction of key accusations against Israel in The Daily Telegraph. Monday 4 April 2011 As about-faces go, Judge Richard Goldstone's recantation of the ferociously anti-Israel UN report that bears his name can only compete with fantasy examples, such as the Pope questioning the existence of God or Marx declaring in a tucked-away letter to Engels that capitalism is actually where it's at. Writing at the weekend in The Washington Post, the South African jurist announced that he and his "fact-finding mission", appointed with rank bias by the UN Human Rights Council in 2009 to investigate Operation Cast Lead, was wrong to accuse Israel of deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The Goldstone Report had found Israel guilty of "deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humilia and terrorise a civilian population." But that was all wrong, Goldstone admits now Israel has thoroughly investigated more than 400 allegations of military misconduct which, he writes, "indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy". Whoops. As for the terrorist organisation that rules Gaza and was treated by Goldstone's commission as the moral equivalent of the Israel Defense Forces, Hamas has neglected to investigate its own battlefield misconduct and is still launching rockets and mortars into densely populated civilian areas in southern Israel. Only one man seems genuinely surprised by this behavior. Read more>>

The Wire

Richard Goldstone retracts key conclusion of Gaza War report Mon. 4 Apr. 2011 @ 11.30 - In a remarkable u-turn, UN-appointed judge Richard Goldstone admits that his UN Human Rights Council report into the Gaza War was wrong to conclude that Israel deliberately targeted civilians in the three-week campaign in 2008-9. Writing in an op-ed for the Washington Post on Friday, Goldstone retracted some of the key conclusions reached by his 2009 report. In 'Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and war crimes', he writes that 'civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy', and that: 'If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.' Goldstone reaffirmed his assessment that war crimes were committed by Hamas as a matter of policy during the conflict, as 'its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets'. However, by comparison he explains that such allegations against Israel were based on lack of evidence, rather than substantiated proof: 'The allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion... 'I regret that our fact-finding mission did not have such evidence explaining the circumstances in which we said civilians in Gaza were targeted, because it probably would have influenced our findings about intentionality and war crimes.' Read more>>