Israel Matzav

The coming Goldstone Report on Afghanistan

I have done several posts on this blog pointing out the danger to the United States and its allies that is presented by the possibility of a Goldstone Report looking at Iraq or Afghanistan. That possibility was completely foreseeable nearly a year ago when Goldstone came out. And yet, so many Western countries, so eager to see Israel lambasted by the media and the NGO's yet again, were silent or complicit in advancing the Goldstone Report. With the release of some 90,000 documents on the United States' and the United Kingdom's war in Afghanistan this week, that silence and complicity now look like they may yet carry a heavy price.

The West's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have a lot in common with Israel's war in Gaza. In each case, a militarily and technologically superior power or group of powers is fighting an armed insurgency that hides and lusts for casualties among a helpless civilian population. In these circumstances, civilian deaths are - from the great power's perspective - unavoidable. In each case, actions taken on the battlefield always look different with the 20-20 hindsight of European hearing rooms than they did in the heat of battle. And now, maybe, those Western powers who backed Goldstone because of their own latent (or not so latent) Jew-hatred may yet pay a price for their actions. Because if they don't, the full rancid hypocrisy of the Goldstone Report and those who promoted it will be exposed to the World for all to see.

This is Robin Shepherd:

This weekend’s release of thousands of secret official files about coalition operations in Afghanistan paints a harrowing picture of the fog of war, most troubling of all of the accidental killings by our soldiers of hundreds of innocent civilians – revellers at wedding parties, kids in school buses, ordinary people going about their daily business who tragically found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Given that the Taliban systematically hides behind the civilian population this sort of thing is, of course, inevitable. Nonetheless, it is understandable that the revelations by Wikileaks have caused embarrassment to the governments of all the coalition countries.

But for those coalition countries in Europe – Britain first among them – who are currently cheerleading the passage of the Goldstone Report on Gaza through the United Nations this is more than an embarrassment. In the light of Goldstone, it represents an outright threat to the security of their soldiers on the ground as well as to their national interests in international tribunals.

...

Of course, I am using Goldstone as both a concrete precedent in its own right, but also as a proxy for the whole panoply of terror-appeasement policies and norms that outfits such as the British Foreign Office have allowed to develop, or have actively supported, in the international community over decades.

The Foreign Office and its equivalents are thus proved not merely to have been engaged in the vilest of discriminatory hypocrisy over Israel, Goldstone and all that it represents, they are shown to have been deliberately and wilfully allowing a depraved anti-Israeli agenda to take precedence over their own national interests.

Read it all.

Evelyn Gordon adds:

Shepherd doesn’t give the numbers, but they are shocking: of the 45 countries with troops in Afghanistan, only 12 voted against endorsing the Goldstone Report in the UN General Assembly. Twelve voted in favor, and 21 abstained.

Notable abstainers included Britain and France — which, as the second- and fourth-largest troop contributors to Afghanistan, are among the most vulnerable to Goldstone-style charges — and Georgia, which faces allegations of similar “war crimes” during its 2008 war with Russia. Turkey, which routinely kills civilians in its battles with the PKK, voted “yes.”

Granted, the Goldstone Report was commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council, which has never shown any interest in investigating any country but Israel. So coalition members probably don’t have anything to fear from that quarter. But the HRC is not the only player on this field.

An acquaintance recently reported being shocked when, at an academic conference, a guest speaker from the International Criminal Court explicitly described the court’s plan as establishing a precedent via the “easy” cases it’s tackling now (egregious human rights violators like the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda and Sudanese officials involved in the Darfur genocide) that will grant it legitimacy to prosecute anyone for anything, worldwide, thereafter. And once it establishes this precedent, it intends to use it, the speaker added.

Read the whole thing.

Unless the West wishes to cede the World's battlegrounds to radical Islam, it is time to put a stop to the craven hypocrisy known as the Goldstone Report.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:28 PM