An open letter to members of the Goldstone Commission who disagree with his re-evaluation
On Thursday, in a
Comment is Free piece in al-Guardian, the three members of the Goldstone Commission whose last name is not Goldstone
attacked his partial retraction of his report. Maurice Ostroff sends an open letter to those three commission members that includes
seven difficult questions for them to answer.
I am astonished by the report in the Guardian of April 14 that, in response to Judge Goldstone’s recent oped in the Washington Post, you have “turned on him”, accusing him of misrepresenting facts in order to cast doubt on the credibility of your joint report. It is regrettable that you did not explain what facts you accuse him of misrepresenting, so that the reader can reach an informed opinion.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/14/un-gaza-report-authors-goldstone
I trust you will agree that every intellectually honest person will willingly review previously held convictions if and when relevant new evidence becomes available. To his credit, that is exactly what Judge Goldstone has done.
By contrast, your evident inflexible belief in the immutability of every sentence in your 500-plus page Report reflects an attitude reminiscent of those who refused to look at the evidence presented by Galileo and condemned his heliocentrism as contrary to Scripture.
If, as you wrote, you “find it necessary to dispel any impression that subsequent developments have rendered any part of the mission's report unsubstantiated, erroneous or inaccurate”, it is puzzling that you did not do what you find necessary by refuting the evidence that evidently influenced Judge Goldstone. I therefore respectfully ask you to please address the following circumstances.
Continue reading
here.
Labels: Goldstone Report, Maurice Ostroff, Richard Goldstone
A call for honesty from Judge Goldstone
In a November 2010 interview, Hamas Interior Minister Fathi Hamad acknowledged that the number of Hamas terrorists who were killed in Operation Cast Lead was
far closer to the 709 claimed by the IDF than to the "one in five casualties" claimed by the Goldstone Report. Maurice Ostroff wonders why the would-be-future-Secretary-General of the United Nations has yet to acknowledge that Israel was right, and that the
'Palestinians' and the European-financed NGO's on whom he relied were wrong.
It has been a considerable time since I last wrote an open letter to you, but I believe that you will not only be willing but anxious to clarify questions that have arisen as a result of the widely publicized statement by Hamas interior minister Fathi Hammad in his interview with Al-Hayat last November 1. The Minister quoted figures of combatant casualties in the Cast Lead Operation that according to Islamic News 'roughly match the 709 "terror operatives" that the military of Israel said it had killed during the fighting which included members of the Hamas-run police force'
Fathi Hammad's figures contradict the ratio of one in five of the persons killed being a combatant as reported by PCHR and Al Mezan that was accepted seriously by your Mission as stated in clause 361 of the Report. It is now obvious that your Mission was mistaken in accepting the reports of various NGO's while summarily rejecting the detailed counterclaims by the Government of Israel that has now been vindicated, namely, that at that stage Israel had recorded the names of 1,166 Palestinians killed, 709 of them identified as operatives of Hamas and various other terror organizations and that 295 uninvolved Palestinians were killed during the operation, 89 of them under the age of 16, 49 of them women and that in addition, there were 162 names of men that had not yet been attributed to any organization.
You have said in the past that the information the Mission received would not be admissible as evidence in a criminal court and I have difficulty in reconciling this with the statement in clause 361 of your report which states "The counterclaims published by the Government of Israel fall far short of international law standards". In the circumstances it is fair to ask whether the claims by the NGO's which the Mission accepted and which have since proved to be unreliable, met these law standards.
The realization that the mission was very mistaken in its belief that statistics from non-governmental sources are generally consistent, as stated in clause 361, should raise a red flag in evaluating other claims made by them, which should now be re-examined.
Read the whole thing. And don't hold your breath waiting for Goldstone to admit he was wrong. He's too pompous for that.
Labels: Fathi Hamad, Goldstone Report, Maurice Ostroff, Operation Cast Lead, Richard Goldstone
On Thursday, in a Comment is Free piece in al-Guardian, the three members of the Goldstone Commission whose last name is not Goldstone attacked his partial retraction of his report. Maurice Ostroff sends an open letter to those three commission members that includes seven difficult questions for them to answer. 
