Greetings from London Heathrow. I'm on my way home.
Hamas executed three 'murderers' at dawn on Tuesday. Two were executed by firing squad, while the third, a 'policeman' was hanged.
Last week, Amnesty International called for the 'attorney general' of Gaza to intervene in these cases.
Gaza's Attorney General must halt planned executions, death penalty is inhuman punishment & will not deter crime pic.twitter.com/PRRUNYk2Gx
— AmnestyInternational (@AmnestyOnline) May 23, 2016
Of course, Amnesty said nothing of Gaza's 'justice system.' Richard Goldstone of the Goldstone Commission once endorsed Hamas' 'court system,' but it goes without saying that Gaza does not have an 'attorney general' and that Amnesty's call is ludicrous.
Hamas does have Abu Mazen, who is supposed to approve any death sentences, but since Hamas broke Gaza off from the more 'moderate' terrorists of Fatah in 2007, they no longer ask Abu Mazen to approve their death sentences.
But just give them a 'state' and they'll sort it all out....
At least one rocket fired from the Gaza Strip
hit southern Israel on Tuesday night, as alarms sounded across the
region, the Israeli army said.
There were no immediate reports of
injuries or damage from the rocket, which landed near the town of Gan
Yavneh, outside Ashdod, according to an IDF statement.
The projectile — a Grad missile — was located minutes after sirens sounded in the Lachish region and Ashdod.
It was unclear how many rockets were shot at
Israel from Gaza. According to the IDF, initial signs pointed to one,
though other reports put the nubmer as high as five.
...
There was no immediate claim of responsibility from Hamas or other terror groups in the coastal enclave.
However, an Israeli official said Jerusalem
holds Hamas responsible for all attacks launched from the enclave, and
the group was reportedly evacuating buildings and bases Tuesday night
ahead of an expected Israeli retaliation.
A source in Gaza said the firing was the
result of an internal dispute inside the Islamic Jihad terror group,
which has included kidnappings of people in northern Gaza.
The source said Islamic Jihad recently appointed a new commander to oversee the northern region of the coastal enclave.
The new commander was supposed to start his
new position today officially, but his predecessor opposed it, sparking
clashes between the two commanders’ supporters.
The new commander’s men then kidnapped two
operatives working under the former commander and, in retaliation, the
predecessor’s followers decided to fire rockets at Israel.
Hamas security forces are now searching the
area from which the rockets were launched and have detained several
suspects, according to the source.
I wonder what Hamas will do with all these people they've detained. I heard they have courts there. Heh.
Why the Schabas Report will be every bit as biased as the Goldstone Report
Until he was forced out a month ago when it was discovered that he had worked for the PLO, William Schabas headed the United Nations 'human rights council's commission of inquiry into Israel's summer 2014 Operation Protective Edge. The UN has tried arguing that Schabas' resignation means the report won't be biased. That's nonsense. But not for the reason you think. In a lengthy article published by the Tower, Hillel Neuer explains how Richard Goldstone was duped when he headed the Commission of Inquiry into Operation Cast Lead in 2009, and how as much as Schabas was anti-Israel, his presence or absence on the Commission likely made little difference.
There seems no question that Goldstone was duped. He never suspected
that OHCHR, the UN agency in charge of providing him with professional
staff support, had quietly embedded one of the world’s top anti-Israel
lawfare strategists into the team. After all, only four years before,
Goldstone had worked on another UN inquiry on the oil-for-food program.
In that case, he was supported by a highly professional staff based in
New York, with most if not all of them lawyers and experts hired from
the outside. Goldstone assumed the Gaza inquiry would be the same.
But it was not the same. The culture of the Geneva-based OHCHR
secretariat is known to be far more anti-American, anti-colonial, and
anti-Israel than the one in New York. In his naiveté, Goldstone was
blind to the prejudice and political agenda of his own bureaucracy.
Indeed, there is not the slightest indication that Goldstone had any
knowledge of Baars’ extremist activism. But OHCHR knew—and that is why
they hired her.
On March 23, what for six months was the Schabas Commission, and now
in its final and seventh month has become the McGowan Davis Commission,
will present its report to the Human Rights Council. Do we have any
reason to expect a fair, objective, and credible report?
Not if we consider the built-in prejudice of the commission’s
founding mandate, spelled out in resolution S-21/1 of July 23, 2014,
which preemptively declares Israel guilty. It condemns the Jewish state
“in the strongest terms,” citing “widespread, systematic, and gross
violations of international human rights,” “the targeting of civilians
and civilian properties” as a form of “collective punishment contrary to
international law,” “disproportionate and indiscriminate attacks,”
“grave violations of the human rights of the Palestinian civilian
population,” and “military aggressions.” The resolution mentions Israel
18 times. Hamas is not mentioned once.
Not if we consider that Schabas, the activist chairman who says
that he “devoted several months of work” to the project, is someone who
performed undisclosed paid legal work for the PLO—on the subject of how
to prosecute Israelis in international courts—and who famously declared
barely three years ago that the leader he most wants to see in the dock
at the International Criminal Court is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu.
And—as the cautionary tale of lawfare general Grietje Baars as the
key author of the original Goldstone Report makes clear—not if we
consider the outsized role played by OHCHR in compiling the evidence,
processing submissions, and picking the people to draft the report’s
chapters and conclusions. Everything we now know about how OHCHR
engineered the travesty of the original Goldstone Report indicates that
Goldstone II will suffer the same politically-motivated fate.
Read the whole thing. The woman whose picture is at the top of this post is Grietje Baars, whose name you probably never heard until today.
Civilian to combatant casualty ratio in Gaza around 1:1
Despite ongoing 'Palestinian' efforts to create civilian casualties in Gaza through the use of human shields, the IDF reports that the civilian to combatant casualty ratio in Operation Protective Edge is around 1:1.
Israel has
evidence that almost half of Palestinians killed in the 25-day-old Gaza
war were combatants, its deputy foreign minister said on Saturday,
pushing back against international allegations of a lopsidedly heavy
civilian death toll.
Gazan human rights groups say
at least 80 percent of the 1,669 Palestinians killed have been
non-combatants, including hundreds of children. The U.N. Human Rights
Council last week accused the Israelis of "disproportionate and
indiscriminate attacks" and launched an inquiry into possible war
crimes.
...
"There is research being done in the military,
very professionally and reliably, (whose) conclusion is that at least
47% of the fatalities are terrorists, with photographs and names,"
Tzachi Hanegbi told Israel's Channel Two television, adding that the
data would be presented to investigators.
He
did not elaborate. Israel rejected the U.N. Human Rights Council's
probe announcement, describing the forum as biased, but usually conducts
its own combat inquiries.
Israel
says Hamas and other Palestinian guerrillas in Gaza are terrorists and
in past conflicts has used broad definitions of combatants - including,
for example, Palestinian policemen working for the Hamas administration.
Other significant factors in the count include:
1. The statistics from the 'Palestinian Health Ministry' in Gaza come from Hamas and are therefore not reliable.
2. The statistics from the 'human rights council' counted anyone under the age of 18 as a civilian, whereas Hamas uses 16 and 17-year olds (and sometimes even younger children) as combatants. and even uses babies as human shields.
3. The more significant statistic in determining whether civilians or combatants are being killed is the male to female casualty ratio. The numbers I have seen for Operation Protective Edge put that at 3:1.
According to a 2010 assessment by John Sloboda of Iraq Body Count,
a United Kingdom-based organization, American and Coalition forces had
killed at least 28,736 combatants as well as 13,807 civilians in the Iraq War, indicating a civilian to combatant casualty ratio inflicted by coalition forces of 1:2.[24] However, overall, figures by the Iraq Body Count
from 20 March 2003 to 14 March 2013 indicate that of 174,000 casualties
only 39,900 were combatants, resulting in a civilian casualty rate of
77%.[25]
The civilian casualty ratio for U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan
is notoriously difficult to quantify. The U.S. itself puts the number
of civilians killed from drone strikes in the last two years at no more
than 20 to 30, a total that is far too low according to a spokesman for
the NGOCIVIC.[26] At the other extreme, Daniel L. Byman of the Brookings Institution
suggests that drone strikes may kill "10 or so civilians" for every
militant killed, which would represent a civilian to combatant casualty
ratio of 10:1. Byman argues that civilian killings constitute a
humanitarian tragedy and create dangerous political problems, including
damage to the legitimacy of the Pakistani government and alienation of
the Pakistani populace from America.[27] An ongoing study by the New America Foundation
finds non-militant casualty rates started high but have declined
steeply over time, from about 60% (3 out of 5) in 2004-2007 to less than
2% (1 out of 50) in 2012. The study puts the overall non-militant
casualty rate since 2004 at 15-16%, or a 1:5 ratio, out of a total of
between 1,908 and 3,225 people killed in Pakistan by drone strikes since
2004.[28]
By the way, Britain's civilian-combatant ratio in Afghanistan was 3:1.
After Operation Cast Lead, Israel produced a 500-page report which, among other things, showed that it had killed mostly combatants (make sure to watch the video at that link). Subsequently, former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations demolished the 'human rights council's investigation chairman, Richard Goldstone, in a debate (videos at this link) at Brandeis University, which I live-blogged. After that debate, Goldstone refused to debate anyone else (including Alan Dershowitz) about his report, and eventually he recanted the major accusations in the report - far too late.
Goldstone's favorite court system finds Gaza 'Palestinian' guilty of 'collaboration with the Zionist occupation against the Palestinian people'
Richard Goldstone's favorite court system has convicted a Gaza 'Palestinian' of 'collaboration with the Zionist occupation against the Palestinian people.' The 'Palestinian' will be executed when they get around to it
A source in the Hamas government said that the man, whose name was not
released, was found guilty of "collaboration with the Zionist occupation
against the Palestinian people."
The source did not give additional details.
The source claim that the defendant would be allowed to file an appeal against the verdict.
In June, Hamas authorities hanged two men who were also convicted of "collaboration" with Israel.
Hamas is also planning to execute in the coming days a man who was convicted of killing three Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Hamas to hang two 'collaborators' before the end of the month
Hamas plans to hang two 'Palestinians,' who have been convicted by Richard Goldstone's favorite court system of 'collaborating' with Israel, before the end of the month, and possibly as soon as next week.
The official said that the two men had been convicted by a
Palestinian court of passing on to Israeli authorities information that
led to the killing of Palestinians.
Salah Eddin Abu Sharkh, a
senior official with the Hamas-run Ministry of Interior, confirmed that
his government was planning to execute convicted "collaborators" in the
near future.
He said that Hamas authorities recently arrested several Palestinians on suspicion of aiding Israeli authorities.
The
arrests, he said, were carried out after a deadline offered by Hamas to
suspected "collaborators" to hand themselves in expired.
The
deadline, part of a campaign waged against "collaborators," was offered
by the Hamas government on March 12, and expired on May 12.
Those
who handed themselves in were promised that their identities would not
be disclosed. "Collaborators" who were not involved in killings were
offered an amnesty.
It's come to this: IDF establishes combat cameraman unit
The IDF tries to put the best face on its establishment of a combat cameraman unit (and the US apparently has one too - see picture above), but I still think there's something perverse about having to risk soldiers' lives to prove to the likes of Richard Goldstone down the road that your troops have not done anything wrong.
For the first time in the IDF, a combat cameramen unit will be established, composed of dozens of combat soldiers responsible for documenting from within the battlefield. After completing eight month of combat training with the Golani Infantry Brigade, the soldiers will join the division that is currently forming in the IDF Spokesperson Unit. With highly professional filming skills, the soldiers will be able to quickly provide footage to be used for informative purposes.
"The modern battlefield has changed and more bodies, armed with cameras, are working to change public opinion. The IDF must accommodate this changing reality, where different organizations may falsify facts in accordance with their own objectives," explained Commander of the IDF Spokesperson combat cameramen unit, Maj. Micha Ohana.
The project was launched three years ago, when the first combat photographers were drafted and received only partial combat training. All current cameramen have a background in filming, and join forces as independent units. During wartime, the cameramen join the war effort and function as both photographers and combat soldiers. During the Cast Lead Operation, the photographers were incorporated in the battlefield and provided informatory footage, used to depict true images and occurrences from the battlefield.
According to Maj. Ohana, the cameramen serve as combat soldiers, training in anti-terrorism techniques, urban warfare and more. The cameramen will be provided with highly advanced technological means capable of conveying live footage to be publicized worldwide for informative, intelligence, and operational purposes. Additional footage will be provided from IAF aircraft, Israeli Navy vessels and intelligence posts.
Sorry, but as mundane as it sounds and as necessary as it is, I think there's something wrong with the fact that we're risking soldiers' lives to stay out of court.
From now on, the officials said, Israel's ambassador to the UN organizations in Geneva will not appear before the council, answer any phone calls from the council, or cooperate with them in any way. The ambassador is not going to be withdrawn from Geneva, however, because there are a lot of other organizations that Israel does fully cooperate with and will continue to do so.
The official said that Israel will make efforts to get other countries on the council to follow suit, even though he acknowledged that this will be difficult.
No decision, however, has yet been made on what sanctions to take against the Palestinian Authority, which initiated this action at the UN body. Amid speculation that Israel may once again cut off monthly tax revenues that it transfers to the PA, as it did following UNESCO's decision to accept the Palestinians into the organization in November, the source said that there are other measures that can be taken. He did not elaborate.
The action was taken in response to last week's 'human rights council' decision to appoint a 'fact-finding mission' to investigate Israel's 'settlement activity in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.
The official said that the Palestinians are adopting a strategy of unilateralism aimed at avoiding an agreement. "They link everything to settlements," he said. "Attempts to spearhead uncoordinated projects in Area C as well as efforts in the International Court of Justice are meant to impede any political move."
The official said that the Palestinians' aim is to achieve UN recognition using unilateral means.
Despite the bold move to sever ties with the UN council, the Foreign Ministry remains concerned about the political stalemate. Minister Lieberman is working on a series of unspecified steps to end the deadlock.
What's not said here is whether Israel will allow members of the 'fact-finding mission' into the country, including into Judea and Samaria. There have been hints in the media here that the decision will depend upon the mission's make-up. But I wouldn't take that as meaning much. Richard Goldstone is a Jew and was a trustee of Hebrew University in Jerusalem until the commission that bears his name was established. Goldstone was not allowed into the country with his commission.
A Hamas official in Gaza says the militant group has sentenced a local Palestinian to death for collaborating with Israel.
The official said the man was sentenced Wednesday to death by firing squad at a military court in Gaza. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to speak with reporters.
Palestinians who collaborate with Israeli intelligence are widely loathed within Palestinian society.
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights' says Hamas has issued 36 death sentences since it seized Gaza from the rival Fatah party in 2007. About 15 executions have actually been carried out.
The Palestinian rights group says it is "gravely concerned" over the continued death sentences imposed by both Hamas and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
But Hamas and Fatah both practice due process, don't they?
The Jewish community is very small and the word is that Richard Goldstone is trying to make amends for his pernicious Goldstone Report due to his virtual excommunication from the Jewish community. The latest effort is an op-ed in the New York Times, in which Goldstone defends Israel from charges of apartheid. This passage made me wonder whether he gets it yet.
The situation in the West Bank is more complex. But here too there is no intent to maintain “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group.” This is a critical distinction, even if Israel acts oppressively toward Palestinians there. South Africa’s enforced racial separation was intended to permanently benefit the white minority, to the detriment of other races. By contrast, Israel has agreed in concept to the existence of a Palestinian state in Gaza and almost all of the West Bank, and is calling for the Palestinians to negotiate the parameters.
So let me get this straight: Israel's rule in the West BankJudea and Samaria is not “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group” only because we have "agreed in concept to the existence of a 'Palestinian state' in Gaza and almost all of the West Bank?" And every country that does not agree to cut off part of its land is promoting apartheid? And every ethnic group that decides it's entitled to a 'state' is a victim of apartheid if it doesn't get that state? And were we one day to decide that we have had enough of the 'Palestinians' being unwilling to negotiate with us (and we all know why they are unwilling to negotiate with us), and we withdraw whatever offers of 'statehood' have been made, would we then be practicing apartheid?
Goldstone going for career advancement on Israel's back again
Richard Goldstone, the author of the discredited Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead, has inserted himself as Chairman of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC), an organization that is helping to select judges for the International Criminal Court (ICC). Both the CICC and its advisory council are filled with a collection of UN hacks that should raise some eyebrows. And although Israel, the 'Palestinians' and the United States are not members of the ICC, the 'Palestinians' are seeking to have Israel hauled before the court (which could theoretically happen were a determination made that Israel's judicial system is not competent to investigate the behavior of - for example - the IDF), and that effort is likely to become more intense if the 'Palestinians' are granted full membership in the United Nations. George Soros also has a hand in this....
Officially, Goldstone’s panel has no power to dictate anything regarding the ICC; it can only advise. But at the CICC, Goldstone has embedded himself amid a clique of former U.N. officials well versed in working the system, and in some cases used to working together. For instance, the CICC’s 14-member advisory board includes one of Goldstone’s three co-authors of the Goldstone Report, Pakistani lawyer Hina Jilani. Following Goldstone’s walk-back in April, she defended the report as an important document that nothing can invalidate.
The advisory board also includes Goldstone himself, and former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour — who in 2006 used her U.N. pulpit to protest the execution of Saddam Hussein, and in 2008 welcomed an anti-Semitic Arab-rights charter, before waffling away from it under public criticism.
The five-member “Independent Panel on ICC Judicial Elections” includes a Chilean former judge, Cecilia Medina Quiroga. She’s a veteran of a pre-Goldstone U.N. fact-finding mission dispatched by the Human Rights Council to Gaza which also included a British lawyer who later was another co-author of the Goldstone Report, Christine Chinkin.
Two other panel members have served as judges for the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, where Goldstone in the mid-1990s was chief prosecutor. They are South Korean former justice O-Gon Kwon (still serving on the near-eternal Yugoslavia tribunal) and an American former judge, Patricia Wald, former chair and current member of the board of George Soros’s Open Society Justice Initiative.
The fifth panel member is a Swedish lawyer, Hans Corell, who served as legal counsel to the U.N. from 1994 to 2004. Under former secretary-general Kofi Annan, Corell was heavily involved in the creation of the ICC. He also had a hand in the creation and management of the U.N.’s Oil-for-Food Program, a relief plan so badly designed, so mismanaged, and so globally corrupt that Annan was finally forced in 2004 to call for a special inquiry — in which Goldstone served as a member of a three-man panel, led by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker. The committee exonerated Annan of deliberate wrongdoing, but not of a “cumulative management performance” that “fell short of the standards that the United Nations Organization should strive to maintain.” Today, Kofi Annan chairs the CICC advisory board.
And what, exactly, is the CICC, which has gathered all these folks together? Funded by donors such as George Soros’s Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the European Union, it is a program run by a nonprofit organization called the World Federalist Movement/Institute for Global Policy. Registered in New York, with another office in The Hague, the World Federalist Movement enjoys consultative status with the U.N., and campaigns for “World Federalist government.”
A spokesman for the CICC, reached by phone, says Goldstone’s report on the ICC judicial candidates will probably be released sometime next month. Nothing here precludes the possibility that Goldstone might have learned from his self-confessed mistakes. Nonetheless, there’s something in this CICC welter of old U.N. hacks and fresh presumption that gives added heft to the obvious question: Does the world really need another Goldstone Report?
Here's Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler for Thursday, September 8.
1) Goldstone vs. Palmer
Gerald Steinberg and Gidon Shaviv explain why the Palmer report on the Mavi Marmara incident came out with results that were generally fair to Israel, whereas the Goldstone report was hopelessly compromise.
The first factor is that different UN bodies were behind the two reports. The Goldstone “fact finding” commission arose out of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) which has 47 member states, including China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and, until recently, Libya and even Iran. The UNHRC has Israel as the only country on its permanent agenda and consistently singles out Israel for condemnations.
The record shows that activities involving the UNHRC are invariably biased.
In sharp contrast, the Palmer Commission was formed under the auspices of the UN Secretary General, reporting directly to him, and not to the UNHRC, where staff and a majority of countries hostile to Israel were unable to control the events.
What's disturbing is the lack of acknowledgment of the corruption of the Goldstone report. After Richard Goldstone reconsidered his commission's report Ethan Bronner and Jennifer Medina of the New York Times wrote Past Holds Clue to Goldstone’s Shift on the Gaza War
“I know he was extremely hurt by the reaction to the report,” said Aryeh Neier, president of the Open Society Foundations, who has known Mr. Goldstone for years and remains close to him. “I think he was extremely uncomfortable in providing some fodder to people who were looking for anything they could use against Israel.” In describing his new position, Mr. Goldstone wrote, “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone report would have been a different document.” He has declined requests to elaborate. Interviews with two dozen people who know him suggest a combination of reasons: the hostility from his community, disappointment about Hamas’s continuing attacks on civilians, and new understanding of Israel’s conduct in a few of the most deadly incidents of the war. The year and a half since the Gaza report was published have been hard on Mr. Goldstone. Hailed by the Arab world and the anti-Israel left, he has been censured by those with whom he had always identified. One of his two daughters, who spent more than a decade in Israel and now lives in Canada with the man she married here, has been furious with him, according to a family friend; he was nearly unable to attend the bar mitzvah of his other daughter’s son in South Africa because of plans by some members of the Jewish community there to demonstrate against his presence.
This article is misdirection at its worst. By describing the factors that caused Judge Goldstone to reconsider his commission's work the New York Times implied that his reconsideration was not normative. But given the pre-existing prejudices of his cohorts, the question should have been how an investigation so tainted could possibly be fair. Goldstone's reconsideration was less newsworthy than the open bias of the commission from its very start.
Peter Bouckaert, Human Rights Watch emergencies director, told CNN he has seen the same pattern in armories looted elsewhere in Libya, noting that "in every city we arrive, the first thing to disappear are the surface-to-air missiles."
He said such missiles can fetch many thousands of dollars on the black market.
"We are talking about some 20,000 surface-to-air missiles in all of Libya, and I've seen cars packed with them." he said. "They could turn all of North Africa into a no-fly zone."
The benefits to the PLO have been staggering. Financial statistics cannot be specified, for the PLO does not circulate its budget, but published reports indicate that in recent years the organization received about $250 million yearly from Saudi Arabia and smaller amounts from other oil states, including $60 million a year from Kuwait. At a summit conference in Baghdad in 1978, the Arab states promised another $100 million annually. Non-Arab governments (such as the Soviet bloc) also gave generously; and if these insisted on cash for arms, third parties might be induced to pick up the tab, as in April 1982 when the Saudis promised $250 million to pay for weapons from Bulgaria, Hungary, and East Germany. When the PLO requested help from the Arab states last summer, the Algerian foreign minister called in the Soviet ambassador in Algiers at four in the morning and gave him a check for $20 million; the weapons reportedly arrived in Beirut several days later by air. About 5 to 10 percent of the pay of the 300,000 Palestinians working in the Gulf states is withheld by the governments there and earmarked for the PLO; were all of this money to reach its stated destination (which is not the case), it would provide the PLO with about another $250 million a year. Aid also comes from the farther away, from radical and Islamic groups around the world: in January 1983, for instance, the Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement in Kuala Lumpur gave a check for $80,000 to the local PLO representative. Terrorist activities have also proved a source of funds; the PLO reportedly received $20 million in December 1975 for releasing the OPEC oil ministers it had helped take hostage. With this capital, the PLO was able to start large-scale business enterprises. In Lebanon, it ran a conglomerate called Samad ("Steadfast") whose 10,000 employees and estimated $40-million gross revenues in 1980 made it one of the country's largest firms. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an organizational member of the PLO, achieved a near-monopoly over steel products in South Lebanon during the late 1970s by importing steel from the Soviet bloc at concessionary prices and paying no import duties (the PLO controlled the ports of Sidon and Tyre). Its factory, the Modern Mechanized Establishment near Sidon, undercut competitors and drove them out of business; then it raised prices and reaped huge profits. Many Lebanese believed that predatory pricing was integral to the PLO's plans to retain control over South Lebanon. In addition to its local investments - a hotel in Lebanon, a chicken farm in Syria - the PLO owns a portfolio of investments in the industrial states, including a disco club in Italy and an airline in Belgium.
Abbas's corruption isn't new. He's just the most recent and possibly weakest practitioner at the head of Fatah.
4) Followup
Yesterday I wrote that PM Netanyahu agreed to a building freeze in response to the diplomatic furor over the announcement of building in Ramat Shlomo. Israel Matzav pointed out that I had the chronology wrong. He also speculates (contrary to what I wrote) that he believes that Abbas would have gone through the motions of negotiating with Tzippi Livni (had she formed the current government) as he would have had no excuse not to.
'Collaborator' executed on orders of Goldstone's favorite court system
A 'Palestinian' accused of 'collaborating' with Israel has been executed on the orders of Richard Goldstone's favorite court system. This is from the first link.
"This morning we executed A.S. who was convicted of collaboration with Israel," it said, adding that the death sentence was carried out in line with the law and after the approval of the authorities in Gaza.
"He was sentenced to death by firing squad on April 19 by a military court in Gaza City," the statement said, without giving further details about the specifics of his conviction.
The last time Gaza's Hamas rulers carried out a death sentence against Palestinians accused of collaboration was in April 2010, when they executed two men by firing squad -- in what was the first such execution since the Islamists seized power in 2007.
A month later, three more people were executed on charges unrelated to collaboration, human rights groups say.
Under Palestinian law, collaboration with Israel, murder and drug trafficking are all punishable by death.
By law, all execution orders must be approved by the Palestinian president before they can be carried out, but Hamas no longer recognises the legitimacy of Mahmud Abbas, whose four-year term ended in 2009.
In recent months, Hamas has arrested several alleged collaborators, and warned it would prosecute any "traitor" working for the Jewish state.
Israel Radio reports that the execution was carried out today because future executions may require Abu Mazen's approval under the reconciliation agreement.
JJ Goldberg tried to give a lesson in what being Jewish is all about, and discovered that not everyone liked it.
One comment sort of took my breath away, I must admit. A faithful reader named Howard informs me that I am “an enemy of G-d, Torah and Judaism.” This comes as a shock. I take the Good Book pretty seriously, as those who know me are aware, and I go to considerable lengths to stay on the right side of the Big Guy. It would be a drag to discover that all my efforts were so unappreciated.
And what brought this acrimony on JJ Goldberg (no relation to Jeffrey Goldberg although he does quote him) is an attempt to defend Richard Goldstone.
Again, for the millionth time, Goldstone is no mystery. He is a devoted Jew and passionate, lifelong Zionist, former world chairman of ORT, no less, and a former honorary life member of the Hebrew University board of governors (until he was kicked off last year) who thought his credentials as a world-renowned human rights jurist would help him to win Israel a better hearing than it would otherwise have gotten. He wasn’t expecting Israel to refuse to cooperate, leaving him only with the other side’s evidence. Having signed up for the job, he signed onto a report that drew the relevant inferences from the available evidence. And its primary recommendation, if you read it, was that Israel and Hamas, both having committed apparent (this was not a judicial verdict) war crimes should conduct investigations. Israel did so. Hamas did not.
And, no, Jeff, he never said he was surprised that Hamas killed people. He’s not that naïve. He was disappointed that Hamas refused to conduct any sort of investigation. Most organizations, even terrorist organizations, make some pretense of concern for the opinions of mankind. So yes, Hamas caught him off guard. Then again, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Not even enemies of the Torah like me.
That's a load of hogwash. Goldstone was warned by just about everybody who had access to him that he was going to be used to skewer Israel. The Israeli government made it quite clear to him from the outset that there was no way it would cooperate with an investigation sponsored by the UN 'Human Rights Council.' And certainly that it would not cooperate with an investigation that only examined Israel's actions and not Hamas'. The man is so obtuse that he still cannot admit that his mandate was never legally changed.
It wasn't the recommendations that ticked people here off. The IDF routinely investigates anyway. It was the repeated claim - that Goldstone sort of repudiated in his Washington Post piece - that Israel deliberately sought to damage civilian infrastructure in Gaza. And it was the aspersion cast on Israel's courts in general and the IDF and the military justice system in particular that they were not capable of conducting impartial investigations.
The evidence in Israel's favor was there. It was presented to him by Israeli NGO's like NGO Monitor and Sderot Media, and much of it was publicly available on the internet (on this blog among many others). Goldstone chose to ignore it because it wasn't officially presented to his high and mighty butt by the Israeli government.
What on earth made Goldstone or anyone else think Hamas would investigate at all, let alone investigate credibly? What 'public opinion' or legal scholar would sway Hamas? The concept is too laughable to deserve a response.
But what JJ doesn't get at the end of the day is that for some of us, the libelous crap written by Goldstone and his cohorts is a matter of life and death. You see, we don't live in Manhattan. We live in Israel, where Hamas is constantly seeking ways to attack us. How much more restricted with the IDF's ability to defend us be the next time as a result of the Goldstone experience? Those who defend Goldstone are endangering their fellow Jews. For that, they are worthy of 'Howard's - and everyone else's - opprobrium.
What happened to make Richard Goldstone retract his accusation that Israel deliberately bombed civilian facilities in Gaza? In a sympathetic article, The New York Times reports that things didn't quite work out the way Goldstone planned.
Two decades ago, Richard Goldstone, a Jewish South African judge, played a vital role in reconciling his country’s white minority government and rising black majority movement by leading a fact-finding mission into black violence that offered a Solomonic conclusion.
The violence, he found, was endemic but a covert government campaign was sponsoring black killings to undermine the opposition. Heads rolled, hands were shaken and Mr. Goldstone was hailed as the most trusted man in the country, going on to a distinguished international career.
In 2009, he tried to do the same thing in the other country close to his heart — Israel. Mr. Goldstone, a Zionist who believes political reconciliation will result when both sides face the unbiased rigors of international law, agreed to lead a United Nations inquiry into the war between Israel and Hamas, telling friends the mission could make a real contribution to Middle East peace.
The resulting report that bears his name accused both sides of wrongdoing — deliberately making civilians targets. But the report not only failed to bring peace to the region and universal honor to its author. It also hardened positions and brought a storm of attacks on Mr. Goldstone, especially from within his community.
In other words, Goldstone thought that if he made the terrorists think that they were no more guilty than Israel, they would come around to reconciling with us. Really. And he stuck to that line from the Report's release in September 2009 until April 1, 2011, when he wrote his famous op-ed in the New York TimesWashington Post.
So what changed his mind? The Times makes it sound like the biggest factor was the extent to which Goldstone was shunned by the Jewish community worldwide. Did he really think it would be otherwise?
“I know he was extremely hurt by the reaction to the report,” said Aryeh Neier, president of the Open Society Foundation, who has known Mr. Goldstone for years and remains close to him. “I think he was extremely uncomfortable in providing some fodder to people who were looking for anything they could use against Israel.”
In describing his new position, Mr. Goldstone wrote, “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.” He has declined requests to elaborate. Interviews with two dozen people who know him suggest a combination of reasons: the hostility from his community, disappointment about Hamas’s continuing attacks on civilians, and new understanding of Israel’s conduct in a few of the most deadly incidents of the war.
The year and a half since the Gaza Report was published has been hard on Mr. Goldstone. Hailed by the Arab world and the anti-Israel left, he has been censured by those with whom he had always identified. One of his two daughters, who spent more than a decade in Israel and now lives in Canada with the man she married here, has been furious with him, according to a family friend; he was nearly unable to attend the bar mitzvah of his other daughter’s son in South Africa because of plans by some members of the Jewish community there to demonstrate against his presence.
The daughter who is 'furious' with him would be Nicole. I guess she tired of giving pained interviews.
Indeed Goldstone and his supporters are acknowledging to Jewish friends that he did have a motive in agreeing to head the group that issued the report. His motive, according to his supporters, was to bring some balance to a report that without his input would have been “even worse.” Goldstone’s daughter, Nicole, in an obviously pained interview with Haaretz said that, “Had Richard Goldstone not served as the head of the UN inquiry into the Gaza War, the accusations against Israel would have been harsher.” She continued. “My father took on the job, for peace, for everyone and also for Israel.” She told the Jerusalem Post, “My dad loves Israel and it wasn’t easy for him to see and hear what happened. I think he heard and saw things he didn’t expect to see and hear….”
So can we drop the accusation that Goldstone had it in for Israel? Maybe. But that doesn't excuse the hubris that caused him to ignore warnings by many people that he was stepping into a trap. This is from the Times again.
When Mr. Goldstone was asked to investigate the three-week Gaza war, which started in late 2008, he was told by many friends of Israel that he was stepping into a trap. There had never been a United Nations Human Rights Council investigation into possible war crimes in Chechnya or Sri Lanka, but there had been multiple ones into Israel’s actions.
...
As he said in an interview with the newspaper The Forward, “I was driven particularly because I thought the outcome might, in a small way, assist the peace process. I really thought I was one person who could achieve an evenhanded mission.”
Some attribute that sentiment to a well-developed sense of ambition. With a nod to Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then the secretary general of the United Nations, some called him Richard Richard-Goldstone, according to Benjamin Pogrund, a South African journalist.
And when Israel refused to play along - citing the bias of the 'Human Rights Council' and the fact that Goldstone's mandate was never changed despite promises made to him that it would be - Goldstone determined to ignore any evidence that was submitted to him unofficially on Israel's behalf, and to ignore evidence that was publicly available (like YouTube videos of 'Palestinians' using children as human shields that were posted on this blog and many others).
“It was a nightmare experience to visit Gaza and witness at first hand all of this destruction and to witness at first hand the effects this has on the men, women and children of that overcrowded enclave,” Mr. Goldstone said in a speech last month to a group of Jewish lawyers in Sacramento.
He added that he was sure it would also have been “an emotional and distressing experience” to visit the many victims of the thousands of rockets over the years fired from Gaza into southern Israel. “I deeply regret that the Israeli government denied us that opportunity,” he said.
The lack of access to Israel and its military, Mr. Goldstone implied in numerous statements, led to a somewhat skewed report that needed to be adjusted.
The problem is that all his protestations to the contrary, Goldstone conducted his commission as a court. He issued 'findings of fact and conclusions of law' like a court. And a court doesn't hear evidence unless the parties put the evidence in front of it.
Goldstone may not be guilty of deliberately trying to hurt Israel. But he is guilty of hubris of the worst kind. Former Nixon aide John Dean wrote a book about it once. It was called Blind Ambition.
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.
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.
Unanimous US Senate calls on UN to rescind Goldstone report
The United States Senate has unanimously passed a resolution calling on the United Nations to rescind the Goldstone Report.
The resolution called on the UN Human Rights Council "to reflect the author's repudiation of the Goldstone report's central findings, rescind the report and reconsider further Council actions with respect to the report's findings."
The resolution urged UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon to "do all in his power to redress the damage to Israel's reputation" and to "reform" the HRC "so that it no longer unfairly, disproportionately and falsely criticizes Israel on a regular basis."
We love the US Senate and we appreciate this resolution, but the chances that they will move the UN in general and the 'Human Rights Council' in particular by just passing this resolution are somewhere between slim and none. Is the US willing to do more? Is it willing, for example, to call on the Obama administration to withdraw from the 'Human Rights Council'? Is it willing to withhold US funding for the UN until the UN buries the Goldstone Report? Is it willing to withdraw from the UN? Even those measures may not help to deep six the Goldstone Report, but they would send a moral message of where the United States stands on the issue.
Hamas: Yes of course we fire missiles from civilian areas (with video)
For years, Israel has charged that Hamas uses civilians as human shields by firing rockets and missiles from within civilian areas. For years, the 'international community' has ignored that charge, and instead accused Israel of killing - and even targeting - civilians in its actions against Hamas.
Now, Hamas has released video showing its own terrorists shooting missiles from civilian areas.
Hamas has confirmed what Israel has charged for years and has released videos of rocket and mortar shell launches from within civilian areas in Gaza. The IDF release the video after taking it from Hama’s official website, showing launches from civilian areas, despite the danger to nearby residents.
At 14 seconds in the video, a rocket is launched in front of a school and a mosque.
The international community has supported Hamas allegations that Israel fires at civilians when conducting counterterrorist operations. The U.N. Goldstone Report last year charged Israel with intentionally trying to kill civilians and generally denied Israel’s documented claim that Hamas used human shields when attacking Israelis.
Surprise: Goldstone's retraction spurred anti-Semitic cartoons in Arab world
Actually, this shouldn't surprise anyone. The Anti-Defamation League reports that Richard Goldstone's ostensible retraction of the report that bears his name has led to a round of anti-Semitic cartoons like the one above in the Arab world.
“Just as the original report was celebrated by Arab cartoonists as ‘proof’ of the evil nature of Israel and Jews, so too has the decision by Judge Richard Goldstone to reconsider his findings inspired another round of hateful caricatures and stereotypes in the Arab media," Anti-Defamation League chairman Abraham Foxman said.
"Newspapers across the Arab world have responded to the Goldstone developments with a series of hideous caricatures, many of them viciously anti-Semitic.”
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
