26 February 2011

Judge Goldstone: change of heart?

From here:

Judge Goldstone's bold statement that punishing war crimes should be "on the basis of the equality of all nations before the law" is encouraging in view of the disproportionate focus on every little wart in Israel while ignoring real gross violations of human rights elsewhere. He said that this indefensible action by the HRC:


"fueled the long-standing and repeated complaints by Israel that the Human Rights Council and the UN in general are biased against it. They repeatedly rush to pass condemnatory resolutions in the face of alleged violations of human rights law by Israel but fail to take similar action in the face of even more serious violations by other States. Until the Gaza Report they failed to condemn the firing of rockets and mortars at Israeli civilian centers."


In dealing with the recent public statement by Hamas interior minister Fathi Hammad, who quoted figures of combatant casualties in the Cast Lead Operation that roughly match the 709 claimed by Israel. Goldstone said that Israel assumed that the 250 members of Hamas who were killed in police headquarters were combatants, but that this is not necessarily so. However, he continued that, if in fact, those police officers were members of the Hamas military wing the number of combatants who were killed would approximate the number claimed by the Israeli Government.
Too late, I am afraid...

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