Something new about the Goldstone Report

I have not seen this article on the Israel Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Facebook site. (Although they do put up article after article about the evil of Israel.) So, because it is very important I will.

The Washington Post yesterday in an opinion column featured Richard Goldstone, former chief prosecutor of the U.N. International Criminal Tribunals, who was the head of the committee that wrote the damning ‘Goldstone Report’ for the United Nations. That was the report that accused both Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes during the Gaza conflict. The piece is entitled “Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and War Crimes.”

In the article Goldstone begins:

"We know a lot more today about what happened in the Gaza war of 2008-09 than we did when I chaired the fact-finding mission appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council that produced what has come to be known as the Goldstone Report. If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document."

Additionally he writes:

“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. While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.”

Goldstone slams Hamas for their refusal to investigate their own crimes. He writes, “That the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying — its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.”

He does condemn Israel for not being more open about their investigation but then once again points out the bias of the UN’s Human Rights Watch. He writes:

“Something that has not been recognized often enough is the fact that our report marked the first time illegal acts of terrorism from Hamas were being investigated and condemned by the United Nations. I had hoped that our inquiry into all aspects of the Gaza conflict would begin a new era of evenhandedness at the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted.”

I would hope that this report would show up on the IPMN site … perhaps that is too much to ask, they like the Human Rights Watch are also biased.