Standing Up to Goldstone
Congress is to vote today on H. Res. 867, which calls for the administration to kill any further promotion of the Goldstone Report in international institutions. This is a declarative measure, which bears no necessary executive significance. Congress is the legislature, the President heads the executive, and as any 6th grader has heard, they're separate and balanced and all that.
Still, declarations and symbols play real roles in life, on all sorts of levels, so when possible it's better to get them right than wrong. Which is why Goldstone himself and the forces backing him see the need to to foil the adoption of the resolution. (The forces backing him apparently share a telephone number with Human Rights Watch, but I'm not getting into that). Goldstone sent a letter to Representative Howard Berman, a Democrat from California and the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee where the measure is under discussion, explaining why he and his colleagues ought first to read his report, and then not do what they're proposing to do.
Berman has now replied, and sent Goldstone's letter and his rebuttal to all the relevant House members. You can read it here. While I can think of derogatory things to say about the report that are not in Berman's rebuttal, it's clear that whoever wrote it for him has read the Goldstone Report: most of the grist of the rebuttal is taken from the report itself.
One of the strange things about the report is that if you dislike Israel, there's lots in it that will warm your cockles. However, if you're into factual analysis, the report supplies endless demonstrations of its own profound biases and general lack of honesty and seriousness. Someone in Berman's office has done this homework.
Still, declarations and symbols play real roles in life, on all sorts of levels, so when possible it's better to get them right than wrong. Which is why Goldstone himself and the forces backing him see the need to to foil the adoption of the resolution. (The forces backing him apparently share a telephone number with Human Rights Watch, but I'm not getting into that). Goldstone sent a letter to Representative Howard Berman, a Democrat from California and the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee where the measure is under discussion, explaining why he and his colleagues ought first to read his report, and then not do what they're proposing to do.
Berman has now replied, and sent Goldstone's letter and his rebuttal to all the relevant House members. You can read it here. While I can think of derogatory things to say about the report that are not in Berman's rebuttal, it's clear that whoever wrote it for him has read the Goldstone Report: most of the grist of the rebuttal is taken from the report itself.
One of the strange things about the report is that if you dislike Israel, there's lots in it that will warm your cockles. However, if you're into factual analysis, the report supplies endless demonstrations of its own profound biases and general lack of honesty and seriousness. Someone in Berman's office has done this homework.
Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
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