Love of the Land: Israeli report contradicting Goldstone ignored

Israeli report contradicting Goldstone ignored

Just Journalism
15 April '10

On Wednesday 14 April, The Guardian’s lead opinion piece by George Monbiot focused on the issue of the application of international jurisdiction to visiting foreign dignitaries to the UK. In ‘The pope on trial would show what equality before the law means’, the journalist argued that any foreign citizen, regardless of their rank or position, should be arrested if they are alleged to have breached international law. Alongside Pope Benedict XVI, Monbiot argued that leader of Israel’s Kadima party Tzipi Livni, should be tried for war crimes if she ever visits the UK. Criticising Gordon Brown for seeking to change the law to prevent such a speculative arrest, Monbiot stated that Livni should be brought to court because ‘the evidence for the crimes against humanity to which Livni has been linked – laid out in the Goldstone report and elsewhere – is massive, detailed and hard to dispute.’

The Goldstone report is commonly cited in this manner by British journalists in both news and comment articles alleging Israeli war crimes during Operation Cast Lead. However, Israeli rebuttals of such claims are not regularly referenced in such a way – and often receive minimal coverage.

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Love of the Land: Israeli report contradicting Goldstone ignored

Love of the Land: Smoke and mirrors over 'lawfare'

Smoke and mirrors over 'lawfare'

Melanie Phillips
The Spectator
04 March '10
Posted before Shabbat

The Israeli paper Ha’aretz , along with the Kadima leader Tzipi Livni, appear to have been taken in by Gordon Brown’s noisy but misleading announcement in today’s Daily Telegraph that he will change the law to prevent the abuse of ‘universal jurisdiction’ through threats to arrest visiting Israeli dignatories for ‘war crimes’, an abuse which has caused the cancellation of a number of high-profile visits by Israelis to the UK of which the latest was the planned visit by Livni. Brown wrote:

There is a case now, therefore, for the evidential basis on which arrest warrants can be allowed to be tougher and for restricting the right to prosecute the narrow range of crimes falling under universal jurisdiction to the Crown Prosecution Service alone.

Livni and Ha’aretz naively take this at face value to assume that the UK is to change the law. But this is not so. Brown has merely said he intends to change the law and will consult on the best way to do this. But with a general election to be held by June at the very latest, and with no legislation actually being tabled, there is clearly no time for any such change in the law to occur.

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Love of the Land: Smoke and mirrors over 'lawfare'

Love of the Land: Aww... Holocaust-Abetting Poles Try To Capture Israeli "War Criminals" On International Holocaust Day

Aww... Holocaust-Abetting Poles Try To Capture Israeli "War Criminals" On International Holocaust Day

Omri
Mere Rhetoric
27 January '10

In fairness it was probably their parents and grandparents who consummated millennia of Catholic antisemitism by turning over Jews to Nazis, denying supplies to Warsaw Ghetto smugglers, pretending that Auschwitz didn't exist, and so on. But still:

Knesset members visiting Poland for ceremonies marking International Holocaust Day were surprised to see ads against Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Opposition Chairwoman Tzipi Livni in the city of Krakow on Tuesday evening. Posters hung not far from the Israeli lawmakers' hotel read in English, "Wanted for war crimes," offering the public an award of 10,000 euro in exchange for information on Barak or Livni's expected arrival in Europe... "After 65 years, we once again realize that being right is not enough," said MK Hasson. "We must remember this ahead of the next challenges, like Holocaust deniers, Holocaust cursers and different kinds of anti-Semites."

I especially like the part where they offered rewards for any information on where the Jewish delegation could be found and captured.

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Love of the Land: Aww... Holocaust-Abetting Poles Try To Capture Israeli "War Criminals" On International Holocaust Day

Love of the Land: A road map leading nowhere

A road map leading nowhere

Moshe Arens
Haaretz
12 January '10

It is now close to 17 years since Israel's ill-fated decision to recognize the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and the Oslo Accords. Despite the accords, or possibly because of them, during those years much blood has been shed and no significant progress was made toward peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

There was no absence of good intentions on the part of Israel. But as was shown repeatedly, good intentions are not enough to resolve the seemingly intractable issues that separate the parties. On the contrary, on many occasions, suggestions and proposals offered by Israel actually created obstacles to any progress in the negotiations. Far-reaching concessions offered by Israel, although rejected by the Palestinians, only served to establish what the Palestinians from then on insisted would have to be the starting point for future negotiations, actually creating a pitfall on the road map for any progress.

Ehud Barak's egregious concessions offered at the Camp David talks in 2000, and the additional farcical proposals made by the Israeli delegation at the continuation of these talks in Eilat, only served to establish a roadblock on the way to peace.

Why would an Israeli offer of concessions end up being a roadblock to further progress? For the simple reason that if these concessions are not supported by the majority of the Israeli public they cannot be implemented, while a Palestinian demand that these concessions become the starting point of any further negotiations blocks the resumption of negotiations.

The prime minister or government that offers these concession might well argue that they are the democratically elected government and have the perfect right to offer concessions that they consider appropriate. And they do have that right, but if they are aware of the fact that the Israeli public would not support these concessions they should know that they cannot be implemented, and therefore they are actually doing a disservice to the very peace process they claim to be pursuing by offering these concessions to the Palestinians.

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Love of the Land: A road map leading nowhere

Love of the Land: HRW's Roth tries to weasel out of his libel

HRW's Roth tries to weasel out of his libel

Elder of Ziyon
11 January '10

I wrote last week about HRW's Ken Roth's article vilifying Israel as a nation that uniquely hates human rights and that goes out of its way to trample the rights of its enemies.

One of the things he wrote was a purposeful misinterpretation of a statement by Tzipi Livni, which he used as justification for his sick thesis. He falsely wrote that she said that the IDF should not distinguish between Gaza civilians and terrorists, when in fact she said that Israel should not distinguish between Arab and Jewish victims of terror.

NGO Monitor traced the history of how Livni was misquoted and found that it originated in a similar accusation by Al Haq, a European-funded Palestinian Arab NGO. That libel then spread to other Palestinian NGOs, to Al Jazeera and finally to HRW which quoted it in its Rockets from Gaza report last August - in a transparent attempt to balance its rare criticism of Hamas with a calumny against Israel. The entire episode shows in a clear light how HRW's fact-finding methodology is flawed and biased, when they cannot even be bothered to read the original source of the quote and instead rely on biased and false interpretations from Palestinian Arab NGOs with a clear agenda against truth.

Now, Roth is backtracking. His article has been edited to take out Livni's quote, and to add a correction that, unbelievably, still doesn't admit the error:

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Love of the Land: HRW's Roth tries to weasel out of his libel

Love of the Land: A Lesson for London

A Lesson for London

Evelyn Gordon
Contentions/Commentary
05 January '10

Meeting with Israeli officials in Jerusalem this morning, British Attorney General Baroness Scotland reiterated her government’s pledge to amend the “universal jurisdiction” law under which British courts have repeatedly issued arrest warrants against Israeli officers and politicians. That pledge, first made by Prime Minister Gordon Brown last month, outraged the Muslim Council of Britain, which accused the government of being “partisan” and “compliant to [Israeli] demands.”

But if Britain keeps its word, the pro-Palestinian activists who keep seeking, and getting, those warrants will have only themselves to blame. After all, British courts have issued such warrants for years without the British government batting an eye, despite vociferous Israeli protests, and could probably have continued doing so had activists only picked their targets a little more carefully. The British couldn’t care less if Israeli army officers canceled planned visits for fear of being arrested, as yet another group did last week. Ditto for right-of-center politicians such as Minister Moshe Ya’alon, who aborted a planned trip in November: Britain would rather not hear from Israelis who think peace with the Palestinians is currently impossible.

But the activists overreached last month by securing a warrant against former foreign minister and current opposition leader Tzipi Livni. Livni is the Great White Hope of peace-processors worldwide, the Israeli deemed most likely to sign a deal with the Palestinians.

Love of the Land: A Lesson for London

Love of the Land: Time for Prime Minister Brown to take decisive steps as Israeli Deputy FM says relationship with UK “insufferable”

Time for Prime Minister Brown to take decisive steps as Israeli Deputy FM says relationship with UK “insufferable”

Robin Shepherd
robinshepherdonline.com
05 January '10

Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon is reported by the Jerusalem Post today as describing the current situation between Britain and Israel as “insufferable”, adding that “normal relations between the two countries” would be difficult to sustain under current circumstances.

Ayalon was referring to the increasingly common practice by Palestinian extremists and their many supporters in the UK of abusing the British legal system to threaten visiting Israeli dignitaries with arrest for alleged war crimes. Former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, it will be recalled, had to cancel a trip to London in December after a court authorised a warrant for her arrest over Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. It has now emerged that a group of IDF officers had to cancel a trip last week for the same reason.

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Love of the Land: Time for Prime Minister Brown to take decisive steps as Israeli Deputy FM says relationship with UK “insufferable”

Love of the Land: Typical Human Rights Watch Dishonesty

Typical Human Rights Watch Dishonesty

David Bernstein
The Volokh Conspiracy
04 January '10

HRW’s website has published this piece on the Geneva Conventions and Israel by director Ken Roth. There are many things wrong with it, but I’ll focus on one piece of blatant dishonesty.

Here’s Roth:

Instead, there is strong evidence that Israel wanted Gazan civilians to pay the price for Hamas’s abuses, and that the decision to impose that cost was taken not by junior officers in the field but by senior government officials.... [A]s the foreign minister at the time, Tzipi Livni, said during a wartime debate in parliament: “On my way here I heard that Hamas declared the man killed by a rocket in Ashkelon ‘one of the Zionists’ despite being an Israeli Arab. They don’t make a distinction, and neither should we.” With culpability running to such senior levels of government, it is no surprise that Israel wants to rewrite the rules.

Roth helpfully provides a link to his source for Livni’s quote, a newspaper article from the Israeli news site Ynet. Put aside, for a moment, the fact that despite the seriousness of his accusation, Roth is quoting from a newspaper article that doesn’t give a transcript (and thus the full context) of Livni’s remarks. And put aside that he is relying on an English translation, not the original Hebrew.

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Love of the Land: Typical Human Rights Watch Dishonesty