Love of the Land: Seattle Times Columnist Entitled to Own Facts?

Seattle Times Columnist Entitled to Own Facts?

Gilead Ini
CAMERA Media Analysis
05 April '10

Bruce Ramsey is entitled to his opinions. In fact, as a columnist for the Seattle Times, opinions are precisely what he gets paid for. It seems, though, that his employers feel he’s also entitled to his own facts. This despite journalistic codes of ethics maintaining that opinion pieces, like news stories, must be accurate.

In a March 31, 2010 column commenting on Israel’s justification for the 2008-2009 Gaza war, Ramsey claimed that rockets fired by Gaza Palestinians into Israeli towns "hadn’t killed any Israelis":

Israel said it was defending itself, against rockets — homemade pipe-bomb-type rockets. These had been fired by Gazan hotheads against the Israeli town of Sderot to protest Israel's quarantine. The rockets hadn't killed any Israelis, but they might have. ("Congressman Brian Baird stands up for the people of Gaza")Not only is this claim about lack of fatalities demonstrably false, but so is just about everything else in that passage.

• Prior to the Gaza war, over 20 people were killed by Palestinian rockets.

• Israel was acting to stop not only the local "homemade" Qassam rockets, but also the sophisticated Grad or Katyusha type rockets launched from Gaza into Israel immediately prior to the war, and as early as 2006.

(Read full analysis)

Love of the Land: Seattle Times Columnist Entitled to Own Facts?

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.

(Read full article)

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Love of the Land: Israeli report contradicting Goldstone ignored

Love of the Land: Positioning Israel as the Nazi of Nations

Positioning Israel as the Nazi of Nations

Richard L. Cravatts

American Thinker

28 March '10

Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., director of Boston University's Program in Publishing, just finished a book about the worldwide assault on Israel taking place on college campuses: Genocidal Liberalism: The University's Jihad Against Israel & Jews.

Jews have been accused of harming and murdering non-Jews since the twelfth century in England, when Jewish convert to Catholicism Theobald of Cambridge perjuriously proclaimed that European Jews ritually slaughtered Christian children each year and drank their blood during Passover season.

That medieval blood libel, largely abandoned in the contemporary West, does, however, still appear as part of the Arab world's vilification of Jews -- now transmogrified into a slander against Israel, the Jew of nations. But in the regular chorus of defamation against Israel by a world infected with Palestinianism, a new, more odious trend has begun to show itself: The blood libel has been revivified, but to position Israel and Zionism as demonic agents in the community of nations, its primitive superstitions are now masked with a veneer of academic scholarship and politicized scientific study.

In March, to cite the latest instance of this trend, the findings of a study conducted by the New Weapons Research Group (Nwrg), a team of scientists based in Italy, were announced on "the use of unconventional weapons and their mid-term effects on the population of after-war areas" -- in this, case Gaza after Israel's "Cast Lead" operations last year. "Many Palestinian children still living in precarious situations at ground level in Gaza after Israeli bombing," the study found, "have unusually high concentrations of metals in the hair, indicating environmental contamination, which can cause health and growth damages due to chronic exposure," and these high levels were the direct result of Israeli bombs.

Moreover, suggested Professor Paola Manduca, one of the investigators, the presence of metals in children's hair "presents serious problems in the current situation in Gaza, where the construction and removal of damaged structures is difficult or impossible, and," in case anyone does not know whom to blame, "certainly represents the major responsibility of those who should remedy the damage to the civilian population under international law."

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Positioning Israel as the Nazi of Nations

Love of the Land: Ashton in Gaza: When the "experts" are clueless

Ashton in Gaza: When the "experts" are clueless

Elder of Ziyon
22 March '10

One of the more frustrating parts of watching the Middle East is when one sees that people who should have some basic knowledge, who present themselves as experts, and who urge actions based on their experience and expertise, are completely clueless.

Meet Catherine Ashton.

Lady Ashton is the high representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and vice president of the European Commission. She visited Gaza last week, and, armed with the latest on-the-ground intelligence, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times describing exactly what needs to be done to make the Middle East a happy place again.

Here is her first paragraph:

It is the process of entering the Gaza Strip that strikes you most. At the Erez checkpoint you go into what looks like a modern airport terminal. Leaving it you move through a winding maze of gates and walls and emerge, like a time-traveler transported backwards, on a dirt track. This is where the industrial center of Gaza used to be, before the shelling just over a year ago. Now, people with donkeys and carts carry stones from the rubble.

Ashton is stating as fact that the heartless Israelis, for no discernible reason, reduced the Erez area to rubble during Operation Cast Lead and bombed the formerly prosperous industrial area to the stone age.

Love of the Land: Ashton in Gaza: When the "experts" are clueless

Love of the Land: The Gaza siege myth

The Gaza siege myth

Jacob Shrybman
Israel Opinion/Ynet
18 March '10

(Note:The fifth rocket attack from Gaza in the past 48 hours, killed a 23-year old Thai foreign worker, Monny, late Thursday morning, March 18. The Qassam rocket struck the greenhouses area in Netiv Ha’asara located just north of the Gaza Strip. Medics at the scene said there wasn't much they could do to save him.Over 325 rockets and mortars have been fired into Israel during the third Hamas-Israel ceasefire that began on January 18, 2009 following Operation Cast Lead.)

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is set to arrive in Israel to visit the Gaza Strip amidst demands to end a so-called siege on the terrorist-controlled territory. Yet one has to ask what siege, or blockade, he is referring to, with 738,576 tons of humanitarian aid being transferred into the Gaza Strip in 2009.

Moreover, the UN has provided $200 million in Gaza Strip aid following a military operation that reportedly claimed 1,300 fatalities amongst a population of less than 1.5 million – meanwhile, notwithstanding plans to raise more funds, it has provided only $10 million to natural disaster victims in Haiti as of the end of January, an earthquake that claimed the lives of over 230,000 people and affected over 3 million. Of course, that is without mentioning that Haitians have not been attacking an innocent nearby civilian population for a near decade.

The international community has bought into a bold-faced lie about an Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip while ignoring the facts on the ground. International humanitarian aid has been flowing rapidly into the Gaza Strip for years and in no way stopped after Operation Cast Lead, as 30,576 aid trucks entered the territory in 2009. In 2009, 4,883 tons of medical equipment entered the Gaza Strip. Just last month, a new CAT scan machine was brought into the Strip.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: The Gaza siege myth

Love of the Land: New report shows Hamas used more than 100 mosques and hospitals to fire rockets during Cast Lead

New report shows Hamas used more than 100 mosques and hospitals to fire rockets during Cast Lead

Robin Shepherd
robinshepherdonline.com
15 March '10

The Jerusalem Post carries an exclusive today detailing a new report from Israel’s Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (Malam) showing that Hamas used more than 100 mosques and hospitals as well as areas they knew to be populated with children as shields from which to fire rockets at Israel during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

According to the paper: “The IDF and the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) cooperated with the report’s authors and declassified hundreds of photographs, videos, prisoner interrogations and Hamas-drawn sketches as part of an effort to counter the criticism leveled at Israel in the UN-sponsored Goldstone Report.”

The research group was led by Col. Reuven Erlich, a former Intelligence officer. Erlich was quoted as saying: “By placing all of their weaponry next to homes, by operating out of homes, mosques and hospitals, by firing rockets next to schools and by using human shields, Hamas is the one responsible for the civilian deaths during the operation”.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: New report shows Hamas used more than 100 mosques and hospitals to fire rockets during Cast Lead

Love of the Land: Lying in Gaza

Lying in Gaza

Ben Cohen
Z-Word Blog
09 March '10

A group of friends in London alerted me to this grubby little piece by a British Labour Party Member of Parliament, Bob Marshall-Andrews, concerning his recent visit to Gaza. Upon reading it, I was struck by various thoughts, not least the degree to which Marshall-Andrews words will be welcomed by the Hamas cheerleaders who compose the Palestinian solidarity movement, in marked contrast to the fierce condemnation with which this blog, and others like it, will greet his compendium of antisemitism-laced falsehoods. Why bother to refute such lies, one might ask, when those of us who defend Israel are at irreconcilable odds with those who demonize her, when any charge of antisemitism we make is bound to be dismissed as another tired attempt to muzzle debate? The most satisfactory answer I can come up with is that some things - and Marshall-Andrews article is one of them - are so odious that they cannot pass without rebuke.

To work, then. Here’s how Marshall-Andrews sets the scene:

“Bags of cement are slit open by grinning ringletted guards. Having destroyed they maintain the destruction.”

The “ringlets” he refers to are known, in Hebrew, as pe’ot, the sidelocks worn by ultraorthodox Jews. Now, I’ve spent a great deal of time in Israel and I can tell you that most Israeli soldiers don’t wear pe’ot. So what visual image is Marshall-Andrews trying to conjure up here? One of a people that rejoices in radical evil, their grinning faces framed by those unmistakeably Jewish ringlets.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Lying in Gaza

Love of the Land: Top UK military commander says Israeli advice key to British strategy against suicide bombers in Afghanistan, warns of “dark forces” in the BBC

Top UK military commander says Israeli advice key to British strategy against suicide bombers in Afghanistan, warns of “dark forces” in the BBC

Robin Shepherd
Robin Shepherd Online
22 February '10

A rare voice of sanity in the British establishment, Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of UK forces in Afghanistan, has mounted another devastating defence of Israel. In a speech at the annual dinner (which I attended) of the UK’s Zionist Federation in London last night, Kemp even revealed that prior to his deployment in Afghanistan a four hour briefing by a top Israeli general had been instrumental in formulating British tactics and strategy on how to deal with Taliban suicide bombers.

To my knowledge, such an intimate strategic relationship on such a sensitive matter has never before been revealed. If it has, it has certainly not received widespread coverage in the UK press.

Kemp’s counter-orthodoxy views on Israel rose to global prominence in October last year when, against the background of the Goldstone Report, he appeared before the UN Human Rights Council to say of Operation Cast Lead: “..Israeli Defense Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare. Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population.”

(Read full post)

Related: UK Commander Challenges Goldstone Report

Love of the Land: Top UK military commander says Israeli advice key to British strategy against suicide bombers in Afghanistan, warns of “dark forces” in the BBC

Love of the Land: Double Standards? Nato's Afghan Errors

Double Standards? Nato's Afghan Errors

Honest Reporting
18 February '10

Nato and Afghan government forces have recently launched the largest military operation against the Taliban since the beginning of the conflict in Afghanistan in 2001.

Like the IDF during Operation Cast Lead, US and British troops face an enemy that cares little for the well being of its people.

Like the IDF, US and British forces operate under a military doctrine that aims to prevent civilian casualties.

Like the IDF, US and British forces have found that in a conflict situation, mistakes inevitably occur and civilians are the tragic victims.

According to a BBC report: "A Nato air strike against suspected insurgents in Kandahar has instead killed five civilians, officials say. The group was seen digging on a roadside and was thought to be planting bombs, Nato said. A senior Isaf official said he regretted the loss of life, adding that an investigation was underway."

This followed an incident only a day earlier when 12 Afghan civilians were reported to have been killed by an errant missile:

Gen Carter confirmed on Tuesday a missile that struck a house outside Marjah on Sunday killing 12 people, including six children, had hit its intended target.

Gen Carter said the rocket had not malfunctioned and the US system responsible for firing it was back in use. Officials say three Taliban, as well as civilians, were in the house but the Nato soldiers did not know the civilians were there.

Initial Nato reports said the missile had landed about 300m (984ft) off its intended target. Gen Carter blamed these "conflicting" reports on "the fog of war".

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Double Standards? Nato's Afghan Errors

Love of the Land: Roger Cohen And Wishful Thinking, Part 974

Roger Cohen And Wishful Thinking, Part 974

Eamonn McDonagh
Z-Word Blog
13 February '10

As readers of this blog know, Roger Cohen is not a wise man. His latest column in the New York Times gives further evidence of this.

Domestic U.S. politics constrain innovative thought - even open debate - on the process without end that is the peace search.

Open debate constrained, eh? Come on Roger, don’t be a tease. You mean the evil and oh so long tentacles of the Israel lobby are reaching into campuses, news rooms and the very halls of Congress to prevent people saying what they really think, and you know, you’re really sure, that what they’d say if the evil Zionist manipulators would only let them, bears a striking resemblance to what you think yourself.

Centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust created a moral imperative for a Jewish homeland, Israel, and demand of America that it safeguard that nation in the breach.

And if Jews had never been persecuted and never been victims of genocide I guess that would mean that they would have no right to self determination? Let’s try thinking about this another way. During the 19th century the idea began to gain traction among Jews in Europe that they were as entitled to their own nation state as anyone else. The same idea started to gain presence among many other peoples without states at the same time. Eventually the Jews got their state. Not all were so lucky.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Roger Cohen And Wishful Thinking, Part 974

Love of the Land: Can it all be just a mistake?

Can it all be just a mistake?

Itzik Yarkoni
Sderot Media Center
09 February '10

Hamas officials said that a 52-page document has been compiled to testify that the offensive missiles fired during Operation Cast lead were “an accident” due to their weapon’s lack of aiming capabilities toward military installations.

However, section 1687 of the “Goldstone Report” presents that, “indeed, Palestinian armed groups, among them Hamas, have publicly expressed their intention to target Israel civilians.... claimed responsibility for the deaths of each of the Israeli civilians killed by rocket fired during the operations in Gaza”.

This begs the question: If Hamas weapon’s suffer from inaccuracy, maybe the information that was given to Goldstone is also off target?

I remember the first time that I heard about Sapir college was when I was traveling in the United States after the army. When I asked about the whereabouts of the college, a friend replied, “It is a nice place next to Sderot. However, the situation is a little strange. Rockets are launched towards the city daily”. I did not know what lay ahead for me at Sapir College, but I decided that I would take the risk. After all, I figured something would be done, eventually, to stop the rockets.

Eight years have passed since the first rocket was launched towards Sderot. The situation has not changed, I was wrong. More than ten thousand kassam missiles, grad, and mortar shells have been fired from Gaza, of which eighty-four fell in Sderot during Operation Cast Lead. Moreover, the “military installations” Hamas speaks of are nowhere to be found in the city. Where exactly were the rockets intended to fall?

(Read full story)

Love of the Land: Can it all be just a mistake?

Love of the Land: Re: Goldstoned

Re: Goldstoned

Evelyn Gordon
Contentions/Commentary
14 February '10

Readers of David’s post on Goldstone Commission member Desmond Travers’ ridiculous assertion — that “the number of rockets that had been fired into Israel in the month preceding” last year’s war in Gaza “was something like two” — could erroneously conclude that Travers was correct about that month; his mistake was in “blithely ignoring the thousands of rockets Israelis endured in the years leading up to the operation.” That was certainly not David’s intention, but to eliminate all doubt, here are the actual figures, as compiled by Israel’s Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center:

The war began on December 27, 2008. During 2008 as a whole, the number of rockets and mortar shells launched at Israel from Gaza was 3,278, more than double the number that landed in 2007.

More importantly, however, there was a significant escalation in November and December, 2008, after Hamas withdrew from the truce that had been in place during the previous months. Thus the number of rockets launched from Gaza into Israel totaled 125 in November and 361 in December, compared with only 11 in the four preceding months (July through October) put together. The number of mortars totaled 68 in November and 241 in December, compared with only 15 in the four preceding months put together. The number of rockets and mortars combined totaled 193 in November and 602 in December, compared with only 26 in the four preceding months put together.

Needless to say, these figures are a good deal higher than “something like two.” But the more important fact to be derived from this data is that Hamas could have avoided the war simply by continuing the truce. Instead, it opted for a major escalation in the volume of fire. And it was that escalation that finally provoked Israel into responding, after three and a half years of trying and failing to end the bombardment by methods short of war.

Love of the Land: Re: Goldstoned

Love of the Land: Should Israel's conduct in Gaza have provoked this mad-dog fury?

Should Israel's conduct in Gaza have provoked this mad-dog fury?

Stephanie Gutmann
Telegraph.co.uk
07 February '10

(Good question, good answer. Y.)

Or is there, as the psychologists would say, “something else going on”?
Look, I love Daniel Hannan and would like him to come over and run for president of the United States in 2012 but I was disturbed by something in his recent post about the motivations for anti-Semitism. I don’t want to be confused with one of those nags who’s always ready to find some tiny ideological misstep and consign would-be friends to an enemies list. No, I think what I’m doing here is making a different point. I think Daniel and a number of intelligent, well-informed people are missing an important part of the picture about anti-Semitism in Britain, Europe or wherever and its relationship to the Gaza invasion.

Daniel wrote:

Anti-Semitic attacks are on the rise in Britain and (hat-tip Mark Steyn) in the rest of Europe. Many of the perpetrators are reported as having been provoked by the invasion of Gaza… [But] why should British Jews be held answerable for the actions of the Israeli government? The most bellicose critics of Israel are forever telling us that their quarrel is with Zionism, not with Jews. If so, it seems perverse in the extreme to attack those Jews who have declined to migrate to Zion.

What hangs in the air here is the notion that it is not odd to get so incensed about Israel’s conduct that you would feel moved to do something extreme, and that the odd part is blaming it on British Jews. Reasonable people would ask themselves, as Daniel put it, “why should British Jews be held answerable for the actions of the Israeli government?” and then they would not, say, throw the rock and then we could still call them reasonable people.

And I too would congratulate them for their reasonableness – for not throwing the rock is a big deal – but then I would like them to take the next step on the road to sanity. I would like them to see how the intensity of the reaction, the fact that we can even think of Israel’s conduct in Gaza as understandable provocation, is itself a symptom of the madness. In other words, no, “Israel’s rampage in Gaza” does not “provide a convenient cover story”, to paraphrase Julian Kossoff. The interesting part that so many of you are missing is that the conduct is used to provide a cover story for people who are looking for a convenient cover story.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Should Israel's conduct in Gaza have provoked this mad-dog fury?

Love of the Land: Goldstoned

Goldstoned

David Hazony
Contentions/Commentary
14 February '10

One of the big questions surrounding the Goldstone report is whether the Israeli government made a mistake by refusing to cooperate with the mission. It was, admittedly, a serious gamble: If Goldstone’s “fact-finding” commission were in any way sincere in its efforts to present a balanced view, Israel would be giving up on a real opportunity to make its case to the world; on the other hand, if the commission had already decided from the outset to blast Israel and accuse it of atrocities, then to cooperate with the commission would have been to grant it a legitimacy it might not otherwise have had.

Part of an answer came in recent weeks from the mouth of none other than Desmond Travers, a retired Irish army colonel who was one of the commission’s members (h/t, JCPA and Haaretz). In an interview with the Middle East Monitor, Travers unleashes a pile of telling quotes. First, he points out that “the number of rockets that had been fired into Israel in the month preceding their operations was something like two.” For this reason, he “reject[s]… entirely” Israel’s excuse for the whole operation, since Hamas had anyway stopped terrorizing. This statement, blithely ignoring the thousands of rockets Israelis endured in the years leading up to the operation, or the fact that Hamas continued shooting rockets at Israeli civilians despite many warnings and more limited retaliations, is infuriating to anyone who watched as Israelis in Sederot and other communities suffered repeated barrages, and should alone be enough to call Travers’s objectivity, or at least his judgment, into question.

Second, he dismisses Israel’s claims that Hamas hid its missile stockpiles in Gaza mosques as “spurious.” What about the photographs? “Unless they can give me absolute forensic proof, I do not believe the photographs.” Well, we do have to wonder: If incriminating photos of missile stockpiles do not meet the threshold of “facts” that the commission was meant to find, why the head-spinning gullibility in repeating all those accusations of Israeli war crimes, which were almost entirely based on unverified hearsay?

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: Goldstoned

Love of the Land: An Anti-Israel Extremist Seeks Revenge Through Goldstone Report

An Anti-Israel Extremist Seeks Revenge Through Goldstone Report

Alan M. Dershowitz
Hudson New York
12 February '10

When Irish Colonel Travers eagerly accepted an appointment to the Goldstone Commission, he was hell bent on revenge against Israel based on paranoid fantasies and hard left anti-Israel propaganda. He actually believed, as he put it in a recent interview, that “so many Irish soldiers had been killed by Israelis,” with “a significant number who were taken out deliberately and shot (in southern Lebanon.)” This is of course complete and utter fantasy, but it was obviously part of Colonel Travers bigoted reality.

Travers came to the job having already made up his mind not to believe anything Israel said and to accept everything Hamas put forward. For example, Israel produced hard photographic evidence that Gaza mosques were used to store rockets and other weapons. Other photographs taken by journalists, also proved what everybody now acknowledges to be true: namely that Hamas, as its leaders frequently boasted, routinely use mosques as military munitions depots. When confronted with this photographic evidence, Travers said “I don’t believe the photographs.” Of course he doesn’t since they don’t comport with his politically correct and ideologically skewed world view. This is what he had previously said about why he didn’t believe that Hamas used the mosques to store weapons:

“We also found no evidence that mosques were used to store munitions. Those charges reflect Western perceptions in some quarters that Islam is a violent religion….If I were a Hamas operative the last place I’d store munitions would be in a mosque. It’s not secure, is very visible, and would probably be pre-targeted by Israeli surveillance. There are a [sic] many better places to store munitions.”

But that is exactly what Hamas did, despite Travers insistence on paraphrasing Groucho Mark’s famous quip, “Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lying eyes?”

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: An Anti-Israel Extremist Seeks Revenge Through Goldstone Report

Love of the Land: A Usurpation of National Sovereignty

A Usurpation of National Sovereignty

Israel fights back against a U.N. power grab.


Peter Berkowitz
National Review Online
10 February '10

Tel Aviv — The controversy sparked by the Sept. 15, 2009, publication of the Report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, otherwise known as the Goldstone Report, may appear to exclusively concern the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In fact, it involves a usurpation of national sovereignty by international law that has implications well beyond Israelis, Palestinians, and their neighborhood.

The latest round in this controversy got underway on January 29, when Israel delivered “Gaza Operation Investigations: An Update” to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. The carefully crafted 46-page document affirmed Israel’s unequivocal commitment to the law of armed conflict, and it reported substantial progress in investigating allegations of unlawful conduct against Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers and commanders arising from Operation Cast Lead.

Operation Cast Lead took place from Dec. 28, 2008, to Jan. 18, 2009. Israel carried out the operation because Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups had launched approximately 12,000 rocket and mortar attacks from the Gaza Strip since 2000 against civilian populations in southern Israel. Paradoxically, given that Hamas’s deliberate and premeditated attacks on Israeli civilian populations and its use of fellow Palestinians as human shields were flagrant war crimes, international ire has from the outset swirled around the alleged criminality of Israel’s operation.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: A Usurpation of National Sovereignty

Love of the Land: New Revelations About the UN Goldstone Report that Seriously Undermine its Credibility

New Revelations About the UN Goldstone Report that Seriously Undermine its Credibility

IMRA
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
10 February '10

Col. (ret.) Desmond Travers was one of the four members of the UN Fact Finding Mission that produced what is widely called the Goldstone Report. The Mission investigated Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip between December 27, 2008 and January 18, 2009. Travers joined the Irish Defense Forces in 1961 and retired after forty years. As the only former officer who belonged to Justice Richard Goldstone's team, he was the senior figure responsible for the military analysis that provided the basis for condemning Israel for war crimes.

After following his repeated public appearances with the other mission members in July 2009, and especially in light of his most recent interviews, serious flaws have now become evident in the methodology he followed, in his collection and processing of data, and in the conclusions he draws. In the past, the flaws in the Goldstone report, and especially its lack of balance, have been criticized by the London Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist, but the fundamental problems of its military analysis have not been fully addressed. In the material presented here, this becomes evident in four specific ways:

1. A Fundamental Bias against the Israel Defense Forces

2. False Information Reported About Weapons Systems

3. Completely Inaccurate Data

4. Lack of Professionalism in Conducting Thorough Investigations

(Read full review)

Love of the Land: New Revelations About the UN Goldstone Report that Seriously Undermine its Credibility

Love of the Land: Just A Reminder: Having Turned Gaza Into A Weapons Factory, Hamas Gearing Up For War [Video]

Just A Reminder: Having Turned Gaza Into A Weapons Factory, Hamas Gearing Up For War [Video]

Omri
Mere Rhetoric
05 February '10

There's an Al Jazeera expose at the bottom of the post, outlining the massive indigenous weapons industry that Hamas is running in the middle of the "world's largest concentration camp" (because that's exactly how Auschwitz was - lots of spare missiles and raw materials just lying around!) They're back to mass weapons production, which as a sheer matter of statistics means a bump in "work accidents." And in the Sinai the Egyptians are literally tripping over huge weapons caches.

And - just as they were doing on the eve of Cast Lead - Hamas is back to strutting around about taking on the IDF:

One year after Israel's offensive on the Gaza Strip, the spokesman for Hamas' armed wing said this week that the Islamist group would not shirk away from a new battle with Israel... Israel has said the brigades, which some observers estimate have 25,000 fighters, have been seeking with Syrian and Iranian help to upgrade their rocket capabilities and put the Israeli heartland and the commercial capital of Tel Aviv within range. Abu Ubaida said Hamas had no choice but to improve its arsenal.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: Just A Reminder: Having Turned Gaza Into A Weapons Factory, Hamas Gearing Up For War [Video]

Love of the Land: A Moral Evaluation of the Gaza War - Operation Cast Lead

A Moral Evaluation of the Gaza War - Operation Cast Lead

Asa Kasher
Jewish Center for Public Affairs
04 February '10

(For anyone wanting a better understanding of the topic, this is worth the investment of time to read. Y.)

In Israel, a combatant is a citizen in uniform; quite often, he is a conscript or on reserve duty. His state ought to have a compelling reason for jeopardizing his life. The fact that persons involved in terrorism are depicted as non-combatants and that they reside and act in the vicinity of persons not involved in terrorism is not a reason for jeopardizing the combatant's life more than is required under combat conditions.

The ethical doctrine which follows from the IDF Ethics document mandates that, whenever possible, you must warn non-combatants that they are residents of a neighborhood where it is dangerous to stay. In Gaza, the IDF employed a variety of unprecedented efforts meant to minimize injury to non-combatants, including warning leaflets, phone calls, and non-lethal warning fire.

There is no army in the world that will endanger its soldiers in order to avoid hitting the warned neighbors of an enemy or terrorist. Israel should favor the lives of its own soldiers over the lives of the well-warned neighbors of a terrorist when it is operating in a territory that it does not effectively control, because in such territories it does not bear the moral responsibility for properly separating between dangerous individuals and harmless ones.

Proportionality is not a numerical comparison, but an assessment of existing threats and the measures that must be taken in order to avert them. Proportionality is justifiability of the collateral damage on grounds of the military advantage gained.

Compare the Gaza operation to the U.S. Marine operation in Fallujah, Iraq, in late 2004. During the operation, about 6,000 Iraqis including 1,200-2,000 insurgents were killed. Of the city's 50,000 buildings, some 10,000 were destroyed, including 60 mosques. Thus, the U.S. left a trail of destruction in Fallujah far greater than anything Israel inflicted on Gaza. Comparing IDF activities to those of military forces of Western democracies is an essential part of any present attempt to use international law.

We in Israel are in a key position in the development of customary international law in this field because we are on the front lines in the fight against terrorism. The more often Western states apply principles that originated in Israel to their own non-traditional conflicts in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, then the greater the chance these principles have of becoming a valuable part of international law.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: A Moral Evaluation of the Gaza War - Operation Cast Lead

Love of the Land: Hamas' Line of Defence to Goldstone Report

Hamas' Line of Defence to Goldstone Report

Jonathan Dahohah HaLevi
Shalomlife
02 February '10

Israel has recently delivered to the United Nations Secretary-general Ban Ki-moon its official response to the UN’s fact finding mission to Operation Cast Lead, headed by Judge Richard Goldstone. Hamas’ government is also preparing to submit its official response before the grace period of six months set to the parties by the Goldstone committee is over.

In sharp contrast to the genuine fears expressed by Israel, Hamas does not seem to feel any threat in the legal arena. On the contrary, Hamas demonstrates self confidence based on the understanding that the Goldstone committee strived only to incriminate Israel and all other limited references to the other side were just for lip service without any legal significance. Musa Abu Marzouq, Hamas’ second in command, said in this regard in an interview to Al-Mashahid Al-Siyasi newspaper (December 8, 2009) that “All paragraphs in the Goldstone report convict Israel and totally exonerate Hamas from any misconduct... Likewise, the [Goldstone] report exonerated Hamas from all other accusations mentioned by Israel and even when the [Goldstone] report is dealing with the rockets which were launched from the Gaza Strip it speaks about military groups without naming Hamas.”

Hamas’ line of defence vis-à-vis the Goldstone report has been shaped by a group of Palestinian jurists headed by Diya Al-Din Muhsin Al-Madhoun, former legal adviser to Ismail Haniyeh (Hamas Prime Minister) and today chairman of the Tawtheeq (documentation) organization that was the key factor assigned by Hamas’ government, on which the Goldstone committee relied for sources of information in its fact finding mission. In series of interviews to the media, Madhoun elaborated as follows Hamas’ main legal arguments of its would be response to the Goldstone report assumed to be delivered in the near future to the UN secretary general.

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Love of the Land: Hamas' Line of Defence to Goldstone Report