The facts have changed. The hubris hasn't

http://www.georgejonas.ca/recent_writing.cfm?id=966

Two years after accusing the IDF of war crimes, a UN judge backtracks

by George Jonas
National Post
April 6, 2011

"Are you going to dump on Goldstone this week?" a friend wanted to know.

"What would you say about him?" I asked.

"Me? I'd say anybody can make a mistake," my friend declared, "but it 
takes a big man to admit it."

Well, that's a reliable old bromide. Let's see if there's any life in it.

In 2009, Richard Goldstone, a retired South African jurist, agreed to 
chair a UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) fact-finding mission on Gaza. 
UNHRC is a Geneva-based mockery of human rights that sports Libya and 
Saudi Arabia on it roster. The Goldstone Commission held hearings and 
eventually issued a report that found Israel's 2008 incursion into Gaza to 
have been "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, 
humiliate and terrorize a civilian population" -- arguably a war crime.

Goldstone's finding had legs, as they say in showbiz. It pleased the 
"progressive" left, coincided with fashionable sympathies internationally, 
suited the agenda of UNHRC, set the tone against Israel, fuelled public 
opinion, spawned boycotts and succeeded in blaming the victim.

It had only one flaw. The evidence didn't support it.

This being fairly transparent, it aroused strong feelings against Judge 
Goldstone. The former prosecutor of Yugoslavian and Rwandan war crimes 
impressed many as a careerist bureaucrat in black robes, a 
world-government rubber stamp, a useful Jewish idiot, possibly of the 
self-hating variety, lending his name to UNHRC's anti-Israeli agenda. As 
times went by, this feeling grew, supported by the findings of the McGowan 
Davis Report -- essentially, New York Judge Mary McGowan Davis' subsequent 
committee confirming that Israel doesn't deliberately target civilians, 
and didn't in Gaza.

On Friday, Judge Goldstone revisited his own report.

"If I had known then what I know now," he wrote on The Washington Post 
website, "the Goldstone Report would have been a different document."

Goldstone implied the reason was Israel's refusal to tell the UN kangaroo 
court its side of the story. "I would have welcomed Israel's cooperation," 
he wrote.

Does this make Judge Goldstone a great man?

Imagine a pilot, having failed to extend the landing gear before 
touchdown, saying: "If I had known then what I know now, that would have 
been a different landing." Or a judge: "Well, if I had known the accused 
didn't do it, the verdict would have been different."

Greatness? I don't think so. It's better than a judge stubbornly 
suppressing the evidence, as some have done, but that's about all.

My friend isn't alone, though. Others, too, regard Goldstone's revision as 
a moral triumph. It's almost exactly what Bradley Burston told his readers 
in the Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz.

"We owe him a vote of thanks," wrote Burston about Goldstone, "if only in 
showing, by personal example and at risk of his own standing, that moral 
courage means getting to the truth, not hiding behind what one so 
desperately wants to believe is the moral high ground."

What, exactly, is the "moral high ground" Goldstone and his soulmates want 
so desperately to hide behind? As Goldstone himself explains, he had no 
doubts about what Hamas had done before Israel's incursion. "That the 
crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying 
-- its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian 
targets," he confirms. But what Goldstone thought was that Hamas would 
punish or condemn itself for its actions -- or at least not do them again.

Could he have really expected that? Well, he says he did and I choose to 
believe him.

"Some have suggested," Goldstone writes in his new article, "that it was 
absurd to expect Hamas, an organization that has a policy to destroy the 
state of Israel, to investigate what we said were serious war crimes. It 
was my hope, even if unrealistic, that Hamas would do so, especially if 
Israel conducted its own investigations."

But if so, whether he recognizes it or not, it denotes Goldstone's belief 
in something he himself regards as unrealistic, if not absurd. That's no 
mistake; that's mistake elevated into philosophy, liberalism made 
metaphysical.

"At minimum, I hoped," Judge Goldstone adds, "that in the face of a clear 
finding that its members were committing serious war crimes, Hamas would 
curtail its attacks. Sadly, that has not been the case. Hundreds more 
rockets and mortar rounds have been directed at civilian targets in 
southern Israel."

"If I had known then what I know now." Sorry, Judge. You ought to have 
known.

After errors or lapses of a certain magnitude, some publicly apologize, 
change their names or go permanently abroad. Others offer penance, enter a 
religious order or commit hara-kiri. Few write articles in The Washington 
Post, patting themselves on the back.

"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," writes UNHRC's 
chair. "I had hoped that our inquiry into all aspects of the Gaza conflict 
would begin a new era of evenhandedness at the UN Human Rights Council, 
whose history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted."

Talk about the serenity of the self-righteous! I suppose one must really 
admire Richard Goldstone.

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