As I argued earlier, the Goldstone Report will be a turning point in the manner of U.N. Resolution 3379, which in 1975 declared Zionism to be a form of racism, and which was repealed sixteen years later. It will reveal, as it continues to be analyzed, the demopathy* of the primary political forces behind it, and the distorted political culture and the perversion of human rights values that lend ideologically blinded support to those forces.
Read the ongoing analysis at Understanding The Goldstone Report:
“Goldstone Standard”There are so many cases of inexplicable judgments, “Red Queen” legal reasonings, and bizarre contradictions, that we have decided to accumulate the most egregious of them here for perusal and analysis. In a sense, the “Goldstone Standard” embodies the cognitive failure whereby advocates for human rights and the protection of civilians in time of war can find Israel, the only bastion of human rights in the Middle East and the army with, by far, the best record of protecting enemy civilians, guilty of accusations made by groups that despise and violate human rights — those of their enemies, and those of their own people.
Read the Augean Stables’ analysis of Goldstone’s “36 incidents” (that were Goldstone’s self-professed basis for the report). Goldstone later explained why the U.N. mission chose not to hear testimony from British Colonel Richard Kemp, who later testified before the UNHRC that Israel’s efforts to protect civilians were exemplary. Goldstone wrote
There was no reliance on Col. Kemp mainly because the Report did not deal with the issues he raised regarding the problems of conducting military operations in civilian areas and second-guessing decisions made by soldiers and their commanding officers in the fog of war. The Mission avoided having to do so in the incidents it decided to investigate. (Emphasis added)
In other words, the report proceeded in complete and decisive ignorance of Israel’s principal claim about the nature of the conflict – that Hamas purposefully conducts warfare from within, behind, and in the disguise of the civilian population.
This is just a general highlight; the extensive, specific analysis of the report’s failures, incident by incident, should be devastating if one is not already in the process of succumbing to cognitive warfare.
*A term coined and defined by Richard Landes.
(The Augean Stables referral courtesy of Yaacov Lozowick.)
AJA
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