Part of article below; whole thing:http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/09/19/khalid-amayreh-a-criminal-state-the-must-be-isolated-reading-the-goldstone-report/
Israel is unusually furious over the publication this week of the Goldstone commission report which accuses the apartheid regime of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip during the bloody blitz against the coastal Palestinian territory nearly nine months ago.Israeli officials and hasbara doctors have been railing against Goldstone, who is both Jewish and Zionist, to the extent of accusing him of “anti-Semitism,” an increasingly stale and ineffective weapon which Israel resorts to when all other propaganda tools don’t work.
Benyamin Netanyahu, the extremist Prime Minister of the Zionist regime has even asked US Special Envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell to assist Israel, especially at the American arena, in order to curb the fallout from the report.
Meanwhile, Israel is embarking on a frantic propaganda campaign to discredit the report. In the past, Israel succeeded in endearing itself to western public opinion by enlisting the often Jewish-controlled media which effectively helped disseminate the Zionist narrative. In so doing, that media often turned the black into white, and the big lie into a “virtual truth” glorified by millions of gullible westerners who wouldn’t overburden themselves with the task of finding out the “real truth.”
Now, Israel is facing an uphill task doing the same job successfully.
First of all, Goldstone has, by and large, done a professional job. His report is nearly completely devoid of rhetorical overindulgence and presents facts and as facts without any overly tendentious interpretation.
Hence, the anti-Semitic insinuations made by Israeli hasbara officials should be treated as no more than cheap diversionary tactics aimed at evading the facts. In fact, Goldstone’s own daughter has been quoted by the Israeli press as saying that had her father not been at the helm of the investigating commission, Israel would have been condemned much more harshly.
Second, nearly all credible human rights commissions, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and even Israel’s own B’tselem had more or less reached the same conclusions about the December-January blitz, namely that Israel knowingly and deliberately targeted innocent civilians.
More to the point, numerous Israeli soldiers who participated in the virtually genocidal onslaught on the nearly completely unprotected enclave have testified that they had been instructed to shoot and kill innocent civilians, including people carrying white flags.
As an observer of Israeli behavior for many years, I have no doubt that Israeli leaders realize that they did commit war crimes and crimes against humanity. After all, many Israeli military and political officials are bona fide war criminals who would be thrown immediately behind bars in any country with even minimal adherence to the rules of justice and norms of civility and human decency.
However, these war criminals think, at least privately, that Jews shouldn’t be subject to the same rules of war that apply to other nations. Hence, they don’t view the deliberate collective murder of innocent civilians as “wrong.”
Indeed, a few days ago, an Israeli cabinet minister urged the international community to grant Israel special treatment concerning the conduct of war, presumably one that would allow the Israeli occupation army and paramilitary Jewish terrorists to murder with impunity.
I strongly believe that the international community must adopt a stringent and morally uncompromising stand against Israel. In the final analysis, war crimes and crimes against humanity can’t be treated as diabolic in places like Nazi Germany and the former Yugoslavia while ignored or dismissed as “controversial” when Israel is involved.
This is why, the Goldstone Commission report’s recommendations ought to be presented to the International Court of Justice in The Hague as soon as possible.
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