Report blames victim

Editorial

Any doubts that the world may have had about the actual intent of Iran's "peaceful" nuclear program went up in smoke last weekend when the Islamic Republic test-fired a number of medium- and long-range missiles capable of reaching Israel and Europe.

Events are unfolding at a rapid pace on this front. The United States and a few allies are lately coming to the realization that Iranian leaders are serious about (a) developing nuclear weapons and (b) using them against Israel.

It is sad to realize that Israel's warnings – that it is not only Israel that is endangered, but also European nations and American interests in the region – have been dismissed. The world, it seems, is not perturbed about Iranian nuclear missiles raining down on Israel. Maybe the world will take a closer look now that evidence exists that they could hit Europe, too.

Is it a coincidence that the potential nuclear destruction of Israel emerges in the same morally inverted world where the Goldstone Report into last year's Gaza War expresses prejudices that are founded on the same assumptions that view terrorists blowing up Israeli civilians as an equivocal act to Israel's right to self-defence in targeting terrorist infrastructure?

The report, by former South African judge Richard Goldstone, was commissioned by the United Nations Human Rights Council to investigate alleged war crimes perpetrated during the Gaza War of last winter. Although the report accused Hamas of war crimes, the litany of war crime accusations against Israel defied all reasonable perspective of shared blame.

The report accuses Israel of deliberately attacking civilians for political purposes, ignoring the UN Charter's explicit protections, under Article 51, of a nation's right to act in self-defence against those who attack civilians. Instead, the report equated Israel's self-defence with the murderous intent of more than 12,000 random Hamas rocket and mortar attacks over an eight-year period.

Worse, the report explicitly ignores the actual cause of the loss of Palestinian lives during the war, which is Hamas's calculated use of civilian infrastructure – human shields, in common parlance – as the loci of its terror activity. The despicable nature of these acts, which ensured the highest possible Palestinian death toll, was a heartless strategy to turn global sympathy to the homicidal Hamas cause. Did it work? Brilliantly.

Not only did the world view Israeli self-defensive actions as war crimes, even the man charged with investigating the possibility of genuine war crimes returned a report that rewarded this use of human shields.

Israel refused to participate in the Goldstone lynch mob, for reasons Israel's ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, explained succinctly.

"Israel basically was the equivalent of being summoned to a court in which its guilt was already presumed, in which one of the jurors had already declared Israel guilty and which the witnesses for the prosecution were, in fact, the murderers," Oren said. "I can't think of any country in the world which would participate in such a farce of justice."

As for the legitimacy of the allegations against Israel, which centre on Israel's alleged carelessness toward the lives of Palestinian civilians, the best response is in the Fourth Geneva Conventions, Article 28, which states unequivocally that responsibility for casualties caused by the use of civilian human shields falls on the party that uses the human shields.

Leaving aside this technicality of international law, the moral comparisons are equally clear to fair-minded observers. British Col. Richard Kemp, a counterinsurgency warfare expert and former commander of British troops in Afghanistan said that, "the IDF did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare."

For his part, Judge Goldstone is traveling the world, apparently trying to defend the legitimacy of his report. This week, he told a British newspaper that a "culture of impunity in the region has existed far too long."

Goldstone said, "The lack of accountability for war crimes and possible crimes against humanity has reached a crisis point. The ongoing lack of justice is undermining any hope for a successful peace process and reinforcing an environment that fosters violence."

Ironically, Goldstone is correct. There has been a 62-year history of a lack of accountability for war crimes and possible crimes against humanity and this lack of justice does indeed foster violence. The Goldstone Report is the epitome of this lack of accountability and abrogation of justice.

When Israel is blamed for the attacks it suffers, when the war crimes perpetrated on Israel are instead depicted as Israeli war crimes, there is an unmistakable message to the world and to Iran's leaders as well: do what you will to the Jews; you will be released from responsibility because, in the end, the Jews deserve everything they get. Could this be why the global response to the Iranian nuclear threat is being taken seriously only now, after proof became irrefutable that Iranian nukes could reach Europe as well?

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