The American Jewish Committee is calling the conclusions of the Goldstone commission "utterly discredited" and says the UN should "put an end" to it.
AJC executive director David Harris also states: “Judge Goldstone described Israel’s own investigations into allegations of wrong-doing by IDF personnel as ‘pusillanimous.’ I wonder what is the appropriate word for the Goldstone Commission, which convicted Israel before its investigation had even begun, which barely mentioned the suffering of Israelis living with endless Hamas rocket attacks, and which received its mandate from the UN Human Rights Council – a body which, as the US Assistant Secretary of State noted in his statement, pays ‘grossly disproportionate’ attention to Israel.”
The full press release is after the jump:[[READMORE]]
The American Jewish Committee sharply criticized South African Judge Richard Goldstone’s verbal attack on Israel during a UN Human Rights Council debate concerning his commission’s recent report on the Gaza conflict earlier this year.
“Judge Goldstone described Israel’s own investigations into allegations of wrong-doing by IDF personnel as ‘pusillanimous,’” said AJC Executive Director David Harris. “I wonder what is the appropriate word for the Goldstone Commission, which convicted Israel before its investigation had even begun, which barely mentioned the suffering of Israelis living with endless Hamas rocket attacks, and which received its mandate from the UN Human Rights Council – a body which, as the US Assistant Secretary of State noted in his statement, pays ‘grossly disproportionate’ attention to Israel.”
Harris also pointed to the statement to the Council delivered on behalf of UN Watch, an AJC-affiliated NGO, by Dr. Mirela Siderer, a resident of Ashkelon, Israel. Dr. Siderer, a gynecologist who works with both Israeli and Palestinian patients, was badly wounded in a Hamas rocket attack in May 2008. She testified before the Goldstone Commission “in good faith.”
On reading the report, she declared: “I am shocked. Judge Goldstone, in a 500-page report, why did you completely ignore my story? My name appears only in passing, in brackets, in a technical context. I feel humiliated. Why are there only two pages about Israeli victims like me, who suffered thousands of rockets over eight years? Why did you choose to focus on the period of my country’s response, but not on that of the attacks that caused it? Why did you not tell me that this council judged Israel guilty in advance, in its meeting of last January?”
Harris said: “The devastating testimony of Dr. Siderer, a symbol of all that is wrong with the report and its methodology, underlines the fact that the UN should now put an end to the Goldstone Commission, instead of peddling its utterly discredited conclusions in the corridors of the UN Security Council and the International Criminal Court.”
