Produced by:
KBOO
Program::
Air date:
Fri, 09/25/2009 - 9:00am to 10:00am
Hosts Hala Gores and Will Seaman are joined by Hastings Law School Professor George Bisharat to talk about the Goldstone Report on war crimes in Gaza, and by Stanford University Professor Joel Beinin discussing the Obama Peace Plan.
- KBOO
Update Required
To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your
Flash plugin.
Comments
Interesting Developments re the Goldstone Report
<h1 property="dc.title"><span style="font-size: smaller;">from the op ed pages of the Washington Post ...</span></h1>
<h1 property="dc.title">Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and war crimes</h1>
<h3 property="dc.creator">By Richard Goldstone, <span class="updated">Friday April 1 2011, <span class="special">8:42 PM</span></span></h3>
<p>We know a lot more today about what happened in the Gaza war of 2008-09 than we did when I chaired the fact-finding mission appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council that produced what has come to be known as the Goldstone Report. If I had known then what I know now, the <a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/specialsession/9/docs/UNF... Report</a> would have been a different document.</p>
<p>[ edited to respect copyright -- see the entire commentary at</p>
<p><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/reconsidering-the-goldstone-repor...
<p>- vjb, web coordinator]</p>
<p>Simply put, the laws of armed conflict apply no less to non-state actors such as Hamas than they do to national armies. Ensuring that non-state actors respect these principles, and are investigated when they fail to do so, is one of the most significant challenges facing the law of armed conflict. Only if all parties to armed conflicts are held to these standards will we be able to protect civilians who, through no choice of their own, are caught up in war.</p>
<p><em>The writer, a retired justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and former chief prosecutor of the U.N. International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, chaired the U.N. fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict.</em></p>
<!-- START: sponsor_links_bt-ad -->
If we have to excerpt ...
<P>Since the entire op ed will not be mirrored by KBOO, my choice of the most interesting excerpt would be the following paragraph. (the underlining is my emphasis). Judge Goldstone's comments clearly show that Israel's government's reluctance to initially cooperate was not in it's own best interests. <EM>Ed</EM></P>
<P>"As I indicated from the very beginning, I would have welcomed Israel’s cooperation. The purpose of the Goldstone Report was never to prove a foregone conclusion against Israel. <U>I insisted on changing the original mandate adopted by the Human Rights Council, which was skewed against Israel</U>. I have always been clear that Israel, like any other sovereign nation, has the right and obligation to defend itself and its citizens against attacks from abroad and within. 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. <U>I had hoped that our inquiry into all aspects of the Gaza conflict would begin a new era of evenhandedness at the U.N. Human Rights Council, </U><EM><U>whose history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted."</U></EM></P>
<DIV style="DISPLAY: none" id=slug_inline_bb class="left margin-right margin-bottom padding-top slug">
<DIV id=wpni_adi_inline_bb> </DIV></DIV><!--INLINE_BB AD END--><!--/article-body -->