viernes, 18 de septiembre de 2009

Justice begins at home

The main thing to keep in mind here is that Goldstone is not lying. Everything he says is true.

It should be obvious to anyone who has followed this situation that the IDF's so-called "serious violations" of the laws of war are truly nothing of the kind. Even if one hasn't been following the situation, simple rhetorical analysis will show then the utter fallacy that underlies Goldstone's sentence: notwithstanding his pro forma nods to Hamas violations, he's obviously telling only one side of the story, Hamas's side.

His version implies that the IDF was indiscriminately bombarding hospitals, schools and other typical civilian sites to sow terror as part of a campaign to subdue the Resistance. This is just a fairy tale.

For example, ask yourself why Israel attacked the civilian structures. It was because they couldn't fairly be considered civilian if they were being used as firebases by Hamas.

But the essential point is this: there would have been no IDF attacks whatsoever,
on anything in Gaza if Hamas had not provoked it by years of truly indiscriminate attacks themselves.
Therefore, Hamas bears the blame for all of the civilian casualties and deaths in the war: Israeli as well as Palestinian. Nobody had to die if Hamas didn't promote its intolerant rejectionist policy.
Some made the analogy to WWII: Germans bear the blame for all of the death and destruction simply because they started it. I don't see how anyone could possibly object to such logic and it was the basis for all the postwar treaties.

Why is this same logic not on display here, in the Palestine/Israel conflict, especially by such eminent personalities as the head of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, Richard Goldstone?
clipped from www.nytimes.com

Justice in Gaza

In the fighting in Gaza, all sides flouted that fundamental principle. Many civilians unnecessarily died and even more were seriously hurt. In Israel, three civilians were killed and hundreds wounded by rockets from Gaza fired by Hamas and other groups. Two Palestinian girls also lost their lives when these rockets misfired.
In Gaza, hundreds of civilians died. They died from disproportionate attacks on legitimate military targets and from attacks on hospitals and other civilian structures. They died from precision weapons like missiles from aerial drones as well as from heavy artillery. Repeatedly, the Israel Defense Forces failed to adequately distinguish between combatants and civilians, as the laws of war strictly require.
Failing to pursue justice for serious violations during the fighting will have a deeply corrosive effect on international justice, and reveal an unacceptable hypocrisy.

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