ARE WE NEXT?

When will the U.N. Human Rights Council charge our soldiers and the U.S. with war crimes? After all, we’ve been killing a lot of civilians in Afghanistan. And our unmanned drones have been killing a lot of civilians in Pakistan. And don’t forget that our shock and awe bombings of Baghdad also killed a lot of civilians. Ah, but those damn Jews committed war crimes when they killed civilians in Gaza while defending themselves against rocket attacks on Israeli civilians.

THE U.N.’S ANTI-ANTITERROR REPORT
A biased ‘finding’ on Gaza could also apply to Afghanistan

The Wall Street Journal
September 23, 2009

When it comes to the U.N. and Israel, our thoughts often turn to those East German Olympic judges during the Cold War: Their bias was so transparent it could almost pass without notice. But a new report from a U.N. "fact finding mission" about January's war in the Gaza Strip marks a new low, employing logic and arguments that will be felt wherever the West confronts terrorism.

The Goldstone report—named after principal author, South African jurist Richard Goldstone—is a creature of the U.N.'s Human Rights Council, which in its three short years has condemned Israel more often than the U.N.'s other 191 member states combined, according to Hudson Institute scholar Anne Bayefsky. Mr. Goldstone's report devotes the bulk of its 575 pages to denouncing Israel for what it calls "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population." For this, it adds, Israeli soldiers could be individually liable for criminal prosecution in international courts, while Israel itself is held guilty of "a crime against humanity."

To arrive at these conclusions, Mr. Goldstone and his fellow panelists were forced to make some astonishing claims of fact. For example, they assert that the Gaza police force was a "civilian" agency, though it merged with Hamas's own paramilitary "Executive Force" after Hamas took over Gaza in 2007. The report also says it could not "establish the use of mosques for military purposes or to shield military activity," despite widely available real-time video evidence to the contrary.

The argument seems to be that Hamas can surround its combatants with civilians, and for Israel to strike back is a war crime. The report holds Israel culpable for pursuing a strategy essential in war, which is to break the enemy's will to fight. By this logic, FDR and Churchill could have been charged because the bombing of German industries and cities killed civilians in World War II.

The U.N. also holds Israel accountable as Gaza's "occupying power," never mind that former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon uprooted all of Gaza's Jewish settlements in 2005. As for the "blockade" it accuses Israel of inflicting on the Strip, one wonders why Egypt, which has also sealed its border with Gaza, doesn't come in for similar condemnation.

The report treats Israel as the aggressor in the conflict, though the Israeli government sat still for more than three years as Hamas transformed Gaza into a terrorist enclave while firing rockets at Israeli towns and cities. At exactly what point, if any, does Mr. Goldstone believe Israel is entitled to self defense? His co-panelist, international law professor Christine Chinkin, offered a clue in January when she wrote that Hamas's rocket attacks on Israeli civilians did not "amount to an armed attack entitling Israel to rely on self defense."
The Goldstone report includes some pro forma condemnation of Hamas's behavior, but Hamas leaders quickly endorsed the findings because they know they have nothing to fear from the International Criminal Court or any other special tribunal. Hamas violates the laws of war as a matter of daily routine, not least in the murder of Palestinian dissenters. The U.N. report can only hurt a Western nation like Israel that cares about world, or at least American, opinion.

If it is taken seriously, the Goldstone logic could (and eventually will) be applied to NATO tactics in Afghanistan, where civilians are also sometimes killed in the course of anti-Taliban operations. This may well be a U.N. goal—the preamble in a process that could lead to, say, Director Leon Panetta in the dock at the Hague.

As for the Obama Administration, it has rightly made it clear that it will not allow the report to reach the level of the Security Council, much less the International Criminal Court. But having now joined the Human Rights Council—a point the President underscored, to applause, in his speech yesterday at the U.N.—it now has an obligation to police that body and call it out on its charades, lest it become complicit.