Why the Schabas Report Will Be Every Bit as Biased as the Goldstone Report

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in The Tower March Issue by Hillel Neuer

NOTE:This is a VERY important artice. 

For more than five years, the question of who exactly authored the UN’s 2009 Goldstone Report has been an enduring mystery. The report, written under the auspices of South African Judge Richard Goldstone, was a shocking 500-page indictment of Israel that accused its political and military leadership of deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians during the 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, and condemned the Jewish state as a whole for systematic and institutionalized racism, among other atrocities and abominations.

The answer to that riddle—which involves a radical Marxist law professor who held the equivalent of a general’s rank in the global lawfare movement against Israel, and more broadly, the UN department that selected her—has additional importance today because of the controversy swirling over the upcoming sequel to the Goldstone Report dealing with 2014’s Operation Protective Edge, which will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva on March 23.

Understanding who wrote the 2009 report—and how the establishment behind it remains in place—constitutes a direct rebuttal to the latest campaign by HRC backers and activist groups to salvage the reputation and legitimacy of the Goldstone II commission of inquiry into alleged Israeli war crimes.

Following the February 2 resignation of commission chair William Schabas under a cloud of bias accusations, including the revelation that he had done paid legal work for the PLO, defenders have insisted that Schabas’ stewardship of the probe for six out of its seven months is a non-issue. His resignation has cured all defects, if they ever existed in the first place. “In this way,” says HRC president Joachim Ruecker, the German ambassador in Geneva, “even the appearance of a conflict of interest is avoided, thus preserving the integrity of the process.”

Yet the discovery of who really wrote Goldstone I challenges everything about the integrity of the “process” that is now producing Goldstone II, with or without the discredited Schabas.

In 2009, the fact that the UN commission was headed by Judge Richard Goldstone—who is Jewish and, apart from his involvement in UN circles and occasional criticism of Israeli actions, had been considered a supporter of Israel and of Jewish causes—was what gave the report its explosive impact, and deepened the mystery of how he could possibly have authored a report so dripping with malice. Indeed, it is worth stating again that the 2009 report cast Israel as a wicked and racist predatory state whose leaders gathered around a cabinet table to orchestrate crimes against humanity.

In weighing the evidence and various accusations, the report repeatedly gave the benefit of the doubt to the terrorist group Hamas. By contrast, Israeli defensive actions were consistently interpreted as part of an over-arching plan to oppress, discriminate against, and murder Palestinian civilians. For example, evidence of perfidy by Hamas gunmen, such as their well-known policy and practice of pretending to be civilians, was summarily dismissed with logic and language that strained credulity and coherence:

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