The Goldstone report is a 2009 UN-commissioned report by South African judge Richard Goldstone that accused both the state of Israel and Hamas of war crimes and human rights violations during the three week Gaza war that began in late 2008 and continued into January 2009.
Last week, Goldstone wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post in which he revised his initial statements about Israel's intentions to harm civilian life and civilian infrastructure in Gaza. Goldstone said:
The allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion. While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.Goldstone's change of opinion could either be genuine, or he may have bit the bullet. Either way, the damage is done. The Goldstone report is not viewed with the same respect as before Goldstone penned his piece. But the facts still stand. Israel's leaders did commit war crimes in 2009. Nobody can change history. Goldstone can't rewrite what happened on the ground.
Some people say Goldstone was blackmailed into recanting his original statements about Israel's actions in the Gaza war. There is no way to prove this is true, but nothing is out of the question when it comes to the leaders of Israel. Israel is led by ruthless men who try to get their way through instigating war, intimidation of government officials, assassination of political leaders, blackmail, sabotage, and other various acts of terrorism and deception including the demonization of moral leaders such as Richard Falk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.
Falk is a courageous moral critic of Israel and a strong defender of the truth. Earlier this year, he questioned the official version of the 9/11 attacks, saying:
The arguments swirling around the 9/11 attacks are emblematic of these issues. What fuels suspicions of conspiracy is the reluctance to address the sort of awkward gaps and contradictions in the official explanations that David Ray Griffin (and other devoted scholars of high integrity) have been documenting in book after book ever since 2001. What may be more distressing than the apparent cover up is the eerie silence of the mainstream media, unwilling to acknowledge the well-evidenced doubts about the official version of the events: an al Qaeda operation with no foreknowledge by government officials. Is this silence a manifestation of fear or cooption, or part of an equally disturbing filter of self-censorship? Whatever it is, the result is the withering away of a participatory citizenry and the erosion of legitimate constitutional government. (Richard Falk, January 11, 2001).UN Ambassador Susan Rice came down hard on Falk two weeks after he made his statements. Rice said:
I am appalled by the recent personal blog written by Richard Falk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.”Rice's automatic attack on Falk for his comments on 9/11 was expected. She could not have gained her position if she had an independent mind and soul, which are required to speak the truth in the face of lies. Like the two previous U.S. ambassadors to the UN John Bolton and Zalmay Khalilzad, Rice is a foe of truth, a friend of autocratic power, and an enemy of a free Mankind. I doubt she is ignorant of the fact that leaders of the Bush administration and leaders of Israel were responsible for the World Trade Center atrocity. She is guilty of the cover-up of 9/11. Her aim is to erase U.S. and Israeli war crimes from the public record, and from history itself. As she told Congress, "We see no need ... for the Goldstone report to be considered and now that its principal author has said what he said, frankly, our view is reinforced that this should go away and that's what we'll work to do."
In this blog post, dated January 11, 2011, Mr. Falk endorses the slurs of conspiracy theorists who allege that the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were perpetrated and then covered up by the U.S. government and media.
Mr. Falk’s comments are despicable and deeply offensive, and I condemn them in the strongest terms. I have registered a strong protest with the UN on behalf of the United States. The United States has in the past been critical of Mr. Falk’s one-sided and politicized approach to his work for the UN, including his failure to condemn deliberate human rights abuses by Hamas, but these blog comments are in another category altogether.
But will we let her erase real history, and replace facts with the lies of power? Hell no! The truth about 9/11 is getting out, and the fighters for a free Mankind cannot be stopped. Our resistance to the false history of 9/11 and the false war on terror will rise higher and higher. And there is nothing that Rice and her evil masters can do to stop our minds from registering the truth and correctly judging good from evil.
