Flawed Mission

Years ago, there was a story of a building in Cairo. Rumor had it that the engineers and builders that originally built it cut corners and didn't quite build it correctly. It was 7 stories high when the owners decided to add on another 7 floors. This too was not done properly. Soon, looking for more profit, the owners found a bank was interested in renting out the bottom floor. To make this possible, the bottom floor was made into a wide open and inviting space. The only problem was, they had removed the supports and foundation necessary to support the structure and so,within a short while, the entire building collapsed before the bank ever moved in.

The Goldstone Mission collapsed before it ever got off the ground because, like the building in Cairo, its foundation and structure were flawed. The mission was biased from the start.

On 3 April 2009, the President of the Human Rights Council established the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict with the mandate “to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after.”

And so begins the United Nation's latest travesty of justice. The concept was simple, or it should have been.

Get a mandate.
Investigate.
Learn.
Draw conclusions.
Publish them.

The problem began with Stage 1. It charged the mission members with documenting abuses, not determining if those supposed abuses even existed.

Stage 2 didn't go well either. The commission failed to really investigate, failed to speak with many credible witnesses and worse, failed to evaluate which were not credible at all. It is reported the Judge Goldstone even napped during the showing of a video of the suffering of the people of Sderot. The war lasted almost from December 27 to January 18. The

Goldstone's mission failed to confirm the use of human shields by Hamas; failed to note this video from German TV that clearly shows Palestinian Arabs hiding weapons under civilian clothing in a crowded Gaza street.

Since Stage 2 failed, it isn't hard to understand why Stage 3 failed. How can you learn when you don't have the facts in front of you? And by extension, if you haven't learned, is it any wonder the conclusions reported in the long-winded, repetitive document were flawed and incorrect.

While the commission did succeed in publishing the results, if they were to have succeeded in only one of their tasks, it has to be wished sincerely, that it had been pretty much any one of the other tasks rather than merely publishing it!