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Conclusions about Israel's Guilt in Gaza Were Voiced Well in Advance of UN "Fact-Finding" Mission
[Irish Independent] Zion Evrony - The Goldstone report indicates that, in practice, a democratic state confronted with terrorist attacks against its citizens must do nothing, effectively ruling that there are no legitimate means by which states may counter the terrorist techniques evolved by groups such as Hamas. The Goldstone mission was mandated by the UN Human Rights Council, which has passed 20 resolutions censuring Israel in the three years since its founding, out of a total of 25 resolutions passed by the Council. Yet the Council, which includes paragons of human rights values such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Cuba, currently has nothing to say about the 400,000 deaths in Darfur for which Sudan is responsible, or the 1,000,000 displaced civilians in Somalia. The UN had absolutely nothing to say during the years when 12,000 Hamas rockets - more than 7,000 since Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 - landed on houses, streets, hospitals and schools, making a specialty of targeting the morning school-going period. The Goldstone mission contained members who had clearly voiced their conclusions about Israel's guilt well in advance. The mission did not ask its witnesses any questions relating to Hamas terrorist activity, the storage of weaponry in civilian areas or the launching of attacks from those areas. Overall, the worst feature of the Goldstone report is the moral equation it makes between a democratic state seeking to put an end to attacks against its citizens, and the terrorist group responsible for those attacks. The motives and intentions of Israel are treated as inherently suspect, and its own scrutiny and judicial mechanisms treated as flawed and inadequate. At the same time, Hamas' history of aggression is ignored, and its charter, calling for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel, similarly ignored. The writer is the Israeli Ambassador to Ireland.