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The Dangerous Bias of the UN Goldstone Report
(U.S. News) Dore Gold - Last year's report by the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza War, known more popularly as the Goldstone Report, is not going away. It remains one of the most potent weapons in the arsenals of international terrorist organizations seeking to render ineffective the capacity of the West to engage in self-defense. A report that has the stamp of the United Nations makes serious allegations about a state engaged in lawful self-defense, while letting the aggressor, an international terrorist organization, completely off the hook. The members of the Goldstone team had a very specific outlook of the nature of this kind of armed conflict that affected their conclusions. Col. Desmond Travers of Ireland was the senior military figure on Goldstone's panel and probably its most important member after Justice Goldstone. He told Middle East Monitor on Feb. 2, 2010, he utterly rejects that there is something called "asymmetric warfare" in which insurgent forces are introducing civilians into the battlefield against modern armies in a way that changes the nature of warfare. He argues that these ideas are mainly coming from the U.S. and Israel and they are utterly wrong. This outlook directly affected what Travers and his colleagues looked for as they gathered evidence, and how they went about the interviews that they conducted with Palestinians in Gaza. Western armies are going to be dealing increasingly with situations in which terrorist groups are embedding their military capabilities in the heart of civilian areas. In these circumstances, Western armies have three choices if their countries come under attack: to give up and not defend their citizens, to act like the Russians in Chechnya and use indiscriminate firepower, or to find a way to separate the civilians from the military capabilities they hope to destroy. Israel clearly chose the last option. The laws of war need to be applied correctly and not in a way that ignores what insurgent forces are doing on the ground.