The U.N.'s Anti-Antiterror Report

WSJ Online ^ | September 23, 2009 | Staff

[Pan_Yan]

When it comes to the U.N. and Israel, our thoughts often turn to those East German Olympic judges during the Cold War: Their bias was so transparent it could almost pass without notice. But a new report from a U.N. "fact finding mission" about January's war in the Gaza Strip marks a new low, employing logic and arguments that will be felt wherever the West confronts terrorism.

The Goldstone report—named after principal author, South African jurist Richard Goldstone—is a creature of the U.N.'s Human Rights Council, which in its three short years has condemned Israel more often than the U.N.'s other 191 member states combined, according to Hudson Institute scholar Anne Bayefsky. Mr. Goldstone's report devotes the bulk of its 575 pages to denouncing Israel for what it calls "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population." For this, it adds, Israeli soldiers could be individually liable for criminal prosecution in international courts, while Israel itself is held guilty of "a crime against humanity."

[snip]

If it is taken seriously, the Goldstone logic could (and eventually will) be applied to NATO tactics in Afghanistan, where civilians are also sometimes killed in the course of anti-Taliban operations. This may well be a U.N. goal—the preamble in a process that could lead to, say, Director Leon Panetta in the dock at the Hague.

As for the Obama Administration, it has rightly made it clear that it will not allow the report to reach the level of the Security Council, much less the International Criminal Court. But having now joined the Human Rights Council—a point the President underscored, to applause, in his speech yesterday at the U.N.—it now has an obligation to police that body and call it out on its charades, lest it become complicit.

[Pan_Yan]

It's a mad, mad world.

[SJackson]

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