The United States stood abysmally, disgracefully silent last week as the United Nations General Assembly debated a resolution endorsing the stacked investigation that accused Israel of committing crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. Would that the Obama State Department had loudly and clearly denounced the so-called Goldstone Report before the assembly voted overwhelmingly to support the document's findings.
No such exercise of American moral authority took place during the debate. U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice issued no condemnation on the order of the one that was spoken by Israeli Ambassador Gabriela Shalev, who described the report as "conceived in hate and executed in sin."
Instead, Rice skipped the discussion and permitted her deputy to attend in silence. Only when Rice's second-stringer cast one of the few votes against endorsing the report did the U.S. offer an "explanation" in utterly legalistic diplospeak.
This excessive politeness was utterly misplaced and horribly destructive. The Goldstone Report was not merely "deeply flawed" or "excessively negative" or filled with "overreaching recommendations," as the U.S. said. Nor was it remotely satisfactory for America to reach this bottom line: "Nevertheless, we also have real concerns about this resolution."
NY Daily News
What the U.S. needed to say in plain, unequivocal language was that the report, commissioned by the anti-Semitic Human Rights Council, a body populated by the world's worst human rights abusers, was illegitimate at its root, filled with specious assertions of fact and based on constructions of international law never before seen and never to be seen again.
In other words, it was a monumental frameup.
The sponsors wanted to find Israel guilty for pursuing Hamas in Gaza after Hamas had fired more than 7,000 rockets into Israel with hardly a peep from the international community. And the sponsors got exactly what they wanted, with a tut-tut or two toward Hamas, whose name escaped mention in the U.S. resolution.
Odd, don't you think?
By calibrating discussion of this point and that, by giving the nod to war crimes investigations by both Israel and the Palestinians and by concluding, "We do not think it appropriate to endorse the report in its entirety," America gave backers of the General Assembly resolution an invaluable gift: respect where none was deserved.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2009/11/08/2009-11-08_abomination_accepted_us_shamefully_silent_in_the_face_of_un_israelbashers.html?print=1&page=all#ixzz0WeVq9FTc
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