The Goldstone Report: Islamic Propaganda

You may remember the Goldstone report, which was released by the UN a couple of months ago. This report accused both Israel and Hamas of committing "war crimes" during the Gaza offensive at the beginning of the year. Despite the report's claim to objectivity and balance, it was in fact riddled with anti-Israel bias, and the majority of the report focused on supposed Israeli atrocities during the war. This bias included distortion of the facts and double standards in regard to acceptance or dismissal of evidence.

For example, the report claimed that there was no evidence that Hamas fighters hid in civilian areas and used human shields made up of civilians during the conflict. This completely disregards the testimony of witnesses; for example: "Witnesses, including Hanan Abu Khajib, 39, said that Hamas fired just outside the school compound, probably from the secluded courtyard of a house across the street, 25 yards from the school. Israeli return fire, some minutes later, also landed outside the school, along the southwest wall, killing two Hamas fighters. Nearly all the casualties were in the street outside the compound, with only three people wounded from shrapnel inside the walls." It also ignores video footage showing Palestinian fighters planting improvised explosive devices outside houses and then climbing into those houses and hiding among the civilian population:



Finally, the report actually acknowledges that Hamas MP Fathi Hammad admitted in February 2009 that his party used human shields during the conflict, citing the following statement: "...the Palestinian people has developed its [methods] of death seeking. For the Palestinian people, death became an industry, at which women excel and so do all people on this land: the elderly excel, the mujahideen excel and the children excel. Accordingly, [Hamas] created a human shield of women, children, the elderly and the mujahideen, against the Zionist bombing machine." But despite this, the report goes on to dismiss this as insufficient evidence that Hamas used human shields.

On several other occasions, statements by Hamas leaders and politicians are declared not to constitute evidence, and yet numerous quotes from Israeli politicians are provided, accompanied by the following statement: "It is in the context of comments such as these that the massive destruction of businesses, agricultural land, chicken farms and residential houses has to be understood." In other words, statements by Palestinian politicians which reflect badly upon them do not count as evidence, but statements from Israeli politicians must be taken as evidence of war crimes and nefarious motivations.

All the Goldstone Report has done is embolden and delight Islamic jihadists not just in Palestine, but everywhere, by lending credibility to the Hamas movement and denigrating Israel at every opportunity. That the report would end up being so biased is not that much of a surprise, given the UN's long record of anti-Israel policies, as well as the known anti-Israel bias of several people directly involved in commissioning the report.

But what makes it now even less surprising is the revelation that the Goldstone Report was actually initiated by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the 57-state Islamic umma which makes up the largest voting bloc in the UN and has for the past several years been attempting to push through worldwide legislation that would make it a criminal offense to criticise Islam.

Israel faces enemies on all fronts, and what makes the situation so alarming is that most of these fronts are not martial in nature, and so constitute an easily overlooked threat to its security which is undermining its defenses without the use of guns or bombs.