William Schabas (the new "Goldstone") admits bias but pretends he can be objective (update)

In this interview on CNN, William Schabas freely admits he is biased against Israel and Binyamin Netanyahu.

Yet he claims (without any pushback from the interviewer) that he can set that aside, and be unbiased when he does his "investigation."

No juror in the world would be allowed to be on a case where they admit such strong bias. Any honest judge would recuse him or herself.

But to the UN, the lack of impartiality is in fact the best qualification for a commission like this, since its conclusions are determined ahead of time. 



UPDATE: In case you are wondering what Schabas was talking about when he claims that Netanyahu said that Richard Goldstone was the greatest threat to Israel...

Netanyahu didn't say that.

What he said, in December 2009, was:

There are three primary threats facing us today: the nuclear threat, the missile threat and what I call the Goldstone threat. This is all on top of our mission to resume and then accelerate the peace process with the Palestinians, with the goal of reaching a settlement. These are our main tasks. I want to discuss each of them briefly and then say a few words to the Opposition.

...Goldstone has become code for a much broader phenomenon: the attempt to negate the legitimacy of our right to self-defense. It didn't just start now. The international campaign against Israel has gone on since the Durban Conference in 2000 and since the attempt in 2003 to condemn the security fence that has protected Israeli children – but is condemned just the same – in The Hague.

...The fence hasn't been finished yet. But in 2003, it came before The Hague. Israel built a fence – only one small section was an actual wall – and was brought before The Hague to answer for this terrible, international crime. Later, in 2005, General Doron Almog couldn’t even travel to London because he would have been arrested for war crimes. This was in 2005, even before the Second Lebanon War in 2006 and Operation Cast Lead in 2008, which I'll talk about in a minute. We all have a real problem here.

Ehud Olmert speaks on campuses in the United States, and he's denounced as a war criminal. Defense Minister Ehud Barak – they want to arrest him in London. And there's a warrant out against Tzipi Livni, the Opposition leader. This is the sequence. You all know the truth in your hearts. This is an all-out offensive, not just against one Israeli government or another. And we are taking action to confront it.

Bibi didn't say that Goldstone or the report was the threat, but what the report represented as a continuum of attacking Israel's right to defend herself.

I suppose this is the level of accuracy we can expect from Schabas' report.