Desmond Travers claims that no one has critiqued Goldstone Report

I just looked at a recent interview of Desmond Travers, one of the four members of the UNHRC "fact-finding mission" to Gaza, after reading the JCPA critique of his positions yesterday. (h/t Tired of Liars)

Besides the lies that others have pointed out, like his assertion that there were only two rockets from Gaza in the month before Cast Lead and they weren't fired by Hamas (there were over 150, most of which were claimed by Hamas), he said this doozy:

The best statement I can make about that is the one that Richard Goldstone made when an American spokesperson for the State Department said it was a very biased, flawed report and he said to them by way of response, “Show us where the bias is and where the flaw is and we’ll do our best to correct it.” That invitation stands. I have subsequently issued the same invitation in a Dutch newspaper and elsewhere; so far, no substantive critique of the report has been received.

Funnily enough, I did get a reply back from a most virulently, anti-Goldstone, pro-Israeli, right-wing, blogspot saying more or less, “Travers doesn’t realise that various academics, politicians and military officers have written magnificent tracts disproving the Goldstone Report…”, but they haven’t. They’ve just written magnificent whinges.

So, what I’m saying is the critiques, if you go through them, would fill several times the volume of material compared to the report and none of them are valid. The tsunami of criticisms that have been slapped against the report funnily enough already started long before the report was published. Such early criticisms suggest, perhaps, an awareness of the guilt of the perpetrators; a question of getting one’s retaliation in first, in a manner of speaking. They are signalling their guilt.

In Travers' twisted mind, the very fact that there are so many criticisms of the Goldstone Report is proof that it must be completely true.

Later, he says

What I found was that the quality of the criticisms was appalling. Nevertheless, they self-perpetuated. If it was from an academic or a political or a senior military figure it would tend to regurgitate every now and then in a different shape or form or in a different blog or email or website or newspaper. So the obvious PR strategy by those who would defend Israel at all costs was to keep slinging mud in the hope that sooner or later the sheer volume of it would stick or wear people down. [But the actual level of the critique was]… zero, non-existent.

So instead of responding to the in-depth criticisms written by Dershowitz, Landes, Matas, Israel itself, Lozowick, CAMERA, the IDF, and over twenty posts by yours truly, not to mention countless others, Travers just dismisses them as being worthless.

He doesn't even deign to describe exactly what is wrong with them, just that their quality is "appalling."

But he still claims that he is more than willing to correct any cases of bias in the Goldstone Report.

Well, he can start by explaining why the conclusions of the report mention Israel hundreds of times and barely mention Hamas at all:


Nah, no bias there!