Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Jewish supremacy

Showing posts with label Jewish supremacy. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 16, 2022

HRW and the Goldstone Report authors both claimed, falsely, "no substantive criticism" to their falsehoods [Daled Amos]

By Daled Amos

With the ongoing talk about apartheid, I was reminded of a report that targeted Israel for war crimes.
Not the B'tselem report.
Not the HRW report.
Not even the Amnesty International report.

Instead, I was reminded of the 2009 Goldstone Report.

Of all the issues and topics that were going back and forth back then, one thing that stood out in my mind was the denial -- the denial from one of the judges on the Goldstone commission.

Desmond Travers, a retired Irish Army colonel, was part of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict. Whatever else Travers may have contributed to the group, one thing he seemed to make it his job to do was offer implausible deniability.

Yes, implausible deniability

In an interview at the time with the Middle East Monitor, Desmond Travers came up with the following response to Hanan Chehata:

So far, no substantive critique of the report has been received?

Well, one of the easiest ways to rebut a criticism is to deny that it was ever made (this was back in the day, before it was fashionable to rebut criticism by accusing the other person of being a racist).

Among the papers and articles that came out rebutting the Goldstone Report on issues of law, fact and bias were those from:

o  The Israeli government
o  Alan Dershowitz
o  David Matas (international human rights lawyer)
o  Richard Landes (historian and author)
o  Yaacov Lozowick (historian)
o  CAMERA
o  Intelligence and Terrorism Resource Center

[As well as EoZ.]

But you would never know it from Travers, who made it his business to assure everyone that there was nothing to see -- no criticism, no errors of fact and no controversy in the definition and application of the law.

Fast forward to 2021.

When the HRW report came out, the group apparently adopted the same strategy of denying that anyone could come up with a credible critique of what they wrote. On July 9, 2021, Omar Shakir, HRW's Israel and Palestine Director, tweeted:

One week later, Shakir repeated his claim in an interview with Al Jazeera:

Strawmen?

Anne Herzberg, a legal advisor for NGO Monitor, notes the irony in Shakir's use of the term:

Moreover, the invocation of “strawmen” is ironic, given that neither Shakir nor Roth provided any identification of who or what those strawmen might be, in order to avoid having to refute the substantive arguments.

More to the point, Shakir claims that he did not receive "almost any" counter-arguments on questions of law or definitions.

He is ignoring Eugene Kontorovich's paper, which oddly enough does address the issues of both law and definitions that Shakir claims are lacking -- as well as addressing errors of fact. Kontorovich has a shorter post as well.

CAMERA is apparently guilty of the kind of ad hominem attacks that Shakir condemns. They note that Joe Stork, HRW's Deputy Director for Middle East and North Africa who joined the group in 1996:

Before being hired by HRW, Stork openly supported Palestinian terror attacks against Jewish civilians, and opposed any and all peace treaties between Israel and Arab states.

But pointing out the anti-Israel bias of Stork is done as the context for the factual errors in the HRW report that follow in CAMERA's analysis.

Joshua Kern, a lawyer in international law who has defended clients at the ICC, also wrote one of those posts criticizing the HRW report that Shakir missed. One of the points he makes is that the report appears to water down the concept of "domination" in the context of apartheid from outright "supremacy" down to an Israeli policy designed “to engineer and maintain a Jewish majority in Israel” and to “maximize Jewish Israeli control over land in Israel and the OPT” (A Threshold Crossed, p. 49). Kern notes

With respect to Israel, a policy intended to safeguard the Jewish character of the State and to protect its citizens’ security scarcely reflects the racism of baasskaap [an Afrikaans term for "supremacy"]. On the contrary, recognition of Israel as a Jewish State has been integral to how the international community has addressed issues arising from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1947 at the latest (when the General Assembly recommended partition between the “Jewish” and “Arab” States). [emphasis ]

Will Human Rights Watch now condemn the UN General Assembly as encouraging apartheid?

So how is it Shakir can claim that he is not aware of challenges to the HRW report?

Herzberg may have the answer.

She notes that in the actual report, Shakir's role in creating the report is mentioned:

Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch, was the lead researcher and author of this report. [emphasis added]

Yet in a symposium last year designed to allow for HRW and critics of its report to confront each other -- Shakir was not to be found. Instead, Clive Baldwin and Emilie Max provided HRW's response.

According to the report, Baldwin is a senior legal advisor at HRW who provided program and legal review, while Max is a consultant who contributed research.

So Shakir is the lead person responsible for the report -- yet did not show up to actually answer for it. Lawyers who had a secondary role in creating the report were there instead.

No wonder Shakir has no idea of the challenges to his report.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

The exact same playbook @Amnesty and @HRW took on "apartheid" can be used to accuse Israel of "genocide"

The path that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch took to declare Israel guilty of "apartheid" can be used to claim that Israel is guilty of the crime of "genocide" against Palestinians.

Sounds absurd? It isn't.

The "apartheid" charge began in earnest at the NGO Forum of the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held at Durban in September 2001. Amnesty and Human RIghts Watch were there among the 3000 delegates and did nothing to stop the final declaration, which repeatedly accused Israel of apartheid, racism, and genocide.

In the preamble:

Recognizing further that a basic “root cause” of Israel’s on going and systematic human rights violations, including its grave breaches of the fourth Geneva convention 1949 (i.e. war crimes), acts of genocide and practices of ethnic cleansing is a racist system, which is Israel’s brand of apartheid.

In the main body:

We declare and call for an immediate end to the Israeli systematic perpetration of racist crimes including war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing (as defined in the Statute of the International Criminal Court), ... and state terrorism against the Palestinian people, recognizing that all of these methods are designed to ensure the continuation of an exclusively Jewish state with a Jewish majority and the expansion of its borders to gain more land, driving out the indigenous Palestinian population.

We declare Israel as a racist, apartheid state in which Israels [sic] brand of apartheid as a crime against humanity has been characterized by separation and segregation, dispossession, restricted land access, denationalization, ¨bantustanization¨ and inhumane acts.

And in the recommendations, which sound a great deal like the recommendations at the end of the Amnesty and HRW reports:

Call for the establishment of a war crimes tribunal to investigate and bring to justice those who may be guilty of war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing and the crime of Apartheid which amount to crimes against humanity that have been or continue to be perpetrated in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Condemnation of those states who are supporting, aiding and abetting the Israeli Apartheid state and its perpetration of racist crimes against humanity including ethnic cleansing, acts of genocide.

At Durban, the absurd accusations against Israel of apartheid was accompanied by the equally absurd accusations of racism, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

And just as with apartheid, the NGOs at Durban twisted international law to justify their accusations of genocide.

Note that they mentioned the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Antisemites can read that as if Israel is guilty of genocide just as the antisemites of HRW and Amnesty read the various legal definitions of "apartheid" to damn Israel alone.

Article 6
Genocide
For the purpose of this Statute, "genocide" means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

Amnesty and HRW already laid the groundwork to prove that Israel does all of those things! Their tendentious reports try to prove a Jewish attempt at supremacy or domination, to prove Jewish racism, and especially to prove Jewish intent to destroy "in whole or in part" Palestinians.

The accusation of "intent" was the major part of the discredited Goldstone Report and they are key parts of the newer NGO "apartheid" reports.

Amnesty and HRW regularly pretend to know Israel's intent in all their anti-Israel reports - Israel intended to attack civilians, the IDF intended to cause disproportionate damage to Gaza, and now Israeli Jews intend to dominate the non-Jewish minority in Israel as well as the Palestinians in territories.

Intent is the entire underlying structure of their reports. The very first sentence in Amnesty's report is a quote from Benjamin Netanyahu saying that Israel was the nation/state of the Jewish people alone, while they didn't quote his next sentence that Arabs have the same rights as all. It doesn't fit their "intent" narrative so therefore it must be ignored.

In real life, proving intent is difficult, because no one can read minds. The bar to prove intent in international law is very high for that reason - one must have a preponderance of evidence of statements and actions that indicate that the criminal had intent to persecute people because they were of a different race or ethnic group.

That is what HRW and Amnesty have been pretending to do in their 200+ page reports.

That's the pattern in all these reports: only quoting bits and pieces of Israeli officials' statements to prove Israeli Jewish racism and ignoring all statements and actions that prove Israeli liberalism and intent to ensure equal rights for all.

The half-truths meant to prove Israeli racism are a direct result of antisemitism. The NGOs only look for evidence that proves their pre-judged verdict of Jewish racism and anything that disproves it is considered hasbara, or purposeful misdirection by the evil Jews to throw the righteous NGOs off the trail. Amnesty's Philip Luther pretty much said that in his dumpster fire of an interview at Times of Israel:

It’s because the Israeli state has made it so difficult to penetrate. They have tried to create a smokescreen around, and of course there is a democratic system, and there are judicial institutions that of course then call the state to account, or at least challenge their decisions. But that’s what makes it so challenging in some ways then to disentangle them when you put it all together.
So I would put it back on the Israeli state. In some ways, it ends up being a driver of complexity and a driver of resources unnecessarily spent on investigations by anybody, because it’s made so damn complicated.

Amnesty's job to accuse Israel of racism and apartheid is made difficult by the "smokescreen" of a fair legal system, freedom, democracy, laws, practices and facts that prove the exact opposite.

In a nutshell, that is the proof of Amnesty's antisemitism - they must work really hard to ignore any evidence that Israel is not as evil as they always intended to prove it is. They know the Jews are up to no good, and it is their job to uncover it.

So what's the difference between accusing Israel of apartheid and accusing it of genocide? Nothing. Luther alluded to years of modern antisemites accusing Israel of apartheid - i.e., "Israel apartheid weeks" on campus - to say that this was the opening to Amnesty writing this paper now:

...Part of the reason for that on Israel/Palestine is because there is a growing debate on the subject. We thought it was absolutely right and proper that we brought up….When you’re looking at the question of whether you’re going to be looking at any particular place, well, is there a debate on it? There are external factors, that’s part of the strategic landscape. Do we have something to say on it, is it something that we might have a contribution.
... To my knowledge, the Chinese activists are not currently using the [apartheid] term.

Here, Amnesty is admitting that it bases its research on what "activists" accuse a country of doing, and not any objective factors. Since no one is accusing Lebanon of apartheid with their anti-Palestinian laws, there is no reason for Amnesty to do so . Objective truth is not the goal: Amnesty is choosing what it will call apartheid "strategically," by following the lead of the antisemites and allowing them to define the "debate."

In Durban, Amnesty official Claudio Cordone slightly distanced the group from the genocide charge: "We are not ready to make the assertion that Israel is engaged in genocide," he said. He didn't say it wasn't true, just that Amnesty wasn't yet "ready" to pursue that avenue of attack.

It is twenty years later. Amnesty has already shown what it needs to be "ready" to accuse Israel of genocide - a "debate" created by Jew-haters.

If today's antisemites change their annual "apartheid weeks" to "genocide weeks," that it what would create the "debate" that would give Amnesty and HRW the opening to write their next generation of reports accusing Israel of the worst crimes against humanity possible.

The apartheid charge is just as absurd and antisemitic as the genocide charge. Anyone who has visited a mall in Jerusalem see there is no apartheid. Anyone who sees that the current Israeli government has an Arab coalition partner knows that the charge is a blatant lie. But both the apartheid and genocide/ethnic cleansing charges were given legitimacy in Durban where major NGOs signed on to the final statement, both of those accusations are regularly hurled at Israel by "activists" and Palestinians, both of them have legal definitions that can be twisted by the lawyers at the NGOs against Israel. All that is missing is the "debate," and today's antisemites could create that "debate" over the next few years.

HRW and Amnesty already have the "genocide" reports half-written.

Latest report proves again that @Amnesty International is antisemitic

Amnesty International just issued a report on Israel's arrests for the attacks between Arabs and Jews inside Israel during May.

The report includes outright lies:

Amnesty International has documented unnecessary and excessive force used by Israeli police to disperse Palestinian protests against forced evictions in East Jerusalem as well as against the Gaza offensive. The protests were mostly peaceful though a minority attacked police property and threw stones. In contrast, Jewish supremacists continue to organize demonstrations freely. On 15 June thousands of Jewish settlers and supremacists marched provocatively through Palestinian neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem.

Those "mostly peaceful" Arab protests resulted in the deaths of two Jews, synagogues burned, apartments firebombed, people knifed.

The Flag March on June 15 was not "organized freely." Israeli police limited the route of the march specifically to avoid Arab neighborhoods. While some Jews may have deviated from the route, Amnesty is saying that Israeli police allowed the marchers to do whatever they wanted, which is a lie.

And look how Amnesty describes the Jews: "settlers" and "Jewish supremacists." Really? Every marcher either lives across the Green Line or considers Arabs to be less than human?

Most of the marchers were not extremists or bigots. Some were. But Amnesty is saying all the Jews who support Jerusalem as their capital are "supremacists."

In fact, Amnesty uses the phrase "Jewish supremacists" ten times in this report. Not "Jewish nationalists," not "Zionists," but "Jewish supremacists."

In the entire voluminous Amnesty website, there are only two types of "supremacists" mentioned: "White" and "Jewish."

People who demand that Israel be replaced with a Palestinian state "from the river to the sea" are never called "Palestinian supremacists." Members of ISIS are not once called "Muslim supremacists."

The word choice is deliberate: Amnesty is saying that Zionists who support the existence of a Jewish state are the moral equivalent of white supremacists and Nazis.

Amnesty is demonizing proud Jews as being in the same category as the most reprehensible racists. That is antisemitism, pure and simple.

What is even more ironic is that the report quotes Saleh Hijazi, Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, a "human rights" activist who is literally a supporter of terrorists. His Facebook page, even today, includes tributes to senior Islamic Jihad leader Khader Adnan (who openly advocates blowing up Jews) and to airplane hijacker Leila Khaled, with admiring pictures of Yasir Arafat, cartoons from antisemite Carlos Latuff and evil caricatures of Benjamin Netanyahu.