Mideast Media Sampler 04/05/2011: More Goldstone, More Iran and More...

From an email from DG:

1) More Goldstone fallout

I guess that this will be an indication of Goldstone's sincerity UN official: Goldstone must request repeal of Gaza war crimes report before it can be canceled

Israel has called for the report to be withdrawn after Richard Goldstone, a former South African judge and U.N. war crimes prosecutor, said in an op-ed piece that he was reconsidering the conclusion that Israel deliberately targeted civilians during the three-week offensive against Palestinian militant group Hamas. 

A spokesman for the U.N. Human Rights Council said for the report to be withdrawn Goldstone would have to submit a formal request to the Geneva-based body, which he has not done.

The State Department issued a statement:

U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner welcomed Goldstone’s latest reflections.“We’ve made clear from when the Goldstone report was initially presented, and maintained ever since, that we didn’t see any evidence that the Israeli government had intentionally targeted civilians or otherwise engaged in any war crimes,” Toner told reporters in Washington.

I wish the State Department had included a comment to the effect of: "It's a good thing that the United States exercised its veto to prevent a miscarriage of justice in the Security Council."

And the guy who claimed that Israel had only been attacked by two or three rockets has, of course, stood his ground:

Goldstone’s decision to reconsider the conclusions of the report came as a surprise to at least one other member of the four-person panel that authored the document. 

“I probably didn’t expect to see the comments he made, to be honest,” Desmond Travers told the AP in a telephone interview, adding he had not been consulted beforehand. 

Travers, a former officer in the Irish Armed Forces and an expert on international criminal investigations, said he hadn’t seen the Israeli investigative reports that prompted Goldstone to backtrack on parts of his conclusion, though he acknowledged it might be valid to do so. 

“But the tenor of the report in its entirety, in my opinion, stands,” Travers said.

Well yes, if Israel was only attacked by two or three rockets then repudiating the central thesis of the report would have no effect.

And this is of course, one aspect that's so frustrating about Goldstone's recanting: He had to have known the nature of his confederates, regarding Israel.

Though neither the Washington Post nor New York Times seem to have weighed in with a staff editorial, Richard Cohen concludes in The Goldstone Report and Israel’s moral standing

As Goldstone acknowledges, Israel has looked into every charge of war crimes — incident by incident. Some soldiers have indeed been punished because some awful things happened. But overall, Israel adheres to a morality we all recognize and admire — and that its enemies, Hamas in particular, do not. Those who gleefully embraced the Goldstone report have to ask themselves why. They may hate the answer.

There is much in Cohen's op-ed to disagree with, but his conclusion is spot on. It really behooves any opinion writer who criticizes Israel with any frequency to weigh in on Goldstone. If folks like Roger Cohen, Nicholas Kristof or Thomas Friedman can't find it in themselves to express similar conclusions, it should prove once and for all that they are anti-Israel.


And Yaacov Lozowick notes that J-Street has welcomed the Goldstone retraction.
http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/2011/04/state-department-j-street-welcome.html

And as Yisrael Medad notes (and I saw in Twitter) Ken Roth has not.

2) More Iran

Tehran cuts ties with Louvre in dispute over Persian artifacts

Iran has cut ties with the famous Louvre museum in Paris, an official said Monday, accusing the museum of failing to live up to an agreement to exhibit Persian artifacts in its possession in Iran.  

"In the cultural field, we do not accept that European countries look down on us," Hamid Baghai, who heads Tehran's Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization, told reporters Monday, according to Agence France-Presse. 

"The officials at The Louvre have until the end of 1389 [the Iranian year ending March 2011] to precisely tell us when and what they are going to set up here," he added. 

Siemens puts business first

A year after German engineering giant Siemens AG pledged to retreat from Iran under international pressure, it is grappling with a thorny problem: a big jump in revenue in the Islamic republic. 

Siemens has kept a promise not to pursue new projects in Iran. But its existing contracts there underscore how international efforts to curb Tehran's nuclear ambitions have had only limited impact on the state's ability to draw on the technology and expertise it needs to maintain its broader infrastructure.

3) Another Israeli peace plan

The New York Times reports Prominent Israelis Will Propose a Peace Plan

A group of prominent Israelis, including former heads of Mossad, Shin Bet and the military, are this week putting forth an initiative for peace with the Arab world that they hope will generate popular support and influence their government as it faces international pressure to move peace talks forward. 

Called the Israeli Peace Initiative, the two-page document is partly inspired by the changes under way regionally and is billed as a direct response to theArab Peace Initiative issued by the Arab League in 2002 and again in 2007. It calls for a Palestinian state on nearly all the West Bank and Gaza with a capital in much of East Jerusalem, an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, and a set of regional security mechanisms and economic cooperation projects. 

Every once in a while a group of Israelis get together with a new peace plan designed to embarrass the government and bring attention to themselves. We had the Geneva Initiative a few years ago. It's really quite amazing given the ambitious scope of the project that they were able to fit their plan on two pages. It's even more amazing that it's news.

Another member of the group, Yaakov Perry, a former head of Shin Bet, the internal security agency, said he sent a copy of the document on Sunday to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who replied that he looked forward to reading it. The official unveiling is set for Wednesday in Tel Aviv, but a copy was made available to The New York Times. 

Oh, I guess that's why it's news.

4) Abu Sisi's charges
For those who wondered why Israel would kidnap an engineer in the Ukraine, we finally have an answer.

On Monday, Abu Sisi was formally charged with developing rockets fired from the Gaza Strip at Israel, increasing their range and ability to penetrate Israeli armored vehicles, according to a summary of the indictment released by the Israeli Justice Ministry.  

The indictment alleged that Abu Sisi had acquired extensive knowledge of rocket technology at a military engineering academy in Ukraine. He was also charged with establishing a military academy in Gaza to train Hamas commanders. 

Time after time Israel is accused of doing something outrageous, but when the facts come out it turns out that what Israel did was perfectly reasonable.

5) An actor is killed

Pro-Palestinian Israeli filmmaker killed in West Bank city

Israeli-born filmmaker and actor Juliano Mer-Khamis, 52, was shot dead in the northern West Bank city of Jenin on Monday. 

It was not clear who was responsible, but some Palestinians believe the perpetrators may be among  those opposed to the liberal cultural activity Mer-Khamis had brought to Jenin and his role in building the Freedom Theater in 2006. 

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad condemned the killing, describing it as “hideous crime” and promising to bring to justice those responsible.

I guess that Fayyad won't be able to do anything of the sort.

Technorati Tag: Middle East and Goldstone Report.