Justice Goldstone said no one had been able to show any error of substance in the report nor to repudiate any of its findings.
Interview with South African Sunday Times, November 15
It is one thing for Judge Goldstone to dismiss the numerous analyses of the mistakes in the report that bears his name; it is another thing entirely to ignore the existence of those analyses altogether.
Yet that is what Goldstone has been doing all along, and did again just 3 weeks ago, exploiting his greater exposure to public opinion to claim that the Goldstone Report is above reproach.
It isn't.
Back in October, Al Jazeera reported on an interview it had with Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the secretary-general of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC):
Al Jazeera: The UN's Goldstone report has been in the headlines in the past few weeks - not without controversy - and has brought to light the conduct of the Israelis and Hamas during the war on Gaza earlier in the year. Does the OIC see this as a step forward in recognising what transpired during that war and in bringing the plight of the Palestinians to the fore on an international scale?
Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu: Let me first start by completing the story of the history of the Goldstone report. What I would like to put on record is that the OIC was the initiator of this process.
On January 3, during the attacks on Gaza, we convened the executive committee of the OIC on a ministerial level. It was decided that the OIC group in Geneva should ask the Human Rights Council to convene and consider the possibility of sending a fact-finding mission to Gaza.
On December 4, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, went a step further in
revealing the origins of the Goldstone Report:
The Prosecutor also fielded questions about allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity by Israel. When asked, he offered no confirmation of reports that he had been invited by Hamas to advise on the legality of a Hamas-led investigation into attacks in Gaza this January. But, he admitted to working closely with the Arab League on the matter, which had helped finance the fact-finding Goldstone mission.
This of course explains the mandate given by the United Nations Human Rights Council,
which targeted Israel alone, in language implying the conclusion the report was supposed to find:
I remember for years how the Israeli economy was a joke--how the currency was constantly being devalued, how converting your dollars into shekels provided you what seemed like a small fortune.
Things are different now.
Very different--today, the Israeli economy is no longer a joke.
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