UN Human Rights Council adopts Goldstone Report

Good news - but a serious developing problem for Zionist Israel.

From Al Jazeera:

The UN human rights council has endorsed the Goldstone Report on Israel's war on Gaza, which accused the military of using disproportionate force as well as laying charges of war crimes on Israeli occupation forces and Hamas.

The council's resolution adopting the report was passed in Geneva by 25 votes to six with 11 countries abstaining. 

The Goldstone report calls on Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, to monitor whether Israel and Hamas conduct credible investigations into the conflict which took place last winter.

Should the two sides fail to do so, it calls on the UN Security Council to refer the allegations to the International Criminal Court.

The Palestinian Authority had initially agreed to defer a vote on the UN-sanctioned report but later backtracked under heavy criticism.

Mike Hanna, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Geneva, said the vote was a "very strong victory" for the supporters of the resolution but that the large number of abstentions was also "very significant"

Update 1:

Following the failure of faux-outrage to forestall UN adoption of the report, the mood seems have turned to a sort of whining self-pity.

This from Debka file who are a pretty reliable facilitator for whatever messages the Israeli government wants disseminating:

The UN body administered one of the most damaging blows Israel diplomacy has suffered in recent years, condemning Israel for alleged war crimes in its 22-day Gaza operation last January - but also for work in East Jerusalem such as archaeological excavations.

The damage was compounded by Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu's personal involvement in spearheading the campaign to have the report buried. Its endorsement has instead buried the stalled peace process between Israel and Palestinian Authority.

Snip...

Netanyahu failed even to persuade French president Nicolas Sarkozy - described by President Shimon Peres as "a great friend of Israel," and the British prime minister George Brown, with whom he had a heated telephone conversation Thursday night - to vote against the HRC motion.
That neither was prepared to oppose Israel's condemnation for war crimes means that Jerusalem cannot count on their support for curbing Iran's drive for a nuclear weapon.

Snip....

The hammer-blow from Geneva came at a bad time for Israel: Turkey has turned on the Jewish state tooth and claw. Israel finds itself up against the entire Arab world, even Egypt and Jordan, with whom it has signed peace treaties. It now finds itself abandoned by presumed friends Britain and France as well.

When Israel sees itself as friendless we need to pay close attention.  Maybe another outrageous terrorist attack is called for.

That might do the trick eh?

Israel and Moral Clarity

This article in today's 'Jerusalem Post', by a brave, honest Israeli citizen, is eloquent, 'on-the-button' testimony to the fact that not all Israelis are apartheid-promoting Zio-Fascists - just an overwhelming majority. It needs no further comment.

Virtually all of Israel is now speaking in one voice against the Goldstone report, against any attempt to blame us over the war in Gaza. We've honed our message to a sharp point and, inspired by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's performance at the UN, we're delivering it with just the right tone of outrage:

How dare anyone deny us the right to self-defense! How dare anyone deny us the right to fight back against terrorism!

Very nice. Puts everyone else on the defensive. The right to self-defense is up there with motherhood and apple pie - who's going to come out against it, especially for us, for Israel, for the Jews, for the people of the Holocaust? The right to self-defense - perfect.

But I'd like to ask: "Do the Palestinians also have the right to self-defense?"

We probably wouldn't admit it out loud, but in our heads we would say - again, in one voice - "No!" This is the Israeli notion of a fair deal: We're entitled to do whatever the hell we want to the Palestinians because, by definition, whatever we do to them is self-defense. They, however, are not entitled to lift a finger against us because, by definition, whatever they do to us is terrorism.

That's the way it's always been, that's the way it was in Operation Cast Lead. AND THERE are no limits on our right to self-defense. There is no such thing as "disproportionate." We can blockade Gaza, we can answer Kassams with F-16s and Apaches, we can take 100 eyes for an eye. We can deliberately destroy thousands of Gazan homes, the Gazan parliament, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Interior, courthouses, the only Gazan flour plant, the main poultry farm, a sewage treatment plant, water wells and God knows what else.

Deliberately.

After all, we're acting in self-defense. By definition.

And what right do the Palestinians have to defend themselves against this?

None.

Why? Because we're better than them. Because we're a democracy and they're a bunch of Islamo-fascists. Because ours is a culture of life and theirs is a culture of death. Because they're out to destroy us and all we are saying is give peace a chance.

One look at the ruins of Gaza ought to make that plain enough.

Here is our idea of the "laws of war": When Israeli bulldozers rolled across the border into Gazan villages and flattened house after house so Hamas wouldn't have them for cover after the IDF pulled out, that was self-defense. But if a Palestinian boy who'd lived in one of those houses threw a stone at one of the bulldozers, that was terrorism.

The Goldstones of the world call this hypocrisy, a double standard.

How dare they!

Around here, we call it moral clarity.