Before you watch the video it would be good to at least look over the actual report.
Moshe Halbertal wrote a rather interesting criticism of the Goldstone Report, which can be read here.
Below is an excerpt:
In addressing this vexing issue, the Goldstone Report uses a rather strange formulation: “While reports reviewed by the Mission credibly indicate that members of the Palestinian armed groups were not always dressed in a way that distinguished them from the civilians, the Mission found no evidence that Palestinian combatants mingled with the civilian population with the intention of shielding themselves from the attack.” The reader of such a sentence might well wonder what its author means. Did Hamas militants not wear their uniforms because they were inconveniently at the laundry? What other reasons for wearing civilian clothes could they have had, if not for deliberately sheltering themselves among the civilians?
As for my take on this, I feel people (including Goldstone in his report) go out of their way to seek "balance" on an issue that isn't very balanced. I look at the actions of warring parties in a conflict, and clearly, a terrorist outfit like Hamas is going to use any means necessary, civilians be damned, to achieve their objective. I also look at intentions, and when you have a militant religious ideology as the backbone of your movement, like Hamas does, and borderline ethnic cleansing rhetoric thrown in the mix, it's not hard to see who is to blame. This isn't to say Israel should be cleared of any wrong doing whatsoever. Like Moshe Halbertal, I believe the Israeli government should do an internal investigation of all the accusations, yet to put the IDF on the same level as a terrorist group like Hamas, is really absurd. Debating settlements? That's fine, it's a complex issue. Yet when countries with human rights records that are among the lowest in the world start holding up the Goldstone Report as some type of statement, you know something is wrong. As I said in January,
On one side you have an established democracy that for years has been confronted with threats to its security and existence. It has a pretty large military and the means to defend itself. On the other side is a terrorist organization, which has limited representation out of nationalist fervor, and shoots rockets aimlessly into the democracy (with a focus on their civilians). Which side do you present more positively? Which side do you give leeway with when it comes to the facts? To many it’s a no-brainer, to others, it’s ambiguous.
Clearer to the point: One side intends to kill civilians while the other tries to avoid them.
Is the Goldstone Report "fair"? You decide.
*I say "debate" because he is debating against the report itself, not Goldstone, who decided against attending.
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