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From The Weekly Standard:
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UN Moves Forward to Implement Goldstone ReportÂ
New UN committee members and UN staffer have anti-Israel connections.
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Among the multitude of attacks on Israel that the United Nations has sponsored over the decades, last year’s Goldstone report on the 2009 Gaza war stands out for its dangerous distortions of fact and law. Now the UN Human Rights Council has sponsored a second-team of investigators to press forward with the report’s implementation. Just as with round one, the United Nations has guaranteed the result of round two by selecting individuals whose independence is compromised from the start.
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From ShalomLife:
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Hamas' Line of Defence to Goldstone Report
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By: JONATHAN DAHOHAH HALEVI
Published: February 2nd 2010
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Israel has recently delivered to the United Nations Secretary-general Ban Ki-moon its official response to the UN’s fact finding mission to Operation Cast Lead, headed by Judge Richard Goldstone. Hamas’ government is also preparing to submit its official response before the grace period of six months set to the parties by the Goldstone committee is over.
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In sharp contrast to the genuine fears expressed by Israel, Hamas does not seem to feel any threat in the legal arena.
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Report #28a                                                                                                     January 2010
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New Threats at UN following Goldstone Report on Gaza War:Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Push for Sanctions against Israel Modeled on South Africa Sanctions
“Moderate†Fatah Vows to Isolate Israel and Pursue Punitive Measures at UN
A December 31, 2009 press report from Ramallah announced Fatah’s “two-track approach to step up its struggle against the Israeli occupation: demonstrations and diplomacy.â€Â  In this announcement, Fatah – the “moderate†faction among the Palestinians – committed itself to “increase movement on the international level to pursue Israel, to isolate it and to force it to answer to international law.â€
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Launching a new effort in the never-ending anti-Israel actions pursued in the UN, Fatah plans to follow up on the UN’s Goldstone Report, which accused Israel of “serious violations of international humanitarian and international human rights law†when, in fact, it defended its civilian population from aggressive rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza.
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Equating Israel with apartheid South Africa and using the UN system to delegitimize Israel internationally has been a standard practice of Israel’s enemies, as documented in earlier AJIRI reports.  Their current plan appears to be to call an Emergency Session of the UN General Assembly in February to impose sanctions against Israel by adopting a resolution similar to the 1981 resolution against apartheid South Africa, which contained the following key paragraphs:
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BBC covers UN debate in as even-handed a manner as possible (for them).
09:34 GMT, Thursday, 5 November 2009
Wide support for UN Gaza report
Dozens of nations at the UN have backed a non-binding resolution calling for independent inquiries by Israel and the Palestinians into war crimes in Gaza.
The UN General Assembly is set to vote on the resolution at the end of a two-day debate on a report by former war crimes prosecutor Richard Goldstone.
The report condemns the conduct of both sides last December and January, after Israel launched an offensive in Gaza.
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Marty Peretz reflects on the lessons of the UNHRC latest vote on the Goldstone Report for Obama's policy of engagement with the UN body.
Marty Peretz
October 19, 2009
The point is made in a piece by John Bolton in this morning's Wall Street Journal. No, not the point about fobbing it off on Susan Rice. But the point about how the U.S. joining up with the U.N. Human Rights Council opened us up to diplomatic defeat after diplomatic defeat.Â
There were two disasters in and around the Goldstone Report.
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Harold Evans, in the Guardian (!), denounces the pusillanimous behavior of his government at the recent UNHRC decision. Â He concludes:
No doubt there were blunders. A defensive war is still a war with all its suffering and destruction. But Hamas compounded its original war crime with another. It held its own people hostage. It used them as human shields. It regarded every (accidental) death as another bullet in the propaganda war. The Goldstone report won the gold standard of moral equivalence between the killer and the victim. Now Britain wins the silver. Who's cheering?
Judge Goldstone has been suckered into letting war criminals use his name to pillory Israel
Harold Evans
The Guardian, Tuesday 20 October 2009
Aren't the British sickened by the moral confusions of their government? First, we have the weasel words to justify the unjustifiable release of the Lockerbie bomber. Now we have the sickening spectacle of Britain failing to stand by Israel, the only democracy with an independent judiciary in the entire region.
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It was to be expected that the usual suspects of the risible UN human rights council would be eager to condemn Israel for war crimes in defending itself against Hamas. If you treat people as the Chinese do the Tibetans or Uighurs ("Off with their heads!"); or as the Russians eliminate Chechen dissidents; or as the Nigerians tolerate extrajudicial killings, the evictions of 800,000, rape and cruel treatment of prisoners; or as the Egyptians get prisoners to talk (torture) and the Saudis suppress half their population … well, go through the practices of all 25 states voting to refer Israel to the security council for the Gaza war, and you have to acknowledge they know a lot about the abuse of humans. Anything to divert attention from their own atrocities.
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Marc Lynch (formerly Abu Ardvaark), now blogging at Foreign Policy, has an analysis of how the UN deployment of the Goldstone report could help the peace process. Â Written from deep within the "Politically-correct" paradigm, it assumes Israeli government bad faith and obstructionism and hopes the report has given Obama leverage over the Israelis and maybe even that it will lead to a reunification of Hamas and Fatah (which will presumably help the cause of peace).
Fri, 10/16/2009 - 10:59am
The UN Human Rights Council has passed by a large majority (25-6) a resolution endorsing the findings of the Goldstone Report on the Gaza war. It plans to send its recommendations to the General Assembly and to ask the Security Council to monitor the recommended independent probes of the report's allegations. While the U.S. and five others voted no, it was extremely striking that several major powers -- including the UK and France -- refrained from voting. Pakistan, our crucial ally in the Afghanistan mission, voted in favor along with Egypt and 23 others. The Israeli government is outraged, and the level of rhetoric is hotter than ever.
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That rhetoric has always been out of balance with the actual stakes. The Security Council is highly unlikely to do anything with it, since the United States will surely veto any move to act upon it. But the passage of the resolution is significant nonetheless, primarily because the stakes had been raised by the bizarrely intense Israeli lobbying effort against it and by the disastrous decision by Mahmoud Abbas to initially ask for it to be shelved.  Contrary to the apocalyptic talk coming out about the decision, it could actually help moves towards Israeli-Palestinian peace in at least three ways.
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UN Politics
