Israel, Jewish groups seek to discredit new U.N. report on Gaza war [View All]

<snip>

"Israel's government and its supporters are promoting a one-sentence strategy to counter a 574-page U.N. report on last winter's Israel-Hamas war in Gaza: Consider the source.

"The same U.N. that allows the president of a country to announce on a podium its aspiration to destroy the State of Israel has no right to teach us about morality," Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin said, referring to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"This is a report born of bias," Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in describing the report released Tuesday by the U.N. Human Rights Council. "What do you do with an initiative born of bigotry?"

The report, written by a fact-finding mission headed by Richard Goldstone, a respected war crimes judge from South Africa who is Jewish, urges Israel to set up independent investigations into what it calls Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Calling for the probes to be set up within three months, the report also recommends that international bodies launch prosecutions if Israel does not do so within six months. It makes similar recommendations about Hamas.

The timing of the report is not propitious for Israel, as it sparks a public relations problem ahead of a planned summit to reconvene Israeli-Palestinian talks and open talks with Iran aimed at getting the Islamic Republic to shut down its suspected nuclear weapons program.

A battery of Israeli officials are touring Washington and the United States in an attempt to convey the impression that Israel is more open to negotiations than the Palestinians and that the principal threat in the region is Iran. The report gives Palestinians and Arab nations an opportunity to complicate that effort.

Jewish groups said the strategy now should be to get the United States to dismiss the report as hopelessly biased. Statements Tuesday by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, as well as by Jewish groups that maintain U.N. bureaus such as the American Jewish Committee and B'nai B'rith International, adopted that strategy."

more