{"id":1930,"date":"2010-11-30T19:19:00","date_gmt":"2010-11-30T18:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/?p=1930"},"modified":"2011-05-18T13:29:51","modified_gmt":"2011-05-18T12:29:51","slug":"goldstone-refuted-by-hamas-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/2010\/11\/30\/goldstone-refuted-by-hamas-itself\/","title":{"rendered":"Goldstone refuted \u2013 by Hamas itself"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The media, having long ago agreed to everything in the Goldstone report, has no interest in the accidental revelations which refute its conclusions.<\/p>\n

Camera.org recently published<\/a> news that none other than Hamas itself has revealed an important statistic, previously denied or simply lied about, which shows that Goldstone was a gullible sap who was fed lies from dubious sources and reached conclusions which were foregone before he even started his one-sided investigation.<\/p>\n

Hamas Interior Minister Fathi Hamad’s admission\u00a0that Hamas and affiliated\u00a0militias lost 600-700 fighters\u00a0in the Israeli “Cast Lead” military operation undermines\u00a0the central accusation of the Goldstone Report that the Israeli operation\u00a0was “premised<\/em> <\/em>on a deliberate policy of disproportionate force aimed …\u00a0[at]\u00a0the civilian population.”\u00a0\u00a0The public,\u00a0however, is unlikely to know this, because Hamad’s remarks have been largely\u00a0ignored\u00a0by major news\u00a0organizations, like the<\/em> <\/em>New York Times<\/em> <\/em>and the BBC. <\/em><\/p>\n

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Hamad’s comments were made in an interview\u00a0published in the\u00a0London Arabic daily<\/em> <\/em>Al Hayat<\/em> <\/em>on Nov. 1, 2010 and reported by<\/em> <\/em>Agence France Presse, <\/em>the\u00a0Jerusalem Post <\/a> and others.\u00a0 In the interview, he stated that<\/em><\/p>\n

On the first day of the war, Israel targeted police stations and 250 martyrs who were part of Hamas and the various factions fell.” He added that, “about 200 to 300 were killed from the Qassam Brigades, as well as 150 security personnel.” <\/em><\/p>\n

Hamad’s\u00a0figures\u00a0closely match\u00a0the\u00a0Israeli estimate of 709 combatant fatalities\u00a0and\u00a0indicate that combatants comprised around half of the\u00a0Palestinian\u00a0fatalities in the time period of Dec. 27, 2008 through Jan. 18, 2009,\u00a0 far more than the 17 percent claimed by Palestinian groups. The increased ratio of\u00a0combatants\u00a0to non-combatants\u00a0is inconsistent with\u00a0Goldstone’s most serious\u00a0charge\u00a0that\u00a0Israeli forces\u00a0systematically\u00a0targeted civilians.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The importance of the last sentence cannot be underestimated. The accusation of deliberately targeting civilians was the direct opposite of the truth, as Col Richard Kemp told the UN Human Rights Council last year http:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/2009\/10\/19\/colonel-richard-kemp-and-the-truth-about-operation-cast-lead<\/a><\/p>\n

In the rush to judgement, or directly to condemnation, the picture of Israel as a bloodthirsty, murderous regime, which its enemies are so keen to promote, was given validation by Goldstone.<\/p>\n

Considering the conditions in Gaza – the use of public buildings, the network of residential homes used and the firing from or near UN buildings \u2013 the ratio of combatants to civilians killed is low and completely disproves the demonising conclusion of Goldstone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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The media, having long ago agreed to everything in the Goldstone report, has no interest in the accidental revelations which refute its conclusions. Camera.org recently published news that none other than Hamas itself has revealed an important statistic, previously denied or simply lied about, which shows that Goldstone was a gullible sap who was fed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,223],"tags":[746,1137,1142,12,4],"class_list":["post-1930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-israel-and-gaza","category-israel-palestine","tag-col-richard-kemp","tag-gaza","tag-goldstone","tag-hamas","tag-israel","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1930"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2852,"href":"https:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1930\/revisions\/2852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}