Goldstone

Here is the link to the full report.

The Israeli operations “were carefully planned in all their phases as a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population”…. [with a last wink and nod from GWB].

There is not a word in this report, that Hamas militants have operated from densely populated areas, using civilians as human shields. Nothing about ammunition and explosives storage in schools and mosques. Nothing about booby trapped residential buildings.

Allow me, for the record, p.137:
“In reports issued following Israel’s military operations in Gaza, Amnesty International, the International Crisis Group and Human Rights Watch each determined that the rocket units of the Palestinian armed groups operated from within populated areas.303 Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group gathered reports from civilians about instances in which armed groups had launched or had attempted to launch rockets near residential areas. Human Rights Watch quoted a resident of northern Gaza as stating that, on 1 January 2009, residents of the area prevented Palestinian fighters, who they believed were preparing to launch rockets, from entering a garden next to the building in which they lived.304 The International Crisis Group interviewed a resident of Beit Lahia who stated that fighters used his land to fire rockets, which he did not dare to resist, as his father had previously been shot in the leg by a member of such an armed group when he had tried to prevent them from using his land as a rocket launching site.305 Amnesty International conducted interviews with residents of Gaza who stated that they had observed Palestinian fighters firing a rocket from a courtyard of a Government school in Gaza City at a time when the schools were closed. In another area of Gaza
City, another resident reportedly showed an Amnesty International researcher a place from which a rocket had been launched, 50 metres from a residential building.306 Amnesty International also reported, however, that it had seen no evidence that rockets had been launched from residential houses or buildings while civilians were still in them.” Etc etc

Chris Bertram 09.16.09 at 11:23 am

“#5 I’m afraid that what you say simply isn’t true, as the most cursory examination of the report would have revealed to you (see for example p. 136 et seq.)”

Chris, I suggest banning with a heavy hand on this thread, for obvious reasons.

Gladstone? Disraeli, surely, unless there is a major discovery lurking in the archives.

The story that HRW employees Marc Garlasco and Joe Stork collect Nazi memorabilia is likely part of an Israeli Foreign Ministry disinformation campaign to discredit the organization. The effort is headed by Gerald Steinberg and relayed by Mere Rhetoric.

‘Unfortunately they’ve dug up things that Garlasco really has said on chatrooms that make him a liability to HRW, hence his suspension.’

If organisations are going to start firing people for saying stupid things on the internet, then almost every white male aged between 16 and 50 in the UK, North America, Australia and New Zealand will have to be fired. Myself excepted, obviously.

‘Unfortunately they’ve dug up things that Garlasco really has said on chatrooms that make him a liability to HRW, hence his suspension.’

If the same standard was to be applied to what the right says – not internet chatrooms, but in print, on TV and on the radio, the right would be deprived of just about every prominent person in it.

Admittedly, if I were an officer of the Southern Poverty Law Center, I would try to keep any fascination with Confederate memorabilia to myself.

This analogy is either very confusing or very clever, I’m not sure which. Without raising hackles by expressing any opinion on facts in dispute, is there any fair interpretation under which HRW can be said to be primarily working to advance the interests of underprivileged descendants of victims of Nazi genocide, as the SPLC primarily works for underprivileged descendants of victims of Confederate slavery?

If a HRW representative were to hand out souvenir Nazi memorabilia to interviewees in Gaza, would the likely response really be comparable to what a civil rights lawyer would encounter distributing Confederate souvenirs to African-Americans in Neshoba County?

I find myself unable to develop any significant rage against some military analyst at HRW collecting Nazi memorabilia.

Is he required to be a perfect conformist? Now, that certainly sounds like a fascist sort of requirement.

If there are any doubts, hire another expert to check his work and his qualifications, and if it’s all good – fuck off.

banned commenter at 21 links to a pretty disgusting hit piece. Or maybe the author just doesn’t know anyone with a hobby? They all look bizarre and obsessive from the outside. It’s the nature of hobbies. FSM forbid Cobban ever has occasion to write about someone who participates in Civil War reenactments on the Confederate side.

I find it hard to believe that it’s some kind of crime against humanity to think that the Nazis had cool jackets. There are many things you can say about the Nazis, most of them (obviously) bad. But does that extend to a moral principle that you can’t even acknowledge good fashion sense if you think they had it? That seems to verge on making the Nazis into some kind of supernatural force of pure evil — which they decidedly were not, and IMO dehumanizing Nazis increases, not decreases, the chance of a recurrence of their atrocities. Nazis loved their wives, walked their dogs, tickled their little brothers — AND killed millions of people for terrible reasons. If we can’t wrap our heads around that, how will we recognize it when (not if) it comes again?

The idea of throwing Garlasco under the bus over this seems far more disturbing than any amount of collecting military memorabilia. That really would be thoughtcrime.

P.S. Also, Henri is correct at 22 — this is a pure ad hominem argument. If his work stands on its own merits, it doesn’t matter if he believes he’s the reincarnation of Hitler sent by God to complete his work.

If his work stands on its own merits, it doesn’t matter if he believes he’s the reincarnation of Hitler sent by God to complete his work.

No, I wouldn’t go that far; I think when you join a humanitarian organization you have to share its general goals and principles, this is a reasonable requirement. This is something they probably should ask you at the interview. But what sort of items you might collect, that seems utterly irrelevant.