U.N. Report Exhibits New Legal Terrorism
No nation faces more serious inevitable challenges in the year ahead than Israel, starting with the Iranian nuclear situation that is heading toward a showdown and the many pressures that the Obama administration has exerted on matters varying from settlements to the flow of goods into Gaza.
Israel's military personnel and officials have also been barraged in recent months by accusations of criminal behavior -- most notably by the United Nations Human Rights Council-sponsored Goldstone Report, a report that is indicative of the double standard to which much of the international community holds Israel.
We recently filed with the U.N. a comprehensive response to the Goldstone Report, which, in September, issued a scathing attack on Israel and accused its soldiers of committing war crimes during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza last year.
The report was adopted by the UNHRC and endorsed by the General Assembly, and it is currently before the Security Council, which will eventually vote on whether to refer it to the International Criminal Court.
The report blatantly defied U.N. and International Bar Association guidelines on objective, credible fact-finding missions through biased reporting, improper context, and outrageous and speculative claims about Israelis, including that they engaged in terrorism -- something the report dared not allege against Hamas.
It also ignored the fact that Israel drastically increased humanitarian aid to Gaza, that it issued millions of warnings to citizens during Operation Cast Lead, and that Israel has opened close to 150 investigations, 36 of which are criminal investigations.
The Goldstone Mission is the culmination of a series of coordinated legal attacks against Israel -- often referred to as "lawfare" -- that are orchestrated by international, left-wing organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, sometimes even in conjunction with terrorist groups like Hamas, which recently formed a committee to begin working directly with European lawyers.
These so-called human rights activists are driven by a post-colonial ideological belief that America and Israel are oppressive societies and that power dynamics justify the use of dubious legal tactics to wage a new kind of war.
Their asymmetric legal strategy is to law what terrorism is to warfare: unprincipled, unrestrained and unethical. As with terrorists, there are no negotiations to be had, no deeds that can be done that would elevate our moral standing in their eyes.
These legal maneuvers are becoming increasingly common and especially critical for free societies to combat. Last January, the Palestinian Authority sought to recognize and accede to the jurisdiction of the ICC -- despite not meeting its clear statutory prerequisite of statehood for doing so -- in an attempt to have Israelis prosecuted internationally.
The ICC's prosecutor has so far refused to rule it out, and the Goldstone Report encourages him to proceed. A complaint was also filed recently at the ICC against Bush officials for war crimes.
The same people who call Israelis and Americans war criminals seem unmoved by the barbarous, totalitarian thugs in places like the Sudan, North Korea, Somalia and Gaza, to name just a few. Rather than focus on such areas or condemn those who routinely seek to terrorize Israel, the agitators cultivate the fiction that Israel and the U.S. are what plagues the world.
To call such assessments naive would miss the point and imply a degree of well-intentioned misdirection on the part of lawfare activists. There are no good intentions in this new battlefront -- only attempts to weaken two of the world's freest societies at any cost.
(The Commentary appears here at WashingtonExaminer.com)
Jay Sekulow is Chief Counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) and the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ). Brett Joshpe is an attorney and author in New York City and is Of Counsel with The American Center for Law and Justice.