I was fwd’d an email by an aquaintance who is very active with Israeli politics. The email is from, “Israel Resource News Agency, Jerusalem, Israel.” I lays out a detailed (though biased) approach to showing anti-Israeli bias in the U.N. The text of it is a little long to post so I will fwd it to anyone who may want it.
I’m sorry, but you just made a mistake. Of course impartial does not mean a friend of Israel. When did I imply that. However…somone skeptical of Israel’s claim would NOT be more credible. Why? It means that they believe that the Palestinian claim is more credible. The only unbiased observer would be one who is skeptical about both claims, or none.
That isn’t really a fair comparison. While he could do this, he doesn’t really need to. Also, another problem with the people the UN chose was that they didn’t seem to have the expertise required to investigate the situation properly. I would hope, though I have not thoroughly researched this matter, that the investigators had the expertise to do the job properly.
Also, I would like to add, the investigators hardly seem necessary in the case of Hussein. After all, it seems fairly obvious that he has participated in that sort of thing before, and still actively is (I have not researched this with great depth, so excuse any error in the previous statement. That’s just my impression of the situation.) Israel, as far as I know, has not deliberately targeted civilians. In those cases where an isolated individual has, of which I do not know about, then it seems unlikely that Israel would not condemn such actions.
Maybe I left off a fragment. Someone who is a credible observer but skeptical of Israel’s claim would be much more believeable if they came to the conclusing that there was no massacre. Obviously, someone like Arafat or Sharon have zero credibility for an unbiased observation.
Sadako Ogata, former United Nations high commissioner for refugees, has a lot of credibility. Granted, she isn’t a military person or counterintelligence expert. But she has a track record of dealing with refugee crisises and it would be easy to compare her findings over jenin with her past history. Again, I haven’t seen the Israeli’s propose a fact finding mission made up of impartial observers. They just say that this is an obvious dirt finding mission so all bets are off.
A non-governmental agency, which apparently has managed to go where the UN couldn’t, has determined that there wasn’t a “massacre,” but that there were illegal and willful killings (“willful” implying “deliberate and avoidable”) that could be seen as war crimes.
This is what I’ve been saying all along, and it jibes with the reports I’ve read.
