Christians for Fair Witness Questions America Magazine’s Uncritical Acceptance of Goldstone Report

Christians for Fair Witness Questions America Magazine's Uncritical Acceptance of Goldstone Report

Christians for Fair Witness on the Middle East  questions America Magazine's uncritical acceptance of the Goldstone Report ("Siege Mentality" (October 5, 2009). The report is rife with indicia of prejudice and lack of due process. The resolution mandating the fact-finding mission accused Israel of "the targeting of civilians . . ." and one of the investigators judged Israel guilty of "prima facie war crimes," -- all prior to any actual investigation. The report is based almost entirely on unverifiable Palestinian claims and publications from highly politicized pro-Palestinian organizations which were accepted at face value and quoted directly. Israel's assertions that it warned civilians and planned military operations to minimize civilian casualties were summarily dismissed.

"Why then, did America's editors accept this report wholesale, with no critical eye or ear?" asks Rev. Msgr. Dennis Mikulanis, pastor of San Rafael Parish and Vicar for Ecumenical & Interreligious Affairs in the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego, California.

One glaring flaw in Goldstone, is its failure to find conclusive evidence of Hamas' use of civilians and civilian infrastructure for military purposes despite extensive and readily available evidence to support such use. The report makes no mention of incidents of Palestinian rockets launched from schools or the use of mosques to store explosives despite solid video evidence. Goldstone also claims to have found no evidence that Palestinian armed groups forced civilians to remain within the vicinity of Israeli attacks. But in an article in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Gaza residents explicitly stated that Hamas fighters shot at Israeli forces from their houses after forcibly preventing them from leaving. Contrary to numerous contemporaneous reports in media outlets like the New York Times, the report denies that Hamas fighters wore civilian clothing, hid in hospital facilities and used ambulances for military purposes.

"America places Israel in a moral bind by saying it agrees Israel has the right to defend itself, while at the same time complaining that it targeted civilian infrastructure," notes Rev. James Loughran, S.A., Director of the Graymoor Ecumenical & Interreligious Institute. "Since Hamas was thoroughly embedded in the civilian population, it would have been impossible to attack Hamas and at the same time avoid targets where civilians were located."

"One of war's evils is that it has always exacted a toll on non-combatants," reminds Rev. Dr. Bruce Chilton , the Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Religion at Bard College in Annandale, New York. "During World War II Britain and the U.S. engaged in wholesale bombing of German cities and made no effort to avoid killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. But in this era of terrorist militias that fight out of uniform and from within civilian populations, massive civilian deaths will occur even when an army exerts considerable effort to spare them. Therefore, before engaging in such warfare, all nations -- Israel included -- should determine whether widespread civilian casualties are inevitable, and if so, acceptable. The international community might have to consider recalculating moral and legal standards of proportion where combatants choose to deploy from within civilian areas. Reasonable and thoughtful people may debate these questions for sometime to come, but irresponsible accusations of deliberate targeting of civilians and collective punishment, which amount to little more than mindless name-calling, only impede the serious reflection these issues warrant."