Israel's rebuttal of the Goldstone Report

You might expect them to just sit it out and wait for the storm caused by the 'Goldstone Report'  to blow over, but not them; no they actually have the audacity to publish their own 46 page report defending the IDF's conduct in Gaza and then hand it to the UN  and today there is news in the 'Guardian' that the UN has challenged the Israeli version of an attack on a flour mill.

The al-Badr flour mill was the largest mill in the strip and, of the five mills that were targeted, it was the only one that was operational. 'Haaretz' writes: ".... the UN mine action team, which handles ordnance disposal in Gaza, maintains that the remains of a 500-pound Mk82 aircraft-dropped bomb were found in the ruins of the mill last January."The article was based on the 'Guardian' article and which reports that "the UN mine action team said it identified an aircraft-dropped bomb." With that aplomb born out of a chutzpah that is a trade mark of any Israeli version of events the main reporting verbs "said" and "told", which was used earlier in the 'Guardian' article, both of which indicate that the UN team is just reporting a fact, becomes "maintains" and caught red handed or not, if any doubt can be thrown on anything, then all of the 'Goldstone Report' must be anti-semitic, biased and based on lies. Still, with photographs of the front half of the bomb having been obtained by the 'Guardian', Israel is going to find it difficult to discredit the 'Goldstone Report' on this particular point.

However, the strategy has been revealed; facts will be reported using reporting verbs that smack of academic caution and these will give the Zionist faithful their delusional, illusional "credibility". Furthermore, when that caution is rendered supeflous by a barrage of hard facts, Israel will move onto another point in the report. The flour mill attack was not the most serious incident of a "war" in which some 1,400 Palestinians were massacred in just three week. Indeed, nobody was killed at the flour mill. Nevertheless, here was Jerusalem thinking, "easy pickings" and telling us that "the mill was accidentally hit by artillery in the course of a firefight with Hamas militiamen." Oh, and forgive the academic caution, but the evidence would seem to suggest that it was hit by a precise airstrike even if we might be assuming a bit too much by suggesting that it was attacked out of pure vindictiveness and spite.

Finally, we might expect to see isolated incidents in the 'Goldstone Report' being challenged over the next few weeks and months, in conjunction with the motives for the report, and should even one of those incidents have been slightly different from how it Goldstone portrayed it,  we will hear cries of "fraud, fake, biased, anti-semitic" from Jerusalem followed by the mainstream media using figures of speech such as "contentious", "disputatious" "disputed" and "ambiguous" whenever the report is referred to. The facts, however, as one Israeli blogger points out, are clear; "1,100 of the 1,400 Gazans killed by the IDF were civilians, which further underscores either a willful campaign to target civilians or a strategy that accepted the decimation of the civilian population as a corollary of the approach."