Israel's US envoy compares Goldstone to Nazis

Israel’s ambassador to the United States argues that a United Nations war crimes investigation poses a genocidal threat to Jews comparable to the Nazi Holocaust.

“Recognizing the murder of six million Jews more than six decades ago is, in fact, vital for understanding the supreme dangers posed to six million Jews in Israel today by a nuclear Iran and by the Goldstone Report,” Ambassador Michael Oren wrote in the US political magazine The New Republic on Tuesday.

“The Goldstone Report goes further than [Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Holocaust deniers by stripping the Jews not only of the ability and the need but of the right to defend themselves,” he also wrote.

Oren, a US-born former Yale University visiting professor, also refers to “the supreme dangers posed to six million Jews in Israel today by a nuclear Iran and by the Goldstone Report.”

The article was referring to the report of Judge Richard Goldstone, a Jewish South African who was a prosecutor in war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Goldstone and a team of investigators produced a 575-page report on Israel’s war on Gaza last winter.

The report accuses both Israel and Palestinian militants of war crimes. More than 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the three-week Israeli onslaught, including hundreds of women and children. Palestinians killed nine Israelis, including six soldiers and three civilians. Four Israeli soldiers were killed by friendly fire.

“More insidiously,” Oren wrote, “the report does not only hamstring Israel; it portrays the Jews as the deliberate murderers of innocents–as Nazis. And a Nazi state not only lacks the need and right to defend itself; it must rather be destroyed.”

Oren’s article does not refute or otherwise address the specific findings of the Goldstone report, for example that Israeli forces failed to exercise sufficient discrimination between civilian and military targets in Gaza.

Source: Maan