While Israel is used to being vilified in the United Nations, there is far more to be unraveled in the Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict than just Richard Goldstone’s retraction on April 1, 2011. The secrets behind the story are revealed in my new book, Boycotting Peace (http://www.BoycottingPeace.com) and here is a behind-the-scenes peek at what the Palestinians and United Nations do not want you to know.
There is a Harvard educated U.S. law professor who has been a consultant to Yassir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization, the official name of the Palestinian Authority, and who created the Goldstone Commission from behind the scenes.
After convincing Yassir Arafat to reject the Palestinian state offered to him by then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, U.S. legal counsel to Yassir Arafat proposed a campaign vilifying Israel with war-crimes claims, the exact conclusion of the Goldstone commission, but Arafat rejected the idea so he put it aside for later. This was the same legal counsel who had previously created the divest-from-Israel campaign in his official PA/PLO capacity.
Since the PA is signatory to the Arab boycott of Israel, this makes the divestment campaign an illegal foreign boycott as defined by the US Import Export Amendments of 1977, which created the Office of Antiboycott Compliance under Office of Industry and Security in the U.S. Department of Commerce. While the law predates the Internet and has therefore remained focused on shipments, it clearly applies to BDS.
The Gaza vilification plan was re-introduced by the very same professor after Arafat’s death. Since the same consultant has spoken before the United Nations General Assembly, he was able to use his idea to work behind the scenes to create the Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, and interestingly enough, one of his colleagues was on the commission. Not surprisingly, therefore, some of his writings were included in the final report almost verbatim.
These are not coincidences which can be ignored. I believe and documented how the PA/PLO’s lawyer not only had a direct influence on the Goldstone commission, but was its ideological father. Goldstone was a pawn of the PLO and while it took him more than a year to admit his conclusions were wrong, he still has not revealed the people behind his false report. I did in Boycotting Peace, long before his retraction.
Israel is right in demanding a retraction of the Goldstone report, but severe damage from the report has already been done, all with the intent to demonize Israel. The purpose of the divest-from-Israel campaign is to build a generation of college students, a future adult population, which believes boycotting Israel is both moral and just. They have built that partly on the false Goldstone claims, lies which will live on for years.
When I debated Noura Erakat on Al-Jazeera television February 14, 2009, three months after the release of the Goldstone commission report, she immediately went to these false claims, attempting to justify BDS with the Goldstone report. The Goldstone commission was designed to be an after the fact justification to bolster BDS campaigns, and that is exactly what it did. On campuses world-wide, the Palestinians have used the Goldstone commission findings to recruit non-Arabs to assist their campaign against Israel under false pretenses, and still use it despite the retraction.
It should not be a surprise, therefore, that the United Nations is rejecting the Goldstone retraction. Besides the U.N. loving a Jewish name on a report that vilifies Israel, the PLO consultant who is part of the U.N. hate-Israel contingency created the Goldstone commission behind the scenes.
Of course the U.N. does not want the linkage between the consultant, Arafat and Goldstone to become public. While I exposed the U.N. internal workings that fostered Goldstone, official retraction would force the U.N. to reveal its own inner workings, echoing the Arab League plan to bankrupt Israel and destroy the Jewish state without firing one bullet.