Soccer Dad

Goldstone's innumeracy

Martin Kramer recently wrote a devastating post about one aspect of the Goldstone report.

The most important sentence in this section of the Goldstone Report is this one: "Mr. Amr Hamad indicated that 324 factories had been destroyed during the Israeli military operations at a cost of 40,000 jobs" (paragraph 1009). I did a double-take when I read that: 40,000 would be astonishing in an economy like Gaza's.

But then Kramer looked at the original source for the claim - as opposed to the testimony offered Goldstone - and discovered this:

But if you return to the report of the Palestinian Federation of Industries, it puts the job losses at these 324 factories not at 40,000, but at 4,000. That's an order-of-magnitude misrepresentation by Hamad of his own organization's findings. The Goldstone Mission should have wondered at the figure, checked Hamad's testimony against the Palestinian Federation of Industries report, detected the discrepancy, and gotten it right. But it didn't. Perhaps the mission members, hearing the word "factories," thought that 40,000 jobs sounded credible. In fact, more than a quarter (88) of these 324 "factories" employed five people or less, and over half (189) employed from five to twenty people (Federation report, p. 12). The vast majority of these "factories" should really be described as "workshops." Only three employed a hundred or more people.

The witness who said "40,000" was from the Palestinian Federation of Industries. In other words he lied and the Goldstone Commission looked for no corroboration of his number.

As Richard Landes shows, though, this wasn't the only example of Goldstone's carelessness with numbers.

I have often tried to argue that the situation is the Arab-Israeli conflict is not only exaggerated by the media, but inverted, and that statistics play a critical role in this process.

Goldstone famously told the Forward:

'If This Was a Court Of Law, There Would Have Been Nothing Proven.'

Really it's worse than that. If his kangaroo commission were a court of law, he would have been suborning perjury.

UPDATE: John Bolton describes the mindset that afflicts Judge Goldstone and his ilk:

Nonetheless, human-rights activists who view their morality as higher than that of elected governments are satisfied by nothing less than prosecution. That is precisely why contemporary universal jurisdiction is so profoundly antidemocratic.

Crossposted on Yourish.