Radical Marxists with Jew hate on their minds.
The Lutheran Church’s educational branch of applied sciences, Diakonia (in Finland as well) mentioned in the article, has been used time and again by extremist Leftists, and at the taxpayers’ expense, to pursue their radical agendas, most noticeably against Israel.
Why the Schabas Report Will Be Every Bit as Biased as the Goldstone Report
Even with its discredited chairman gone, the new UN report on the Gaza war will be every bit as biased. Such reports are dictated far in advance—by strong-minded people you’ve never heard of.
For more than five years, the question of who exactly authored the UN’s 2009 Goldstone Report has been an enduring mystery. The report, written under the auspices of South African Judge Richard Goldstone, was a shocking 500-page indictment of Israel that accused its political and military leadership of deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians during the 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, and condemned the Jewish state as a whole for systematic and institutionalized racism, among other atrocities and abominations.
The answer to that riddle—which involves a radical Marxist law professor who held the equivalent of a general’s rank in the global lawfare movement against Israel, and more broadly, the UN department that selected her—has additional importance today because of the controversy swirling over the upcoming sequel to the Goldstone Report dealing with 2014’s Operation Protective Edge, which will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva on March 23.
Understanding who wrote the 2009 report—and how the establishment behind it remains in place—constitutes a direct rebuttal to the latest campaign by HRC backers and activist groups to salvage the reputation and legitimacy of the Goldstone II commission of inquiry into alleged Israeli war crimes.
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An email Baars sent to her activist colleagues as the Gaza conflict unfolded in December 2008—the war she would later investigate for the Goldstone Commission—preemptively declared that Israel was conducting a “massacre” in the territory and ranted about Israeli “lies we have to fight.”
Baars sent the email after receiving a purportedly leaked copy of guidelines for pro-Israel spokespeople responding to questions about the incursion. “These are the lies we have to fight to end the massacre in Gaza,” her email says. “This has been leaked from sources in Washington DC. Please study this and prepare a response as defiantly yet respectfully as you can do. This is easy to trash, but do so in a civil manner please. Outrage is our weapon, but respect is our salvation.”
”Similar partisanship was evident in the many anti-Israel workshops she helped organize as a legal advisor in Jerusalem to the radical and pro-Palestinian Swedish development group Diakonia. In one lawfare briefing for activist attorneys, her PowerPoint presentation celebrated the numerous “opportunities” to prosecute Israeli soldiers or officials, because, after all, Israelis were responsible for a “war crime a minute.” With undisguised glee, Baars concluded, “See you in Court!”
In another PowerPoint for European diplomats, Baars emphasized that the Palestinian Authority has no legal power to make concessions that, in her view, would “sign away” obligations or rights.
It was also as Diakonia’s representative that she traveled to Gaza to meet with key Palestinian contacts. Among them was reported Hamas official Dr. Maher al-Huli, the “Faculty of Sharia & Law Dean” at the Gaza-based Islamic University. The New York Times called this institution “one of the prime means for Hamas to convert Palestinians to its Islamist cause” and the reported site of a Hamas arms cache during Hamas’ 2007 fight with its Palestinian rival, Fatah. Indeed, because Diakonia made submissions to the Goldstone probe, Baars’ pre-2009 employment with the group may even have constituted a legal conflict of interest for her as an inquiry official.
It seems clear that throughout this time, Baars was playing a leadership role in the global lawfare movement. In July 2008, for example, she met with the head the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Raji Sourani—perhaps the leading proponent of lawfare. (This is the same Sourani who had been brought to London by Baars’ colleague on the Goldstone staff, Sareta Ashraph.) Their meeting focused on an ambitious upcoming conference in Brussels aimed at organizing and training Palestinian and European activist lawyers in how to conduct the “pursuit of Israeli war criminals” through “joint action in international courts.”
Organized by Diakonia’s Jerusalem office—meaning Baars—the conference took place in September 2008 under the name “Palestine/Israel: Making Monitoring Work: (Re-) Enforcing International Law in Europe.” The event was a major gathering of some of the world’s top activists and lawyers in the anti-Israel lawfare movement, and was designed to mobilize, network, and share best practices. It was Baars’ signal accomplishment.
Indeed, many of Baars’ Diakonia workshops were pure lawfare endeavors, training activists in how to isolate Israel or Israeli interests internationally, building human rights cases against Israeli soldiers and officials, as well as companies doing business in the settlements. She also lobbied European governments to endorse her boycott and lawfare campaigns.
In her “war-crime-a-minute” presentation, Baars ironically suggested that the dearth of prosecutions to date resulted from international bias in favor of Israel. “Courts don’t necessarily dispense justice,” she said. And at least one forum included a discussion of the “rights” of “armed resistance” groups in relation to the “siege.”
