Goldstone follow-up panel already tainted....

They haven't even started, and we now they're biased...

An American UN expert on Thursday slammed the appointment of German jurist Christian Tomuschat as chairman of the UN committee responsible for implementing the findings of the Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead, and an Israelbased expert blasted all three of the committee’s members for their affiliation with an “anti-Israel” NGO.

In a 2007 interview with the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger daily, Tomuschat said, “Israel killed the spiritual leader of Hamas in 2004, Sheikh Yassin, with a missile, killing eight... Targeted killings are as ruthless as the attacks of terrorists.”

When asked in the interview if Israel’s targeted killings constitute “state terrorism,” Tomuschat said, “It is very much in that direction.”

Anne Bayefsky, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, told The Jerusalem Post that “Aside from the moral repugnancy of such an equivalence, such words twist international humanitarian law beyond recognition.

“His objection to the killing of Yassin – a vicious anti-Semite who was actively promoting the murder of Jews – on the grounds of simultaneous and unfortunate civilian deaths (four of the eight being Hamas terrorists), is unsustainable.

The overriding legal limit on the conduct of war and the targeting of terrorists like Yassin is the rule of proportionality,” Bayefsky said.

“In the words of the Geneva Conventions, an attack on a military target ‘which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life’ is prohibited if ‘excessive.’ The likelihood of civilian casualties must be carefully considered prior to taking action, but it does not render the action illegal in itself.

“So what we know about Tomuschat is exactly why the UN system selected him – to render Israel defenseless against the realities of modern warfare and to delegitimize the Israeli judicial system despite its very high standing in democratic legal circles,” Bayefsky said.