Top Democratic and Republican foreign affairs leaders in the US Congress are calling on the Obama administration to quash the Goldstone Report.
Jurist Richard Goldstone sits next to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay while delivering the report at the session of the Human Rights Council at the United Nations European headquarters in Geneva on Sept. 29.
Photo: AP
A non-binding resolution introduced on Friday by Rep. Howard Berman (D-California), the chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, and Rep. Ileana Ross-Lehtinen (R-Florida), the committee's ranking Republican, "calls on the president and the secretary of state to strongly and unequivocally oppose any further consideration of the 'Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict' and any other measures stemming from this report in multilateral fora."
Also signing on as sponsors were the Middle East subcommittee's chairman and ranking member, Reps. Gary Ackerman (D-New York) and Dan Burton (R-Indiana).
The report alleges Israel and Hamas committed war crimes in last winter's Gaza war. The Obama administration has called the report flawed, but also says it raises allegations that deserve to be addressed by the parties to the conflict.
The administration is opposed to furthering the report in international committees but has stopped short of unequivocally blocking such consideration.
Meanwhile, Judge Richard Goldstone has turned down an invitation by the Israeli Press Council to speak at a journalism conference in Eilat, slated to be held in November, according to a statement issued on the council's Web site on Sunday.
In response to the invitation, Goldstone wrote in a letter to Press Council director-general Eric Bahar that he would not be able to attend the conference, due to a prior speaking engagement at New York's Fordham University law school, according to the statement.
