John Hall: Still The One?

In the face of expected Republican gains this year, receiving the support of
MoveOn, one of the country's largest progressive advocacy groups, is of
particular importance for Democratic candidates. One of only a handful of House
incumbents to receive the coveted endorsement by MoveOn's political action
committee is Democrat John Hall, who represents the 19th district in upstate
New York.

John Hall is the former front man for the band Orleans ("Dance with
Me," "Still the One," etc.) As a solo act, he was the writer of
a number of additional songs of note, including "Power" -- recorded
by Holly Near and others -- which became something of an anthem of the
anti-nuclear movement. He was one of the co-founders of Musicians United for
Safe Energy (M.U.S.E.) and was a long-time supporter of various progressive
causes, through which I got to know him personally. In what was initially seen
as a progressive victory, Hall was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives
from the 19th district in upstate New York back in 2006.

Since being elected to Congress, however, Rep. Hall has moved far to the right.
Despite hopes that he would become a leading voice in support of human rights,
Hall has instead gone in the opposite direction. Last year, he shocked his
progressive supporters by co-sponsoring two resolutions defending a series of
war crimes by a right-wing Middle Eastern government allied with the United
States and endorsing war against Syria and Iran.

Hall's first resolution (H. Res. 34), passed last January during Israel's
massive assault on the heavily-populated Palestinian enclave of the Gaza Strip,
insisted that the high numbers of civilian casualties was not the result of yet
another implementation of the Dahiya Doctrine -- the widely-known Israeli
military policy of inflicting overwhelmingly disproportionate casualties on
civilian populations in urban settings -- but a result of Hamas using
"human shields." Subsequent detailed empirical studies by Amnesty
International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN Human Rights Council, however,
failed to find any such cases of Hamas deliberately using civilians against
their will to deter attacks. His second resolution, written long after these
studies had been published, similarly insisted there was widespread evidence of
Hamas using human shields, but when asked to give even a single example of
Hamas doing so, his office refused comment.

Rep. Hall did not stop with this apparent fabrication, however, in his effort
to defend the killing of over 700 civilians by Israeli armed forces. His
resolution "calls on all nations ... to lay blame both for the
breaking of the calm and for subsequent civilian casualties in Gaza precisely
where blame belongs, that is, on Hamas" (emphasis added). Even putting
aside disagreements among outside observers as to whether Hamas was indeed the
party primarily guilty for "the breaking of the calm," Hall appears
to be making the argument that if one party initiates a conflict, then the
other party therefore has no moral or legal responsibility for war crimes they
may subsequently commit. This constitutes a radical reworking of international
humanitarian law, essentially legitimizing massive war crimes by a nation's
armed force if the other side allegedly initiates hostilities. Such an
re-interpretation, for example, would mean that the large-scale civilian
casualties inflicted by Russian forces in Georgia during the 2008 conflict
between those countries lies solely with the Georgian government, since they
initiated the conflict by shelling civilian areas in South Ossetia.

In reality, international humanitarian law forbids the killing of civilians,
even if the other party is using and human shields and even if the other party
started the war.

As various human rights groups began to detail the widespread violations of
international humanitarian law by both Hamas and the Israeli government during
that three-week conflict, Rep. Hall helped launch a campaign to discredit those
who documented such war crimes. Even the UN-sponsored commission chaired by the
highly-respected South African jurist Richard Goldstone was not immune from
Hall's attacks. When it appeared that the findings of this blue-ribbon panel
was to be referred to the UN Security Council, Hall co-sponsored another
resolution (H. Res. 867) insisting that the mission's report was
"irredeemably biased." Given that the Goldstone mission largely
reiterated those of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other
groups, this was widely interpreted as an attack on the human rights community
as a whole, particularly as Hall appears to have deliberately misrepresented
what was actually in the report.

The report contained over 70 pages detailing a series of violations of the laws
of war by Hamas, including rocket attacks into civilian-populated areas of
Israel, torture of Palestinian opponents, and the continued holding of
kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. However, as part of his desperate
effort to discredit the report by making it appear to be biased against Israel,
Hall only referred to its criticism of Israeli conduct, failing to acknowledge
anywhere in his 1600-word resolution that the report criticized the conduct of
both sides. In fact, despite the report's extensive documentation of Hamas
assaults on Israeli towns -- which it determined constituted war crimes and
possible "crimes against humanity" -- Hall's draft resolution insisted
that it "makes no mention of the relentless rocket and mortar
attacks."

The Goldstone mission report, totaling 575 pages, contains detailed accounts of
deadly Israeli attacks against schools, mosques, private homes, and businesses
nowhere near legitimate military targets, which they described as "a
deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish humiliate and terrorize
a civilian population." In particular, the report cites 11 incidents in
which Israeli armed forces engaged in direct attacks against civilians,
including cases where people were shot "while they were trying to leave
their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags." Hall's
resolution, however, claims that such charges of deliberate Israeli attacks
against civilian areas were "sweeping and unsubstantiated." His
office refused to comment as to why he found the meticulously-detailed report,
which largely reiterated findings of previous reputable human rights
investigations, of such questionable validity.

Hall's resolution also claims that the Goldstone commission report somehow
denied Israel's right to self defense. In reality, the report only reiterated
that neither Israelis nor Palestinians have the right to attack civilians.
Hall's office refused to say where in the report was this alleged questioning
of Israel's right to use military force to defend itself, an apparently
indication that Rep. Hall believes that killing innocent civilians should be
considered a legitimate act of self-defense, at least if the perpetrator is a
U.S. ally. Hall even goes as far as insisting that Goldstone's report is part
of an effort "to delegitimize the democratic State of Israel and deny it
the right to defend its citizens" and that the report's very existence
"can be used to delegitimize other democracies and deny them the same
right." This is but one example of the extent of Hall's demagoguery: In
insisting that documenting a given country's war crimes is tantamount to
denying that country's right to exist and its right to self defense, Hall is clearly
attempting to discredit defenders of international humanitarian law and
intimidate them into silence.

Indeed, the resolution calls on the Obama administration not only "to
oppose unequivocally any endorsement" of the report, but to even oppose
unequivocally any "further consideration" of the report in
international fora. Instead of debating its merits, therefore, Hall decided to
instead pre-judge its contents and disregard the actual evidence put forward.
Indeed, there is no indication that he even actually bothered to read the
report.

Hall's resolution resolves that the report is "irredeemably biased"
against Israel, an ironic charge given that Justice Richard Goldstone, the
report's principal author and defender, is Jewish, a longtime supporter of
Israel, chair of Friends of Hebrew University, president emeritus of the World
ORT Jewish school system, and the father of an Israeli citizen. Goldstone was
also a leading opponent of apartheid in his native South Africa and served as
Nelson Mandela's first appointee to the country's post-apartheid Supreme Court.
He was a principal prosecutor in the war crimes tribunals on Rwanda and the
former Yugoslavia, took a leading role in investigations into corruption in the
UN's "Oil for Food" program in Iraq, and was also part of
investigations into Argentina's complicity in providing sanctuary for Nazi war
criminals.

Hall also singles out Goldstone Commission member Christine Chinkin for attack
in his resolution for noting, prior to her joining the commission, that Israeli
attacks on the Gaza Strip's civilian infrastructure was not commensurate to the
deaths caused by Hamas rocket fire, which she also condemned. Chinkin is an
internationally respected British scholar of international law, feminist
jurisprudence, alternative dispute resolution and human rights who -- like
Justice Goldstone -- had never shown any ideological bias against Israel.

Yet Hall, in an effort to justify war crimes by a U.S. ally, decided to
co-sponsor a resolution attacking the integrity of some of the world's most
respected and principled defenders of human rights. Hall apparently believes
that the credibility of any human rights defender must be attacked if they dare
raise questions about the conduct of a U.S. ally. This may actually be the underlying
purpose of his resolution: to jettison any consideration of international
humanitarian law from policy debates in Washington. The cost, however, will
likely be to further isolate the United States from the rest of the world, just
as President Barack Obama was beginning to rebuild the trust of other nations.

Indeed, Hall's resolution appears designed in part to undermine Obama's efforts
to reverse the saber-rattling of the Bush administration toward hostile
governments in the region and to goad Israel, as an American proxy, to make
war. Following earlier clauses in the resolution that define Israel's massive
military assault on the civilian infrastructure of the Gaza Strip as a
legitimate defense of its citizens and that make the exaggerated assertion that
Iran and Syria are "sponsors" of Hamas, the final clause in his
resolution "supports Israel's right to defend its citizens from violent
militant groups and their state sponsors." (emphasis added.) In short,
Hall is calling for a unilateral Israeli attack on Syria and Iran.

As exemplified by his endorsement by MoveOn, Hall appears to have escaped
much negative reaction to his push for the launching of another disastrous
Middle Eastern war and his publicly defending the killing of hundreds of
civilians, including over 300 children, by a foreign right-wing government.
This, unfortunately, serves as a dangerous precedent: if outspoken supporters
of the large-scale killings of Arab civilians like John Hall and of war on
Syria and Iran can avoid negative ramifications from such statements and
actions -- and, indeed, effectively be awarded by receiving the endorsement and
funding of the largest political action committee on the left -- like-minded
racists and militarists will know they have nothing to lose for doing the same.