by LurkerIn the wake of Yediot Aharonot's expose of Richard Goldstone's history as a racist apartheid judge who sent 28 black South Africans to their deaths, Goldstone's defenders have been rushing into panicked spin-control mode.
The JPost today carried an interview with former South African chief justice Arthur Chaskalson, an old buddy of Goldstone's, who attacks Yediot for having exposed to the public this information about Goldstone's dark past. Chaskalson does his best to provide excuses for Goldstone's crimes against humanity:
Chaskalson rejected the Yediot report as "scandalous" for its failure to capture the context of the times.Yet Goldstone himself never saw any need to "capture the context of the times" when he wrote his one-sided report condemning Israel. It was irrelevant to him that countless innocent Israeli civilians -- including thousands of children -- were coming under daily Arab missile bombardment for a period of years, turning their lives into a nonstop living hell. It was irrelevant to him that Israel had a responsibility to act in order to defend its own citizens. In fact, during Goldstone's kangaroo-court "investigation", when Noam Bedein presented critical testimony to him about the "context of the times" -- namely, the effects of the daily bombardment of Sderot -- Goldstone demonstrated his contempt for Jewish suffering -- and his level of interest in understanding this context -- by going to sleep right in front of Bedein's face. So much for "captur[ing] the context of the times".
Among the responses Goldstone submitted to the two [Yediot] reporters, Goldstone wrote, "I was always committed to safeguarding equality and nondiscrimination, as well as the law. Sometimes these principles clashed in very complex ways."Here's some news for Judge Goldstone: Israel was no less committed to safeguarding the lives of civilian Arabs, to the extent reasonably possible for an army fighting a war against terrorists that deliberately entrenched themselves in the middle of urban civilian populations -- and who took barbaric delight in drawing fire upon those civilians. Israel had to balance their principle of minimizing enemy civilian casualties against the critical goal of neutralizing the ongoing terrorist threat to its own people. And guess what? Sometimes those principles also "clashed in very complex ways". But, for some strange reason, that complex clash of principles played no role whatsoever in Goldstone's report, or in the biased charges of "war crimes" that he leveled against Israel.
There's also a very fundamental difference between Israel's military actions to protect its people during Operation Cast Lead -- which Goldstone labelled as "war crimes" -- and Goldstone's own crimes as an apartheid judge: Israel had no choice but to come to the defense of its own helpless citizens who were being bombarded every day by terrorist rockets. But there was nobody who ever forced Goldstone to become a cog in South Africa's bloody racist apartheid system. No, he made the choice to do that out of his own free will (and his own ruthless ambitions).
Goldstone and his defenders would like us all to take into account the supposedly difficult, extenuating circumstances that surrounded his decision to work as an enforcer of South Africa's immoral, racist laws. But Goldstone himself showed no interest in understanding the difficult, extenuating circumstances with which Israel was faced with in confronting a murderous terrorist enemy during Cast Lead.
And that is the epitome of hypocrisy.
As Alan Dershowitz has pointed out, Goldstone is nothing less than a traitor to the Jewish people. In his vain efforts to advance his own political career within the halls of the viciously antisemitic UN, Goldstone has slandered Israel by making outrageous, one-sided allegations of "crimes against humanity", that have been exploited by our enemies to bring suffering and isolation upon the Jewish state. In the wake of the revelations of the hypocritical Goldstone's own crimes against humanity, I sincerely hope that he comes to experience the same sort of suffering and isolation that he has brought upon his own people.
He deserves it.
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