Reply #54: Desperately smearing Goldstone

[azurnoir]

Inside the Israeli echo chamber, it’s now “case closed” on the war in Gaza. The country’s biggest newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, has “exposed” Judge Richard Goldstone as an apartheid-era hanging judge. This proves he’s a huge hypocrite whose word means nothing, which proves his report on the war in Gaza means nothing, which proves Operation Cast Lead was every bit the shining example of restraint and purity of arms Israel says it was.

That’s the verdict in here. Outside the echo chamber, though, in the saner parts of the world, this episode can only make us look even guiltier. To any but a brainwashed Israeli or “Israel advocate,” this Goldstone ploy is so transparent, so pathetic. All it proves is how desperate this country has become, how blind we are to ourselves and to how others see us.

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I’m sure Goldstone made at least some bad, even immoral decisions from the bench during the years of apartheid. He set for himself the task of stretching a viciously unjust legal system in the direction of justice, and I’m sure there were times he could have stretched it more.

But in all, he was one of the good guys of that terrible time.

NELSON MANDELA knows it. After Mandela was elected president in 1994, he appointed Goldstone to South Africa’s highest court. Earlier, during the transition to democracy, Mandela concurred in Goldstone’s appointment to head an extremely explosive inquiry into regime-sponsored murder (in which it was found that Goldstone himself had been on the hit list).

In the saner parts of the world, they can trust Mandela’s conclusions about the judge, or they can trust Yediot Aharonot’s.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=175401