Richard Goldstone and Israel

Seventy three year old Richard Joseph Goldstone must be either a terminally-ill man, an extremely-befuddled man, or both. Seriously sick people tend to try to make amends before they meet their Maker; confused people often mistake fantasy for reality.

Goldstone, a former and eminent South African judge, made his mark on the bench by undermining South Africa’s apartheid laws with his rulings advancing the rights of that nation’s majority blacks, thereby leading to the end of discrimination by minority whites. He subsequently served as chief prosecutor for the U.N.’s trials of war criminals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

He is evidently an avid proponent of majority rule as well as a sincere advocate for the oppressed. Sometimes.

His advocacy came under fire from the world’s Jewish community and especially from Israel when Goldstone, a non-religious Jew, personally investigated the 3-week Israeli Gaza war of 2008-2009 and the United Nations issued the Goldstone Report, officially titled, “Human Rights in Palestine and Other Occupied Arab Territories: Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict.”

The final version of that scathing report, issued in April 2009, charged Israel’s IDF with a systematic, official policy of inflicting undue punishment on civilians in Gaza and violating international humanitarian and human rights law. It also deleted most references to Hamas atrocities and focused on the disproportionality of Israel’s retaliation.

The investigation and report had been commisioned by the U.N. Human Rights Council, a fact that made it suspect from the outset. The U.N. is notorious for its anti-Semitism and the UNHRC includes China, Cuba, and Pakistan among its 47 members but, still, Goldstone was a Jew and his religion added a significant credibility factor.

Not unexpectedly, he was reviled in Israel and elsewhere by Israel supporters as a wayward jurist suffering from a “moral inversion” who “preserved his judicial reputation while perpetrating a blood libel against Israel” and with worse epithets, all because he had dared expose Israeli war crimes against humanity, in Gaza just as he had exposed comparable crimes in Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the evil of apartheid in South Africa.

In effect, Goldstone was characterized as a Jew-hating Jew.

Fast forward to April of this year when the jurist had an epiphany, a religious attack, a re-examination of conscience, a re-evaluation of perceptions. Call it what you will, Goldstone retracted and contradicted much of what he had witnessed on his fact-finding mission to Gaza just two years earlier.

See his retraction, . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5942.)