Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Richard Goldstone Recants a Blood Libel

http://www.tnr.com/print/article/tel-aviv-journal/86250/goldstone-israel-gaza-war
The scholarly texts of the Jews argue that “even though a Jew has
sinned”—which in this context means sinned against his own—“he remains
Israel.” We can leave it for the Lord Almighty to decide whether
Richard Goldstone remains among His chosen. Still, whether the judge
can worship with members of the congregation, as he was finally
permitted to do at his grandson’s bar mitzvah last spring, remains in
the hands of those who’d have to pray with him. If I were them, I
would not allow him. Not for one moment. Let him pray with the Hamas
Islamists who he believed or pretended to believe in his famous Gaza
war crimes report would, like Israel has done, “investigate,
transparently and in good faith,” the charges made against them.
Goldstone is crystal clear in his Washington Post disavowal of the
report’s accusations of intentional killing by Israel of non-Hamas
Palestinians: “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter
of policy.” On the other hand, Hamas’s rockets “were purposefully and
indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.” Here is the judge’s
pathetic confession: “If I had known then what I know now, the
Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”
But why didn’t Goldstone and his fellow judges know? Well, for one
thing, two of his three companions on the U.N. Human Rights Council
judicial panel on Gaza, Christine Chinkin of the London School of
Economics and Hila Jilanu, a Pakistani jurist, had already condemned
Israel even before the hanging court had been formed. And Richard
Falk, the Council’s designated rapporteur on Israel, has been nothing
less than an enemy of the Jewish state for decades. You don’t believe
me? All you have to do is google Falk and Israel. There’ll be no
surprises. Anyway, the Council endorsed the report by a margin of 25
to 6. Were you surprised by this one?
It took The New York Times fully two days to publish anything in print
(and, by the way, only on an inside page) about Goldstone’s sudden
repudiation of his work. (Up to a few weeks ago he was peddling his
old wares to anyone who would buy.) Is this the Times’s way of saying
that such a recantation really has little meaning? But, of course, it
is not only the Times which is allergic to admitting the falsehoods to
which it gave currency and gave that currency altogether without
scrutiny. Goldstone’s report and his reputation (a drastically
scrubbed-up reputation if you haven’t researched his years as an
apartheid judge) have since September 2009 become the poison gas with
which the whole Israeli-Palestinian dispute has been made rancid and
fiendishly immune to facts, let alone to the truth.
The lopsidedness of the voting in international institutions speaks
neither to the alleged depravity of Israel nor to the justice of the
immoveable ultimata made by the Abbas regime. It reflects a widespread
contempt in the world for the Jews—for their intrinsic peoplehood and
their achievements, embodied in the State of Israel, in modern nation-
building and daring renewal. Believe me: I do not gloat. Still, the
comparison between pluralistic Zion and the deteriorating state of
just about each and every Arab society, now on display in rancor and
in blood, could have, should have evoked some identification with
Israel’s cause. It will not, and not least because the very structure
of global power is based in and has been routinized by illegitimate
authority. It is gangster dictators who decide what will fly in the
United Nations. More that that: These tyrants have been succored by
the European and other democratic powers, to say nothing of the
gargantuan dictatorships of People’s China and Russia. Recall to mind
the photograph of the Western diplomats meeting in London to decide on
what to do about Libya at arms. Each of them (representatives of the
United Kingdom, the United States, and France, for example) had done
dirty work—no, really filthy work—for the mad tyrant and they were now
negotiating with his sons.
Israel apparently will try to get the General Assembly to recant its
endorsement of the Goldstone verdict on the Jewish crimes in Gaza.
After all, the judge himself has recanted. Es vet helfn vi a toit’n
bankes, my mother used to say: “It will help like hot suction cups
will help a dead man.” Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic made the point
early on after the judge confessed to his sins: “a blood libel, hard
to retract once it’s been broadcast around the world.” Maybe
Washington, which voted against the report, will take the leadership
role on this. The president, the secretary of state, and the American
ambassador to the U.N. have, it bears remembering, argued that our
presence at the Human Rights Council can make a difference. Will Obama
even try? It would mean, of course, that another one of his exemplary
lessons in creative engagement will collapse.
There should be many shamed faces in the crowd. The foreign high
priest of the Palestinian cause is Desmond Tutu who, like his rival
Jimmy Carter, finds no charge against Israel too preposterous to leave
to, well, the gagasphere. But they have neither been heard from on
Goldstone nor explained their silence. The Financial Times, which is
the most consistent and hyperbolic critic of Israel in the United
Kingdom, initially went bananas in praise of the Goldstone Report. It
has not been heard from since the jurist’s own mea culpa. The human
rights organizations? Ditto. Stephen Walt, Juan Cole, John Esposito,
Naomi Klein, Michael Lerner, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, J-Street, which
peddled the report door-to-door on Capitol Hill. Here’s my projection:
Not a one of them will come clean.
As is the case with the Israeli “peace left.” Not Peace Now, not the
New Israel Fund, not B’tselem, not Agudah Lezchuyot Haezrch. And not
Ha’aretz, either. They have made pacts with the devil.

 Ha’aretz, either. They have made pacts with the devil.
uhm...caccia alle streghe da inquisizione, patti col diavolo, ebrei in
purgatorio (altrove).....
Non è che stiamo parlando dello stato degli ebrei...
messianici?
AHR AHR AHR AHR