Israel Matzav

Goldstone's apologists

During the day on Tuesday, I had a bit of back and forth via Twitter with Matt Duss of Think Progress - a hard lefty blog. Duss tried to distract attention from the accusations over the weekend that Richard Richard Goldstone was a hanging judge of the Apartheid regime in South Africa by claiming that Menachem Begin was a bigger supporter of the Apartheid regime than Goldstone.

Duss isn't the only one trying to distract attention from the accusations against Goldstone. Most of the Left is trying to ignore the fact that their hero is nothing more than an opportunist.

First, we have comments from Matthew Yglesias, who says that “I’m inclined to give him a pass.” Why? Because the African National Congress (ANC) “always seemed to regard Goldstone as credible.”

Is that surprising? As soon as the situation began to shift, and it was clear apartheid was about to fall and the ANC win, Goldstone shifted his stance and suddenly became an ANC partisan-also ruling against its opponents who wanted to expose the ANC’s own reign of torture against would-be dissidents. The ANC, as one should acknowledge, was in a firm alliance not only with the Stalinist South African Communist Party, but was aligned with the major totalitarian enemies of the West- including Libya, The Soviet Union, Cuba, —you can name all the rest. If one even raised the issue of the human rights abuses of these regimes, ANC spokesmen would say “that is an internal matter and a violation of the sovereignty of socialist states.” This from the same people who asked for international boycotts against the government of South Africa.

Yglesias claims incorrectly, that the Goldstone report criticizes both Israel and the Palestinians for their conduct when they are wrong—which of course, is precisely what the Goldstone report does not do. Its criticism is addressed exclusively to Israel, and it lets Hamas off the hook for its very documented war crimes. Yglesias writes that “the simple fact of the matter is that adhering to international humanitarian law makes it very difficult to wage war, which I think is a good thing but many people disagree with that. This is an important debate, but it actually has nothing to do with anti-Israel bias or Goldstone’s alleged status as an amoral comformist.” This is quite simply meaningless balderdash. Those who defend international law do not necessarily oppose the fighting of war; they fully realize that sometimes war is necessary to defend justice and to attain real peace. And Goldstone is not “amoral,” but more accurately, immoral. This is what Yglesias does not comprehend.

But if Yglesias does not understand the issues, Sasha Palakow-Suransky, a Senior Editor of Foreign Affairs, writing on the website of Foreign Policy, has a more foolish apologia:

Goldstone’s apartheid-era judicial rulings are undoubtedly a blot on his record, but his critics never mention the crucial part he played in shepherding South Africa through its democratic transition and warding off violent threats to a peaceful transfer of power — a role that led Nelson Mandela to embrace him and appoint him to the country’s highest court.

Actually the DeKlerk government, with Mandela’s support, began the shepherding of South Africa to democratic transition, much to the consternation of Afrikaaner hard-liners who wanted to hold out towards the end. And Goldstone’s sorry role was part and parcel of his now documented opportunism.

Scores of other white judges, professionals, doctors and lawyers opposed to apartheid left South Africa, preferring exile to raising their children in the confines of an inhuman oppressive state which they opposed. Goldstone, however, stayed in South Africa during apartheid and its aftermath, putting career first and serving both masters- Botha and his successors and later Mandela-allowing himself to rise in the ranks of the judiciary and to render decisions serving the interests first of apartheid and later of the ANC.

Radosh also has a response for Duss:

The truth is that all governments have and do make alliances of necessity that many find objectionable. There were plenty of people in and outside Israel who criticized this policy at the time. Others argued that Israel’s enemies themselves made unsavory alliances. Indeed, the ANC and the African liberation movements as a whole supported the most pro-Soviet and totalitarian states including the Soviet Union, as well as corrupt African and Arab regimes that gave them support. No one’s hands were entirely clean at the time.

None of this can serve as an excuse for the actions of Judge Goldstone, who could have used his position to rule against apartheid when it might have helped destroy it, or could have with many of his contemporaries gone into exile in protest. Instead, he stayed in the judiciary, first serving the apartheid regime and then shifting as the tides turned to support the ANC. Obviously, career and power was his first concern.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:54 PM