Israel Matzav

Monday, April 04, 2011

Richard Goldstone's sorry legacy

Avi Bell, one of the participants in last week's debate at Stanford, describes what's become of Richard Goldstone.

The debate at Stanford was not designed for enlightenment. Besides the moderator, there were five of us debating under a format that let Goldstone avoid responding directly. The debate had too many participants, too large a topic and too crimped a format to allow a serious probing of the report’s defects. The International Law Society, which organized the debate, tipped its hand by inviting an organization called “Students Confronting Apartheid by Israel” to cosponsor the event.

Even with the friendly format, Richard Goldstone cannot have enjoyed the criticism. As I watched him sitting through the debate stone-faced, his wife sitting next to him, and as I thought back on his lengthy resumé, I recognized the enormous tragedy of a man, once lauded as a champion of human rights, becoming a shill for a terrorist organization.

Goldstone had been proud to take credit for his work in prosecuting war criminals before such institutions as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. And now he had to listen to his professional colleagues demonstrate how the Goldstone Report distorted international law and, as The Washington Post editorialized, made a “mockery of impartiality, with its judgment of facts.”

When the Goldstone Report was first published in 2009, with a brew of blood libels and legal fallacies that exceeded even the usual anti-Israel vitriol produced by the UN Human Rights Council, Goldstone went on a PR offensive. He took to the airwaves to try to sell the idea that the report, which conspicuously and repeatedly denied or whitewashed nearly all of Hamas’s crimes, was accurate in accusing Israelis and Israel’s leadership of the most monstrous crimes and motives. Even then, Goldstone’s going was not easy. The Economist, generally cold to Israel, condemned the report as “deeply flawed,” and a “thimbleful of poison.” A barrelful is more like it.

Now Goldstone has produced less than a thimbleful of contrition. He still refuses to acknowledge the cocktail of lies and distortions that comprise the Goldstone Report. Goldstone has refused to disavow the report’s attempt to eliminate laws against terrorism from the international legal codex, and its refusal to acknowledge that Hamas is a terrorist organization. He has not renounced the preposterous characterization of Gaza as territory under Israeli occupation, or the report’s shocking claim that Israel’s limited economic sanctions against the Hamas government are an unlawful form of collective punishment. He continues to remain silent on the report labeling all Israelis liars to stamp Hamas’s anti-Israel libels with the imprimatur of truth. He has not yet expressed remorse about the report’s gratuitous inclusion of anti- Jewish slurs, such as its endorsement of the bigoted claim that Israeli Jews are dehumanized and paranoid.

Goldstone said during the debate that no one has disputed the report’s factual allegations. But this is demonstrably false and Goldstone knew it, because he was looking right at me when I reminded him of this fact during the debate. He did not repeat the claim in The Washington Post.

Read the whole thing.

Goldstone deserves every stitch of calumny that is being heaped upon him. And more.

Labels: Avi Bell, Goldstone Report, Operation Cast Lead, Richard Goldstone

Goldstone's epiphany

Since Dore Gold crushed him in a November 2009 debate at Brandeis, Richard Goldstone has refused to debate anyone regarding his infamous report. But three days before he published his Washington Post article recanting parts of his report, Goldstone sat in the audience at Stanford University at someone else's debate about his report.

Professor Abraham Bell and fellow academic Peter Berkowitz represented Israel in the debate, which took place on March 28, 2011, just days before Goldstone wrote his column in the Washington Post.

...

According to Bell, Goldstone insisted at the debate that all the investigations showed that, thus far, the facts were as they were reported. "Later on he apologized and said there may be people who would disagree with what he said, like Professor Bell" said Bell, quoting Goldstone.

Bell told Haaretz that, in his opinion, the whole experience of the last few months – where Goldstone has heard what many people have to say about him and his report – "caught up with him."

"He tried to claim that he did not make a mistake, but after that night – it seems to me – he understood that he could not claim such a thing and be taken seriously," said Bell.

"If [Goldstone] hadn't have sat there and people hadn't have confronted him at other events, he would not have done it," said Bell, referring to the column Goldstone wrote in the April 1 edition of the Washington Post, entitled 'Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and war crimes."

Hmmm.

Labels: Avi Bell, Goldstone Report, Peter Berkowitz, Richard Goldstone