Ynet:
United Nations investigator Richard Goldstone said Sunday that he was saddened by the fact that Jews felt he should not be investigating Israel because he is Jewish. As a Jew, he told CNN, I have an even bigger duty to investigate war crimes. I probed war crimes in other countries, he said, so why should Israel be different?…
In an interview to Fareed Zakaria’s GPS show…Goldstone said that he had many friends in the Jewish state but that a visit would likely not be held any time soon.
Addressing accusations that he was an anti-Zionist, Goldstone stressed that he had a lot of love for Israel and had visited the country many times. I have worked for many Israeli courts and will continue to do so, he said.
Addressing accusations that he was an anti-Communist, JFK said…
Addressing accusations that he was an anti-hero, Jake Barnes said…
Addressing accusations that she was an anti-vivisectionist, Bridget Bardot said…
See– it aint all bad!
Addressing accusations that he was an anti-Communist, JFK said…
I don’t get this. Of course JFK was an anticommunist. What is your point? It makes the rest of this point meaningless.
It’s the idea of being ACCUSED of anti-Communism that Phil is ridiculing.
Sometimes I am too literally minded. I get it now.
I thought he was accused of not being anti-communist enough.
Isn’t this just what the farmers would call, “letting the fox guard the hen house” after the fact so many have always gone missing.
Just another example of another organization that is illegitimate such as the international criminal courts and the U.N. for starters. However I was not expecting any real critic and when is the stern gang of ww2 going to be labled as terrorist in history just as hammas and all factions taking arms against the aparthied genocidal rogue element called israel…or should we just call it the left hand of the USA.
The very fact the man stated he was not anti zionist and worked for the aparthied courts should say enough. However the Palestinians should oust or wack abbass from Palestine as well as the traders whom colaborate with occupation immediately.
The Palestinians need to come to grips with the one state solution and hold out for a long enough time to change it all back with democracy. Or they could all sell the properties and let the radicals deal with the occupation. I believe that the facts there was never any real god and the priests knew this all along while writing the bible, a phoney bunch of crap just like all of the religons. They were created to control & manipulate. Israel top officials as well as other know this to be true, but still the media controls the brainwashing..I wonder how any of you would handle the very fact you have all been hoodwinked, would it crush you emotionally? Could you not believe in yourselves enough to still live as a “just” person would but with out the lies and deceptions we are all being told to believe. Moses was following another type of entity and they called it god to control all, it would not surprise me if it was a UFO which has been documented in all the ancient civilizations in construction and carvings which we know factually are impossible for the ancients to have made without an extraterrestial to help. Are there connections between the origins of what is called god and what we know as zionist or ANY religon today. Everyone is their own god inside themselves. Now if only the patsies would or could be deprogrammed. make all the religous places parking lots forever and ban the poppycock. I would have loved there to be a god, instead I found politicians of old named jesus etc….
Javs, first just calm down a bit. You are not sounding rational. If you have a point why not discuss it with someone you trust before posting here.
With all due respect syvanen I do not think javs has to consult with anyone. Sure, some of the statements about supposed ancient experiences (I believe the bible as much as I do the tooth fairy), but the summation of what religion is used for is quite correct.
We have a systemic nightmare here, which serves no one but the interests of the few, whether we speak of foreign or domestic issues. Religions of convenience are nothing but the added accouterments for more of the same, and all of the “biblical” stories are nothing but extensions or elaborations (with whatever twist) of the spurious ancient stories of old – any studied individual knows this.
As I have said before, terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims’ struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.
Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is illegal by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented and used normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead of the oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality actually undermines legality, diminishing the credibility of international institutions such as the United Nations. It becomes apparent that the powerful, those who make the rules, insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.
Attacking civilians is the last, most desperate and basic method of resistance when confronting overwhelming odds and imminent eradication. The Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with the expectation that they will destroy Israel. The land of Palestine is being stolen day after day; the Palestinian people are being eradicated day after day. As a result, they respond in whatever way they can to apply pressure on Israel. Colonial powers use civilians strategically, settling them to claim land and dispossess the native population, be they Indians in North America or Palestinians in what is now Israel and the Occupied Territories. When the native population sees that there is an irreversible dynamic that is taking away their land and identity with the support of an overwhelming power, then they are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance they can.
Just as the traditional American cowboy film presented white Americans under siege, with Indians as the aggressors, which was the opposite of reality, so, too, have Palestinians become the aggressors and not the victims. Beginning in 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were deliberately cleansed and expelled from their homes, and hundreds of their villages were destroyed, and their land was settled by colonists, who went on to deny their very existence and wage a 60-year war against the remaining natives and the national liberation movements the Palestinians established around the world. Every day, more of Palestine is stolen, more Palestinians are killed. To call oneself an Israeli Zionist is to engage in the dispossession of entire people. It is not that, qua Palestinians, they have the right to use any means necessary, it is because they are weak. The weak have much less power than the strong, and can do much less damage. The Palestinians would not have ever bombed cafes or used home-made missiles if they had tanks and airplanes. It is only in the current context that their actions are justified, and there are obvious limits.
It is impossible to make a universal ethical claim or establish a Kantian principle justifying any act to resist colonialism or domination by overwhelming power. And there are other questions I have trouble answering. Can an Iraqi be justified in attacking the United States? After all, his country was attacked without provocation, and destroyed, with millions of refugees created, hundreds of thousands of dead. And this, after 12 years of bombings and sanctions, which killed many and destroyed the lives of many others.
I could argue that all Americans are benefiting from their country’s exploits without having to pay the price, and that, in today’s world, the imperial machine is not merely the military but a military-civilian network. And I could also say that Americans elected the Bush administration twice and elected representatives who did nothing to stop the war, and the American people themselves did nothing. From the perspective of an American, or an Israeli, or other powerful aggressors, if you are strong, everything you do is justifiable, and nothing the weak do is legitimate. It’s merely a question of what side you choose: the side of the strong or the side of the weak.
Eloquently put, v…
I agree with all you say, v. Doiestoevski’s Grand Inquisitor chapter in the Brothers Karamazov takes it all up a few levels, no?
More Important is the breaking news that Israel had a meeting with the PA Reps and an Israeli delegation in Washington prior to the Human Rights Council vote in which damning video evidence was presented showing Abbas urging Barak to continue the attack on Gaza. A Taped telephobe conversation between Dov Weinglass and Abbas aide Tayib Abdekrahim where Tayib urges Weinglass to invade Jabaliya and al-Shati Refugee camps.
The detail is staggering
(blockquote>The source told Shihab that the PA officials initially rejected the Israeli request, until Israeli officer Eli Ofarham showed up and displayed on his laptop a videotaped file showing Mahmoud Abbas urging Israel war minister Ehud Barak to continue the war on Gaza.
The sources also revealed that the PA official also listened to a recorded telephone conversation between director of the general staff office Dov Weissglas and Abbas’s aide Tayeb Abdelrahim in which the latter called on Israel to invade the refugee camps of Jabaliya and Al-Shati and said that the fall of those camps would end the rule of Hamas.
Abbas urged Barak to continue the war on Gaza and Abelrahim called on the Israelis to invade Jabalya and Shati refugee camps to finish off Hamas.
Weissglas, according to the record, said that this would lead to thousands of casualties among citizens, but Abdelrahim stressed that they all elected Hamas and chose their own destiny.(/blockquote>
Javs is certainly right that Abbas is a TRAITOR (note correct spelling) to his own people. He thinks only of his personal power, in the classic manner of dictators, and relentlessly pursues a personal vendetta against Hamas. And it is noteworthy that the US, in its own classic manner, supports his traitorous unelected government, the quislings and collaborators, rather than the democratically-elected parliament.
As for Goldstone, I’d like to think his eyes were opened to the true nature of Zionism, but it will do him no good, as they would then simply say, “See, we knew he was an anti-Semite all along!”
Sorry, my html is horrible
the link is <a href=link to palestine-info.co.uk
title=Abbas Perfidy
Why no preview function?
“Goldstone stressed that he had a lot of love for Israel”
Where does this “love” come from? Hatred of arabs? Ethnic self-congratulation? I am baffled every time I read about this strange but near all-pervasive “love”.
The great people at CAMERA and NGO Monitor absolutely shredded Goldstone’s flawed report.
link to camera.org
link to ngo-monitor.org
I wish we had a good way of filtering out Hasbara spam.
I’ll bet Goldstone is so happy to be a Zionist. Look how much respect he gets for sticking to his moral convictions and curtailing his Zionist spin to trying to make it sound as if Israel slaughtering hundreds of children is somehow the moral equivalent of firing off a rocket that might hit within a kilometer of where someone might be standing.
Same Palaprop. Minimize Hamas terror. Missiles and mortars are only firecrackers. Israel should not respond to thousands of attacks. The people in Sderot should understand these bombings are just fireworks and can’t really hurt them.
Funny thing about Sderot? Historically, it’s suffered even worse attacks than Hamas rockets. Hell, the whole damn place was just about cleaned out.
Of course… back then, it was called Najd.
I’d guess that if the Palestinians had free F-16s, their fuel, white phosporous, and all the other latest US version military tools they’d have no need for their cheap, unfocused rockets. The Palestinians who fight their plight, like the US Marines, “fight with what they got.”
Nobody’s minimizing terror. Who suffers more in terror, a typical Israeli child or a typical Palestinian child?
eh – by uttering such phrases as “the great people at CAMERA” Julian clearly announces himself as one of the kool-aid distributors, to be entirely disregarded.
I have a recurring dream in which the Julians of the world are wrapped in a keffiyeh and dropped into Gaza or at some WB checkpoint, where they could experience a taste of what it is to live under the repression they advocate.
Goldstone stated that what occurred in Gaza was NOT genocide, not even close to the scale. That the parallel to apartheid was innacurate. That he took it as a given that Israel had a right to address the Hamas shelling militarily.
not genocide, but war crimes. get a grip witty. i haven’t noticed anyone calling “cast lead” genocidal on this site and certainly not phil.
Its a shame (probably much worse) that Phil selected only the leftist Pavlovian elements of Goldstone’s comments, rather than a more balanced and complete description.
As Jimby told you, Witty, get a grip. Cast Lead is actually no child’s dreidel, but the dreidel of a Golem; seems you are content that Israel is not committing outright genocide, but merely relentless ethnic cleansing. BTW, as many here have said,
you are the last person to justifiably claim you’ve been “more balanced and complete”
in your expressed POV here for at least two years.