Good for Moment, it has published this vigorous defense of Richard Goldstone by Letty Cottin Pogrebin:
According to witnesses, IDF soldiers shot people whose arms were shackled and a mother and three daughters who were carrying a white flag. Twenty-one members of one family were killed in Gaza City. This testimony echoes first-hand accounts by 30 Israeli veterans of Operation Cast Lead who co-founded the organization Breaking the Silence, as well as the findings of human rights groups such as B’Tselem and Amnesty International. The Goldstone report recommended that Israel and Hamas undertake independent internal investigations and if war crimes were proven, the perpetrators be punished in their own courts. If the parties refused to investigate themselves, it asked that the evidence be referred to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Some weeks after the report’s release, a rabbi friend emailed me asking what I thought of it, promising me “confidentiality.” He knew how perilous it can be for a Jew to go public with an opinion that diverges from the “mainstream,” meaning the views expressed by “Jewish leaders” of “major Jewish organizations” and others who purport to speak for “the Jewish community.”
To understand the price for breaking ranks, just look at how mercilessly Judge Goldstone—a proud Jew and declared Zionist—was vilified, not by gentile anti-Semites or Arabist Israel-haters but by Jews in the Israel-right-or-wrong mafia who, rather than address the troubling issues raised in the report, resorted to character assassination to delegitimate its lead author.
An international blitz of blogs, op-eds and talking heads rained slander on Goldstone, accusing him of “blood libel,” favoring Hamas, betraying his people, being a naïve dupe, malicious traitor, self-hating Jew and enemy of the Jewish State. Dore Gold, Israel’s former ambassador to the UN, called the report “the most serious and vicious assault on the State of Israel” since the UN’s 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism…
I wish the document’s charges were being actively discussed and convincingly rebutted by an internal investigation, but debate has been effectively squelched. Smears and death threats have done little to erode Judge Goldstone’s prestige among those familiar with his lifelong commitment to truth and justice.
“I wish the document’s charges were being actively discussed and convincingly rebutted by an internal investigation, but debate has been effectively squelched.”
Such a simple little task he asks of them, I wonder why Israel hasn’t done it? Oh, I see, it’s that squelching thing, but otherwise, of course, they could have? “Convincingly rebutted by an internal investigation.” My italics.
The tipping point, when Jews in the US began to refuse to let extremists define “the mainstream”, was Gaza.
Hollywood hasbara: an episode of Numbers this evening: the plot of the story revolves around arms merchants; the really bad guy is “Whitey,” the gun seller, the good guy is a black man; the main character is a vanilla white guy.
The Good Guy preaches and harangues Main character that generating obscene wealth by selling guns is a bad thing, but Main is not moved; Main is taken to the scene of the latest carnage his guns are responsible for, but still Main is unmoved. (About a dozen anonymous corpses are created, none of the persons killed by the guns is shown as a person, only a corpse under a tarp on the ground.)
Main character is unmoved until black Good Guy tells Main that what makes Good so passionate to take down arms merchants is the vision of an Israeli family cut down at their dinner table by a rocket. Main character has a come-to-Jesus moment, then tells Good guy his change of heart came about by thinking about the Israeli family killed by the rocket.
gawd damn it.
Israel and the US are the world’s major arms merchants.
Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman wrote that members of Israel’s defense ministry bragged that they deliberately sold Iran defective armaments, and that they never considered the ethics of selling armaments to Iran in the Iran-Iraq war, they just counted the money and let the Iraqis and Iranians kill each other. The Iranian and Iraqi corpses produced are anonymous, dehumanized. Just as are the Palestinian and Lebanese corpses produced by Israel, and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani corpses produced by the US — dehumanized, anonymous.
Last month General Petraeus spoke at the Manama Dialog in Bahrain, encouraging Arabs in the Persian Gulf region to “accelerate” their acquisition of weapons, and crowing that in the past few months Arab states had purchased about $9billion worth of American weaponry, goaded by the “threat” posed by Iran.
But its those poor Israelis, killed by a rocket, that Hollywood humanizes, mourns, generates sympathy for, situates as the heroic sacrifice.
You wonder why Egyptian book stalls sell Protocols and Mein Kampf?
US media, the film industry, newspapers, radio and magazines have always been pro-Israels, anti-Palestinian (anti-Arab). If it’s not the political aspect they obfuscate, then it’s cultural racism. For example, Israelis will be portrayed as technologically advanced, smart, scientists, fun and warm people, while the Arabs are portrayed as backward, angry, loud, goat herders who use donkeys for transportation. It’s all part of a bigoted caricature that seeks to dehumanize “Them”, while endearing “Israel” to mainstream America.
A few months ago I was flipping through the channels when I came across an episode of NCIS I think. The investigative team in the plot had finally caught up with a guy who kidnapped some arms dealer they were looking for and “extracted” information from him. So this team held the kidnapper guy at gun point, when he gave his name and told them he was with the Mossad, they lowered their guns. He then proceeded to lecture them on the entire criminal enterprise he had been tracking. One of the US agents flew to Tel-Aviv to get briefed by Mossad on what they have on these arms dealers.
They don’t even try to be subtle anymore. So the message one is supposed to take away from this, is that it’s OK for foreign agents to operate within the US, illegally, because they’re “on our side” (and they are Israeli).
It will only get worse. Isn’t Spielberg making a reality TV show about a hospital in Israel?
I mean, as things are now, it’s pretty bad. You go outside the informed boundaries of this conflict into the mainstream, where people know less and less, it’s like an alternate reality.
I think it’s symbolic of the hysteria over antisemitism. The people who throw that accusation around can’t deal with certain arguments that cause them to look in the mirror and to question the foundation of their belief systems. So naturally, they react as harshly as they know how and that tactic has come to symbolize ‘evil’ incarnate.
Phil should do a piece on how average Westerners perceive the conflict. Not a poll, but do interviews with people here. After all, he did those ‘post-Zionist Zionist’ interviews.
I mean, before getting an opinion on what needs to be done or what ‘Zionism’ is to a person, why not ask them what their understanding of the history is?
If one of those post-Zionist Zionists did not believe Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 48′ or that the ethnic cleansing began before the declaration of Israeli Statehood – then is it even worth spending the time talking to them?
Would we interview a Holocaust denier? Someone who discounts tremendous historical evidence purely for ideological and possibly emotional needs?
There has to be a reason for these interviews. Otherwise you end up looking as pretentious as that coffee-house, turtle-neck, thick black-rimmed glasses [sans a prescription], ZioLib whose father suggested that the Palestinians convert to Judaism as an act of defiance.
I mean how insensitive and just play fucking stupid.
The point is, that underneath that pretentiousness is an insensitivity and disregard for Palestinian history.
Remember Phil making a post about sympathy for the Jews of the Arab world? Or was it that a lot of Jews fled to Palestine because they weren’t welcome elsewhere? The Holocaust and antisemitism was real.
(This doesn’t mean Jews had a right to build a political entity and State on top of the indigenous population – they did not. And look what happened, predictably the indigenous population’s initial fears were proven true.)
But anyway, we often will question the intentions, motives and historical understanding of a person who presents some critical opinion of Jewishness or Jewish-related issues.
We often mention their ‘credentials’ (reactionary, with respect to the abuse of the antisemitism accusation) as being born of Holocaust survivors and all that.
So, why not talk to the post-Zionist Zionists about the history of the conflict? In doing so, it reveals their capacity to think critically, their compassion, their ethical code, etc. That is the foundation. Our personal historiography of Israel-Palestine.
I’ve done such interviews informally, at various social activities where average Americans (by anybody’s standards) were imbibing some, and relaxing. I’ve always discovered a total lack of any knowledge of the history of Palestine.
The only reaction was invariably a mention of The Holocaust; followed by
some brief version of “the Arabs and Jews have been fighting forever;” winding up, as often as not with the (case-closing; let’s talk about something else) anti-Arab slur: “Sand niggers.”
That’s it, from those with a high school education, or less, and those with
an undergraduate degree.
The walls are tumbling down. British MP Gerald Kauffman brought sixty politicians from Europe to visit Gaza and claimed that anyone using white phosphorus in a civilian population should be arrested if they set foot in Britain and tried for war crimes:
link to jpost.com
MP Kauffman rose to Israeli infamy when he compared what happened in Gaza to the Nazis. A British paper subsequently ran a poll asking whether they agreed with him and as expected the Israeli Lobby made them withdraw the poll and recant, for ever questioning the Israeli army’s right to kill people at their whim.
I also noticed that the JPost article didn’t tell you that Kauffman is Jewish .
Plus there are no comments posted. It looks like the JPost thought the subject was too controversial to allow for an open debate to take place.
I mean, most rabid Zionists have this reflex instinct of squelching those who are critical of Israel. But, it gets kind of messy when the person criticizing Israel is a holocaust survivor.
Although, over the years, I have seen how such Zionists deal with situations like this, they try to claim that the holocaust survivor is “naive”, or that “times have changed”. Whatever the justification, it usually doesn’t stand up to 20 seconds of scrutiny.
Also a good reminder: It should have been harder to besmirch the man whom Aharon Barak, former president of the Israeli Supreme Court, calls “a dear friend” with “very deep ties to Israel.” In fact, had Israel cooperated with the mission and presented its case persuasively, I believe it would have had a formidable ally in Richard Goldstone.
Well, there’s not much left we haven’t yet copied to here now.
“presented its case persuasively,”
This is the work of a seriously illusioned person. He’s just so sure Israel has a “case”, and if they hadn’t been distracted by responding to the Goldstone report they could of presented it? He’s dreaming. And He sounds just like Witty, who’s been where, by the way?
Yeah, that’s what jumped out at me. There’s a certain sort of “liberal” who’s all about process–if only we could just sit down and talk about this calmly everything would be fine. I suppose the thought underneath is that Goldstone is an honest man, but all he had to work with was the word of some Arabs, perhaps even those dreaded Arab Israel-haters–get the Israeli side and all the allegations might disappear in a puff of Israeli honesty.
Definitely Wittyesque in its overtones.
Pogrebin is a woman. She was an important figure in the early feminist movement and the first editor of Ms Magazine. She’s also apparently PEP and living proof that a female “Witty” is possible.
She also passes off some serious hasbara in her piece. Intellectual laziness or outright knowing lie? I suspect laziness and a decades long diet of swallowing hasbara talking points without questioning them. From her article:
Before accepting his assignment, the judge, noting the UN’s biased record against the Jewish State , affirmed Israel’s right to self-defense and insisted that the panel’s mandate be expanded to include violations by Hamas, not just the IDF. He got his way, then spent nearly three months begging the Israeli government to cooperate with the inquiry and gave up only after receiving a flat no from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.
This is deeply regrettable, he says, since his mandate was the most even-handed approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the history of the UN and the final report contains the first and only condemnation of Hamas’ rocket attacks ever to appear in a UN document. Sadly, the force of that condemnation was lost once Israel rejected the report and the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution by a vote of 344-36 denouncing it as “biased and unworthy of further consideration.”
It took me all of 3 minutes to find this, a General Assembly Resolution from an Emergency Session following the IDF’s November 2006 attack on Gaza. (“Autumn Clouds”)
“Deeply deploring further the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel, “
and
2. Calls for the immediate cessation of military operations and all acts of violence, terror, provocation, incitement and destruction between the Israeli and Palestinian sides, including extrajudicial executions, bombardment against civilian areas, air raids and the firing of rockets, as was agreed in the Sharm el-Sheikh understandings of 8 February 2005;
and this…
5. Calls upon the Palestinian Authority to take immediate and sustained action to bring an end to violence, including the firing of rockets on Israeli territory;
link to unispal.un.org
And I’m sure that if I spent a bit more time I could come up with additional documents to prove that Pogrebin was flat out wrong when she insisted that UN documents never condemned rocket attacks prior to the Goldstone Report.
She does seem convinced that Israel must have had a good “moral” reason to cause such destruction. Still PEP? Or is she brave enough to defend Goldstone, but not brave enough to publicly question the mainstream Zionist position on the
“most moral army” in the world?
I don’t have a direct reference but Goldstone pointed out that it was not smart of the Israelis not to present their case. Pogrebin’s description of Goldstone as formidable ally is an exaggeration, but she didn’t pull it out of thin air.
What can be done by the citizens of a democratic rouge state? And what, internationally, short of declaring war on it? I guess the average old time German or Japanese is everybody, huh? And, oh-oh, there’s now only ONE superpower. Power to those who
own and/or effectively control the MSM in every state. It has come down to that. Because
an uninformed citizenry is a sheep flock, especially if they are always hungry and looking
for a place to keep warm.
One of the four member-panel of Goldstone report, retired Col. Desmond Travers (Irish Army) in an interview with the Harpers magazine (October 29, 2009) confirmed that Hamas did not use civilians as hostages as claimed by Israel. When asked that Israeli claim that its forces (IOF) are the “most moral army in the world” – Col Travers replied: “Given the tactics, the weapon used, and the indiscriminate targeting, I think this is a dubious claim.”
An interview with Goldstone
link to rehmat1.wordpress.com
Traver’s also said Mosques were not used to store weapons despite the fact of tons of video evidence to the contrary.
Post the evidence then.
Last year, a curator in (Hod Ha-Sharon) Israel found a weapons cache under the subfloor of a synagogue. According to the curator, those weapons and ammunition were stored there in 1948 when the Synagogue was used as a Jewish Hagana post/position.
Interestingly enough, the English version of the article makes no mention of the fact that the synagogue was used as a “Hagana post/position”. It only states that it was used as a “shelter from Arab rioters” (How benign. It was just a “shelter”).
Furthermore, the headline of the English version makes the reader think that the cache was left there by British Mandate forces. But, the Hebrew headline clearly states that it was a Hagana weapons cache during the founding of the state.
As one can see, Israel has a tendency to project. Israeli leaders usually assume that the “enemy” is doing what the Israelis have done.
Hebrew version: link to haaretz.com
English version: link to haaretz.com
Avi, I think the English version is also clear about it being a Haganah cache. I can’t read the page with the funny symbols but I’m not convinced :)
Ran Hacohen once wrote an article about differences between english and hebrew version (link to original.antiwar.com
and I’d appreciate him doing a follow up. Nudge nudge, Ran.
Here’s is my post exactly as it appeard: (emphasis mine. I think lol).
Interestingly enough, the English version of the article makes no mention of the fact that the synagogue was used as a “Hagana post/position”. It only states that it was used as a “shelter from Arab rioters” (How benign. It was just a “shelter”).
Furthermore, the headline of the English version makes the reader think that the cache was left there by British Mandate forces. But, the Hebrew headline clearly states that it was a Hagana weapons cache during the founding of the state.
Ok, I get it now. Convinced.
Hello all I am knew here….even though I think a read something Phil wrote a few years ago about attending his first Aipac celebration…
Anyhow..as I have watched the world unfold the lst 9 years from 9/11….my attitude towards jewry has plummeted….Phil has even stated he feels more comfortable working with another jewish individual than other humans….I find this extremely replusive….apparently jews have not gotten out of the 100th century BC…to cling to this tribalism….to me this is nothing more than an organised mafia…nazis …KKK….none these are alllowed in the USA today however organised jewry is…both sides of the US congress are replusive to the end……jews want everyone in the USA integrated…except them…they can favor each other with out fear…jewish elite in the US to are thy most discrimanting and prejudice humans there are on earth…and get away with it…Obama…top three advisers jewish……why? what an insult to American people……”ONLY JEWS ARE GOOD ENOUGH TO BE A PRESIDENTS ADVISERS”…..7 MM jobs lost in the last couple of years with jews in control of the FED….however in Israel everything is just fine…..they actually have $60BB in reserves and keep getting monies from the US…..WHY?????????
ORGANISED JEWRY…..it will be the death of this country if not stopped…….
Well, romal, this site is to a certain extent “organized jewry”. That is, the organizers and many of the commenters are jews, and I can assure you that they will not welcome this opinion of yours.
Nor do the rest of us. You’ve got a lot of mistaken ideas and a simplistic appreciation for what is going on, romal, but you can learn a lot from this site. I say this not in insult in any way. Everyone who makes the effort to find out the truth about Israel and the Israeli Lobby starts out with at least some incorrect notions. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is a good place to start, and of course this site.
Judaism ≠ Zionism
RE: “the Israel-right-or-wrong mafia”
MY COMMENT: Good one!
A RELATED FACEBOOK GROUP
Name – Richard J. Goldstone: Integrity Personified
Category – Common Interest, Beliefs & Causes
Description – A group for individuals who admire and respect Justice Goldstone.
LINK – link to facebook.com
Clearly not the same people who are making goldstonereport.org :)
A major problem has been the long term open (and over-) funding of Israel’s tribal wars by dumb big brother US.
I would like to open a challenge:
Can anyone think of a single instance where the Israelis have contributed anything at all to the security of the United States ?
Anything, anything will do. Please try hard.
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