Last night at a New York fundraiser for Jewish Voice for Peace, Naomi Klein explained the power of Richard Goldstone. Here is a man whose professional life has been dedicated to cementing the principle of "Never again" in international law, starting with his own country, South Africa. Thus he has the stature to actually give force to world opinion in the wake of Gaza that "in the face of this kind of lawlessness, there had to be an application of international law." And it is because of Goldstone’s power (moral, personal, legal/investigative) that Goldstone is "driving Israeli politicians out of their minds"–and why Israel supporters have mounted such a "McCarthyite" attack.
"I don’t think a single individual has ever aggravated Israelis to this extent," said Klein.
Lo and behold, the effort to dismantle Goldstone is sprouting up all over the place in the U.S, at one elite academic conference after another. The New School mounted a Goldstone-bash a couple of weeks ago. The Columbia Law School dean is chairing a Goldstone trashing in New York in ten days. And here comes Yale: the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism has announced a conference in August titled, "Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity," led in part by a man who says that Goldstone seeks the "elimination" of the Jewish state.
The conference, co-sponsored by the International Association for the Study of Antisemitism, is sure to be all about Israel and the delegitimization issue, with Goldstone thrown in. So much is evident from the "interim executive committee," which includes Canadian Israel lobbyist Irwin Cotler, a co-chair in the Columbia law dean’s anti-Goldstone event; Ruth Wisse, the Harvard Yiddishist who says young American Jews must enlist in Israel’s army to fight for the country’s image abroad; and Alvin Rosenfeld of Indiana University, who published a buckshot report 3 years ago claiming that "progressive Jewish" criticism of Israel was at bottom anti-Semitism. The interim committee offers this precis:
In the aftermath of the Shoah, some contend that antisemitism illustrates the limitations of the Enlightenment and modernity itself. In the contemporary context of globalized relations it appears that antisemitism has taken on new and changing forms that need to be decoded, mapped and critiqued. In fact, given the rise of current genocidal antisemitic discourse as a social movement, and the limited response to it by the human rights community, this could point to a possible crisis of modernity. This conference aims to explore this discursive phenomenon from an interdisciplinary approach.
Genocidal antisemitic discourse— I hear the sirens of Ruth Wisse.
The interim executive committee also includes the terrifying Milton Shain, a professor of history at of Cape Town University, who has attacked Goldstone with the kind of logic that typifies the surge against Goldstone:
As the military option [against Israel] has failed so far, the diplomatic-economic strategy has come to hold out the best current hope for the elimination of the Jewish state… [Steve] Friedman, like Goldstone, is a soldier in the diplomatic-economic project as he admits when he openly advocates the "boycott, disinvestment and sanctions" strategy. That, in a nutshell, is why the Goldstone Report is widely regarded as political document rather than an impartial enquiry. Friedman only confirms what everyone knows, but that will not stop the Report becoming yet another stick to beat Israel with..
Richard Goldstone, by the way, considers himself a Zionist and feels that the world needs a Jewish state.
