After years of being harrassed, being called a “bad Jew”, and seeing even his grandson attacked by the hasbara wing of the Likudniks and their fellow travelers, poor Richard Goldstone has, much as Salman Rushdie did under similar pressure, apparently cracked and is begging them to leave him alone.
How else does one explain this recanting of his, wherein he doesn’t explain exactly what made him change his mind — but instead tries to change the subject from crimes committed by the IDF to rocket attacks launched from Gaza?
Mondoweiss shreds his recanting into tiny bits, here, here, and here.
And of course, just as Salman Rushdie’s tormentors only redoubled their persecution of him in response to his capitulation, Goldstone’s tormentors are stepping up their attacks on Goldstone and his work:
Goldstone’s latest op-ed is something else altogether. It does not challenge a single concrete finding in the entire report, and he has not conceded absolutely anything to his critics in that way. In fact, his findings under severe constraints have held up remarkably well with time. But the tone and timing of this current piece suggest that somehow the report should be “reconsidered”, that it was somehow wrong. Moreover, his comments seem to intentionally mislead about the content of the UN independent committee’s findings on due process in Israel. This is nothing more than a bone to Israel’s apologists, which is deeply misleading for all the reasons discussed here. I am afraid this is a sad, integrity-damaging turn for a man who had singlehandedly done so much to protect people from war crimes in Israel, Palestine, and elsewhere.
And he should have known better, that is, he should have known that this craven gesture to Israel would not allow his enemies to forgive him and welcome him back to the broader Jewish community. Already the enemies, sensing weakness, attack for the final kill attempt. Jeffrey Goldberg, with the tone of the intellectual gatekeeper he fashions for himself, makes it clear this doesn’t change the “blood libel.” The editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, David Horovitz, tells Goldstone “an apology is not good enough“. We can expect much, much more of such attacks.
Once again, trying to appease right-wing authoritarian nutjobs never works, ever.
(Crossposted at MyFDL.)
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