or, quoting the original title, The Pro-Israel Crowd’s Sins of Omission. It means the same thing.
Being unable to nullify or contradict Judge Goldstone’s UN Report on Gaza, the next best thing: kill the messenger or in this case, vilify the judge is Israel’s next propaganda effort, in spite of the empirical facts upon which the UN Report was based.
Sasha Polakow-Suransky posted about the latest effort by proIsrael propagandists to hang Richard Goldstone, the judge who issued the UN Report that accused Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza during its massacre of over 1,400 Palestinians, including 300 children, which began in December, 2008.
On Friday and over the weekend, (Jeffrey) Goldberg and (Jonathan) Chait responded to a Yediot Ahronoth story claiming to have unearthed evidence of Richard Goldstone’s past as an apartheid-era judge, digesting it almost completely uncritically.
Goldberg wrote: “It turns out that this hero of the anti-Israel left…sentenced twenty-eight blacks to hang for criminal offenses.” Meanwhile, Chait seized upon Yediot’s “finding” that: “In another incident, Goldstone sentenced two young black men merely for being in possession of a video tape showing a speech given by one of the senior officials in Nelson Mandela’s party.” (The results of Yediot’s “investigation” are not news in South Africa, where Goldstone’s record is public and well-known.)
Goldberg’s and Chait’s ongoing blog posts on the latest Goldstone uproar betray what is at best a naively ahistorical approach to current events and at worst a willful blindness to Israel’s own sordid history of supporting a white supremacist regime.
Read on.
Mathew Yglesias also remarked on this new propaganda effort:
….the timing of this controversy is fortuitous because Polakow-Suransky has a book set to be released on May 25 called The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa. As South Africa found itself increasingly isolated on the international scene and Israel to a lesser degree was short on friends, Israel became South Africa’s most important source of weapons and “military intelligence officials from the two countries held annual intelligence-sharing conferences and South African military representatives came to the West Bank to view the anti-riot equipment the Israeli army was using against Palestinians.”
The details provided by Suransky’s link (above) are enlightening.
If one were wondering about Gaza and why Israel would attack, Henry Siegman exposed the sham political rationale Israel’s leaders gave for it, which was instigated, but who is listening? Siegman’s piece is called Israel’s Lies.
Dive in.
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"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Bewildering that South Africa had uses for nuclear weapons and WMD even during the Apartheid era. Now you have to wonder if Israel did not benefit from their research, and now too has WMD. And of course the US. What is the need, except to feed military-industrial corporations?
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In August 2001, Hatfill lost his security clearance after a CIA-administered polygraph test yielded inconclusive results. Sources familiar with Hatfill’s SAIC work record said that CIA polygraph examiners tested him as part of his application for top-secret clearance. They reported inconclusive results to questions about his years and relationships in Rhodesia and South Africa, and as a result, his regular security clearance was suspended.
After losing his clearance, Hatfill appealed the decision and continued to work on some SAIC projects, but the firm terminated him in March 2002 as the FBI intensified its scrutiny of him. Steven J. Hatfill vs U.S. DOJ AG Mukasey (pdf)
Plame, Miller, Kelly, WMD Timeline by BooMan
Steve Hatfill: “I thought it would eventually be proven that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks.” [False and major BS statement – Oui]
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Christ. There’s enough here to keep screenwriters busy for ages, if not at least the British spy novelists. Who needs the Soviet Union any more?
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All along, said Basson, Wentzel’s story was that the buyer was Pakistan, but as time passed, Basson realised that this was merely to be the export route, and he thought the probably buyer was Libya – but it might just as easily have been Iraq or the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. The least likely candidate was Iran.
Wentzel told Basson he had negotiated a better price with South American suppliers. This was conveyed to Basson only on the day before his arrest on January 29, 1997, and Basson immediately warned Wentzel that by dealing with South Americans, “the Jews” would immediately be informed.
Wentzel would have had even more reason to fear for his life, as the Israelis would not have been happy to learn that he was selling arms to Muslims, it could have led to real trouble with Mossad. Referring to the murder of Alan Kidger, Basson said, after all, the last person who “cheated the Jews” ended up cut into little pieces in the boot of his car when a red mercury deal went wrong.
Biological warfare Project Coast
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."All this while Israel itself has become an apartheid state…
History is full of paradoxes, isn’t it? The oppressed becomes the oppressor. I think Isaac Asimov wrote a paper on this problem. It’s a human problem; prejudice is universal.
Dershowitz’ Latest Outrage, Compares Goldstone to Mengele
Here’s the latest from Dershowitz Watch: not content to label Goldstone an “evil, evil man,” and to claim his UN report on the Gaza massacre was a “blood libel,” and that the eminent jurist is a moser (betrayer of Jews), Dersh has now likened the him to Josef Mengele. The context for the charge is a new line of attack which the hasbarists have developed which charges Goldstone with being an “apartheid judge” who “just followed orders” in personally hanging innocent South African blacks.
Read on at Richard Silverstein’s site, Tikun Olam
http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2010/05/12/dershowitz-latest-outrage-compares-goldstone
-to-mengele/
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(The Forward) May 14, 2010 – While Goldstone, as reported by Yediot, adhered to apartheid laws, he is also credited with having used his judicial power to under-mine some racial restrictions. In 1986 he handed down a decision limiting the government’s ability to evict black people living in neighborhoods designated for whites. This decision paved the way for abolishing racially based residency restrictions.
Goldstone is also credited with having helped bring down the curtain on apartheid through a government-commissioned investigation he led that exposed the existence of covert state-sponsored terror units deployed by South Africa against its own black citizenry.
“He was brave. He could’ve been killed,” Benjamin Pogrund, a former South African journalist and founder of the Yakar Center for Social Concern in Jerusalem, told the Forward in September 2009, shortly after Goldstone’s commission released its report.
Still, for many Israelis and pro-Israel activists, the apartheid-era decisions handed down by Goldstone and detailed in Yediot were viewed as a blow to Goldstone’s credibility.
Sasha Polakow-Suransky, a South African Jew and fellow at the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, urged Israel not to continue down the path forged by Yediot. Polakow-Suransky, who recently published a book on Israeli-South African relations during apartheid, noted that Israel had served as Pretoria’s primary arms supplier during that period. Writing on Foreign Policy’s website, Polakow-Suransky called on Israel to examine its own “shameful history” before criticizing Goldstone.
In his e-mail to the Forward, Goldstone wrote: “I have been judged by my fellow South Africans and by President Mandela for my role both during and after apartheid, and I find it curious that no one in Israel ever raised the issue except to laud me, prior to my Gaza report.”
Goldstone pointed to the fact that Mandela appointed him to serve on South Africa’s post-apartheid Constitutional Court as evidence that his rulings under apartheid were not out of line. “South Africans, who are of course familiar with my record and with apartheid, have not made the sort of allegations that certain members of the Israeli press and government are currently making.”
See my comments on Israel and Apartheid’s WMD development
“That is why the United States is fighting against anti-Semitism in international institutions – our special envoy for anti-Semitism is traveling the world as we speak, raising the issue at the highest levels of countries from one end of the world to the next. It is why we led the boycott of the Durban II Conference. (Applause.) It is why we repeatedly and vigorously voted against and spoke out against the Goldstone Report. (Applause.)”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Clinton is just following her husband and sucking up to the Israel Lobby. It is amazing to find alleged liberal Democrats supporting atrocities like the Gaza massacre. I would presume that all of Clinton’s words reflect back to Obama’s wavering position and subsequent obedience of his political master, Netanyahu.
Frankly it is embarassing being an American these days. And imagine that Clinton almost made it to the presidency. This all just shows that Mearshirmer and Walt were on target in their book.
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Israel became an independent state in 1948, the same year the Afrikaner-based Nationalist Party institutionalized the system of apartheid in South Africa. Notwithstanding the fascist origins of the Nationalist Party and its Greyshirts, diplomatic and economic relations between the new state of Israel and South Africa were close from the outset. Nationalist Party chief Dr. Malan, a notorious anti-Semite, was the first foreign head of state to visit Israel. The Malan government allowed the South African Jewish community, numbering over 100,000, to send significant funds to Israel.
Adams points out that one consequence of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war was the clear political convergence between Israel and South Africa. Between 1967 and South Africa’s 1975 military intervention in Angola following the collapse of Portugal’s colonial empire, close collaboration between Israel and South Africa in all areas-economic, military, “internal security,” and intelligence-flourished.
In 1968 the Israeli-South Africa Friendship League-composed of leading political and business figures-was established, a precursor to the Israeli-South Africa Trade Association. By the 1970s the results were the beginning or the expansion of trade between key Israeli and South African industries. For example, Israel exported to South Africa machinery, electronic equipment, chemical and pharmaceutical products, and textiles. Israel imported from South Africa steel, cement, timber, and sugar.
Glenn Frankel, who teaches journalism at Stanford University, was Southern Africa, Jerusalem, and London bureau chief for the Washington Post and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa by Sasha Polakow-Suransky will be published May 25 by Pantheon Books.
History is a great teacher, but sometimes it packs a nasty sense of irony. A case in point: South African Prime Minister John Vorster’s visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem in April 1976, where he laid a wreath to the victims of the German Reich he once extolled.
South Africa's prime minister John Vorster (second from right) is feted by Israel's prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (right) and Menachem Begin (left) and Moshe Dayan during his 1976 visit to Jerusalem. Photograph: Sa'ar Ya'acovIt’s bad enough that a former Nazi sympathizer was treated like an honored guest by the Jewish state. Even worse was the purpose behind Vorster’s trip to Israel: to cement the extensive military relationship between Israel and the apartheid regime, a partnership that violated international law and illicitly provided the white-minority government with the weaponry and technology to help sustain its grip on power and its oppression of the black majority over two decades.
Israel’s Own Shameful History and Apartheid
≈ Cross-posted from BooMan’s fp story — Reflecting Back ≈
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."