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.
