EXPANDED VERSION OF POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MICHAEL WEISS IN THE TELEGRAPH
What a nonsense column.
First, Judge Goldstone has not retracted what he wrote, rather he has made some very qualified statements about aspects of it a long time afterward.
Even in Goldstone’s original report he went out of his way to portray the event as less of a one-sided slaughter than it in fact was, knowing full well he would be subjected to god-awful treatment afterward.
But even his qualified words come after Judge Goldstone's life having been made a living hell by Israeli apologists with accusations, sneers, shunning, and violent threats.
Israel and its apologists are known for the intense and ugly pressure they can bring to bear on anyone who fails to follow the official script.
After all, that's how Israel got itself recognized by the United States in the first place.
President Truman was not inclined to recognize the terrorists who declared themselves a state in 1948.
But he was given the full treatment - he was hounded by apologists and lobbyists in a way he never before experienced.
Moreover, he was running for re-election and the situation looked grim, so the last thing he needed was a howling mob chasing him around the country.
And by finally relenting and granting recognition, he got the kind of campaign contributions he badly needed.
Nothing has changed since 1948.
The truth is we do not really need a report although it is always a good thing to have documentation of terrible events.
Everyone except the howling Israeli apologists knows what happened. We saw it. We heard it. We felt the people’s misery.
And it should make no difference to Israel since Israel has never had any respect for the UN. It stands in contempt of a whole list of resolutions, and, in another of its recent atrocities, the invasion of Southern Lebanon, it deliberately targeted and killed four UN workers bravely doing their job of observation.
When Israel invaded Gaza, it shut down a giant, fenced-in refugee camp, and attacked the occupants as though they were going to war with an army. It attacked civilians with tanks and planes and modern weapons, even employing horrors like white phosphorus.
Israel killed 300 to 400 children alone (plus a thousand others), and we have testimony that Israeli soldiers used children as human shields.
The streets ran red with blood, and the pictures were on the Internet.
And for what? Israel and its apologists insisted on calling it a war, insisted it was justified because some Palestinians, frustrated beyond endurance by Israel’s ill treatment, had been shooting into Israel home-made fireworks called Qassam rockets. Thinking people knew, despite a wall of words over these toy rockets, that that was not what Israel’s atrocity was about.
Well, only the other day Ehud Olmert, prime minister at the time and surely a war criminal now, said the army didn't do its job in Operation Cast Lead. The job was killing all the members and leaders of a cleanly elected government which Israel hates.
Some respect for democracy and human rights.
And as for the mad pack, well, nothing on earth you could say or do would ever convince them that Israel is the nasty piece of work that it truly is, a brutal garrison state with no respect for any of its neighbors or anyone else who doesn’t agree with its views and demands.
According to the pack, we are all supposed to pretend the plainly naked emperor actually is wearing clothes. We are all supposed to drop our precious and hard-won values regarding human rights and just say Israel must be right whenever it starts slaughtering people.
Cloudcuckooland, only stinking of human gore.
