WaPo toon upsets loons

Here's the Washington Post cartoon:

And here are the unhappy loons as reported by Jerusalem Post

Same racism different year

There's an article on the Washington Post site headed, Why demographics are still a concern for some Israeli Jews.  Here's a taste:

in Israel, Jewish policymakers are heralding the fact that the country’s Jewish population has passed the 6 million mark for the first time — a historically significant number, they say, because that’s the number of Jews who were killed in the Holocaust.

“It’s a great joy to know there are more than 6 million Jews in Israel,” Dina Porat, chief historian of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, told the Guardian.

It’s cause for celebration, but the 6 million figure doesn’t entirely put Israeli Jews at ease.

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics released its own figures this week, predicting that the number of Arabs in Israel and Palestine will equal the number of Jews by 2016 and exceed it by 2020, buoyed in part by the Palestinians’ overall higher birthrate.

All of this of course excludes the millions of Palestinians who have been ethnically cleansed from Palestine altogether.

Messenger shoots himself

Another article on Goldstone, this time The Guardian editorial titled, Goldstone: the unanswered questions:

It is difficult, in this digital world of instant claim and rebuttal, to say that you were wrong. But Richard Goldstone's retraction of one of the claims of the report that he chaired – that Israel targeted civilians in the war onGaza as a matter of policy – is one such instance. Mr Goldstone deserves credit for honesty.

I doubt if there'll be a whole lot of credit for his "honesty" from hasbara quarters. But has he been honest?

The retracted allegation refers to the attack which killed 22 members of the Samouni family, who, following instructions from Israeli soldiers, were sheltering in a house in Zeitoun. But there are 35 other incidents that Goldstone's team investigated. It found seven cases where civilians were shot leaving their homes waving white flags; a direct and intentional attack on a hospital which may amount to a war crime; numerous incidents where ambulances were prevented from attending to the severely injured; nine attacks on civilian infrastructure with no military significance, such as flour mills, chickens farms, sewage works and water wells – all part of a campaign to deprive civilians of basic necessities. The key paragraph of the report states: "The Mission finds that the conduct of the Israeli armed forces constitute grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention in respect of wilful killings and wilfully causing great suffering to protected persons and as such give rise to individual criminal responsibility." On the Samouni killings it states that even if it amounted to an operational error and the mission concludes that a mistake was made, "state responsibility of Israel for an internationally wrongful act" would remain. 

It seems that Goldstone, given his professed zionism, which in his case is unambiguously expressed as a love of the State of Israel, was a bad choice for the task at hand.  See the Magnes Zionist blog for how he openly sought to distance himself from the report that his panel produced.

At appearances following the report, Judge Goldstone showed his discomfort and displeasure with those who wanted to use the Goldstone Report to "delegitimize Israel." He was deeply offended by those who questioned his love of Israel. One incident is particularly telling. At Yale, a banner was unfolded with listed the Dreyfuss Affair, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the Goldstone Report. Now imagine if that had happened to Norm Finkelstein. Finkelstein would have known how to react and what to say; he would be eminently non-plussed. But the act not only flustered Judge Goldstone; he virtually lost his composure. After that speech, the judge was accosted by the Chabad rabbi, Rabbi Shmuely Hecht, who asked him, "What are you going to do when the facts are unraveled and the evidence is clear that Goldstone report was a sham and not credible based on video and audio coverage of the war?" The judge replied, much to the puzzlement of the rabbi, "Should that occur, I will rejoice." (Read about ithere.) 

Poor guy.  It's put a terrible strain on his family.  But then look what happened to far bigger and poorer families in Gaza.  But Goldstone does appear to have tried to undermine the report of the panel he chaired.  Magnes Zionist gets into answering why but this Guardian editorial deals with the if.

Clear to one side the superheated flak of the debate today. It arises from Israel's current international isolation, of which the Gaza operation formed only a part. It is now said that the Goldstone report became the cornerstone of a campaign to delegitimise Israel. None of this is relevant to what happened in Gaza between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, events which led to the deaths of 1,396 Palestinians, 763 of whom, according to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, were not taking part in hostilities when they were killed. The report did not in fact claim that Israel set out deliberately to murder civilians. It said that Operation Cast Lead was "deliberately disproportionate" and intended to "punish, humiliate and terrorise". That charge stands unanswered. Indiscriminate warfare, as opposed to deliberate killing, was undoubtedly state policy. Shooting the messenger is always easier than dealing with the message itself. This time, the messenger had the grace to shoot himself. It does not change what happened in Gaza, nor what will happen the next time war breaks out.

So The Guardian is claiming that Goldstone's disclaiming doesn't change anything but that it does amount to shooting himself. Again I say, poor guy. Of course the toll taken on his family has been immense but it is nothing up against what the Palestinians have been suffering, certainly considering cast lead but look what his zionist sympathies and fellow zionists have made him do to his own credibility.

And still the hasbaraniks aren't happy. On the subject of "delegitimisation" of Israel, Engage has the Washington Post article tagged with "anti-zionism". Bizarre!

Finally, I was going to note how Goldstone had hawked his op-ed around the American media. Well, that he had offered the piece to the New York Times anyway but got rejected.  Ernie Halfdram made a comment to this effect linking to Angry Arab News Service which in turn linked to YNET.  Well the YNET link is now broken and the report is now denied by the NYT, on YNET thus:

In an official response to the claims, NYT's Elaine Murphy said that Goldstone had indeed submitted an opinion piece to the newspaper on March 22, which was rejected. Nevertheless, she stressed, the piece did not resemble the one published by the Washington Post.

Still, the New York Times refused to subject the original pieces sent by Goldstone to any comparison with the one published by the Washington Post; claiming they had no right to forward an unpublished submission to a third party. [typos corrected]

What to make of it all?

Reconsidering Goldstone?

Judge Richard Goldstone produced a report on Israel's "cast lead" attack on Gaza back in 2008/9.  Here's a small piece from the Washington Post:

In a 574-page report, the four-member panel accused Israel of targeting civilians in mosques and schools, as well as destroying crops and factories, including the only flour factory in Gaza City. The panel also said Israeli soldiers blindfolded and handcuffed Palestinian civilians and, at gunpoint, used them as human shields to enter unsecured homes.

"There is strong evidence to establish that numerous serious violations of international law . . . were committed by the Israel Defense Forces," Goldstone said at a news conference in New York. "The mission concluded that actions amounting to war crimes and possibly in some respect crimes against humanity were committed by the Israel Defense Forces."

Goldstone said there was no question that the Palestinian firing of missiles and mortar shells into Israel "was deliberate and calculated to cause loss of life and injury to civilians and damage to civilian infrastructure." The mission "found that these actions also amounted to serious war crimes and also possibly crimes against humanity."

Now, writing in the same Washington Post Judge Goldstone has had a change of view:

We know a lot more today about what happened in the Gaza war of 2008-09 than we did when I chaired the fact-finding mission appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council that produced what has come to be known as the Goldstone Report. If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.

The final report by the U.N. committee of independent experts — chaired by former New York judge Mary McGowan Davis — that followed up on the recommendations of the Goldstone Report has found that “Israel has dedicated significant resources to investigate over 400 allegations of operational misconduct in Gaza” while “the de facto authorities (i.e., Hamas) have not conducted any investigations into the launching of rocket and mortar attacks against Israel.”

Our report found evidence of potential war crimes and “possibly crimes against humanity” by both Israel and Hamas. That the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying — its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.

The allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion. While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.

For example, the most serious attack the Goldstone Report focused on was the killing of some 29 members of the al-Simouni family in their home. The shelling of the home was apparently the consequence of an Israeli commander’s erroneous interpretation of a drone image, and an Israeli officer is under investigation for having ordered the attack. While the length of this investigation is frustrating, it appears that an appropriate process is underway, and I am confident that if the officer is found to have been negligent, Israel will respond accordingly.

So the worse that Goldstone is now accusing Israel of is "negligence" and he is confident that Israel will "respond accordingly" if it finds that negligence was indeed the case. But what negligence could have led to "Israeli soldiers blindfold[ing] and handcuff[ing] Palestinian civilians and, at gunpoint, us[ing] them as human shields to enter unsecured homes"?

Well I'm sure we'll find out as soon as Israel "responds accordingly".

UPDATE: The date of the Washington Post article by Goldstone is April 1st.  Could it be an April fool?  I don't think it can be because it is in the name of Richard Goldstone himself.  Goldstone wouldn't joke about something that nearly cost him his place at his grandson's bar mitzvah and surely the Washington Post wouldn't take in vain the name of so august a personage as Judge Goldstone.  Nope, I don't think it can be an April fool but it is bizarre.  The only example he gives of something he described as an Israeli war crime is now explained away by Israeli negligence.  And yet examples of crimes in the report of the report that he linked to cannot possibly have been negligence.  Goldstone's about turn is bizarre but I don't think it's a joke.  I will however keep in mind the possibility that someone thought it might make a funny April fool.