How can we expect Palestinian enablers to respect anything ever said. What Goldstone said just yesterday is no longer a truth. The British Mandate is not a truth. History has no truth... Yesterday has no truth. Nothing is consistent in identity politics. The great sin of the Left is betrayal. You couldn't even point out the truth to these people without being shackled, arrested and extradited to Washington State because you thought life and death were within the context of discussion. He has a letter in the NYTimes today, trying to damage-control the Goldstone recantation:
To the Editor:
The significance of Richard Goldstone’s Op-Ed article in The Washington Post is being overblown. As the judge who led an investigation into the Gaza conflict, he stands by most of his report.
Mr. Goldstone’s shift focuses on his allegation that Israel had an apparent policy to target civilians. He says that because of information now available, he no longer concludes that civilians were intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.
Human Rights Watch’s investigation in Gaza found some cases of apparently deliberate killing of civilians by Israeli soldiers, such as the killing of 11 civilians holding white flags, but no evidence that these resulted from a policy to target civilians.
However, Mr. Goldstone has not repudiated his panel’s findings that Israel committed numerous serious violations of the laws of war. Israeli forces, according to the Goldstone report, indiscriminately used heavy artillery and white phosphorous in densely populated areas and deliberately destroyed civilian buildings and infrastructure without a lawful military reason. That conduct was so widespread and systematic that it must have reflected policy.
As for investigations, Israel looks good only by comparison with Hamas, which has done nothing at all to investigate its war crimes. Israel has indicted four soldiers and convicted three. Only one has served jail time (7 1/2 months), for stealing a credit card.
Israel has yet to investigate the policies behind the indiscriminate attacks that caused so much civilian harm.
KENNETH ROTH
Executive Director
Human Rights Watch
New York, April 3, 2011
a) in writing "As the judge...", Roth seeks to imply this was an actual judicial inquiry rather than an investigative one.
b) in writing "apparently deliberate killing" he seeks to offset Goldstone who insists Israel had no intentional policy. Israel never claimed there could have been such cases of local lack of discipline, and actually investigated claims of such. He is comparing apples and pears. He also adds "apparent" to cover his tuches.
c) those 'findings' are disputed by Israel and the proof is not based in all cases on reliable sources.
Poor chap.
^
Human Rights Watch director Ken Roth, perhaps sensing that the cash cow of anti-Israel hatred may dry up as the result of Richard Goldstone’s recent retraction of allegations that Israel targeted civilians during the Gaza War, penned a feverish reply at CiF (Gaza: the stain remains on Israel’s war record, April 5.) to help sustain his group’s narrative of Israeli villainy.
Guardian readers, clearly relieved that their nearly week-long nightmare of doubt over Israeli sin following Goldstone’s mea culpa is over, took to the streets below the line en mass to express their emotion.
Let the hate begin:
Hamas is actually more moral than Israel. Their rocket attacks represents legitimate resistance.
Israel is a criminal and insane nation which kills and enslaves innocent Palestinians, and who bases their national legitimacy on an “ancient fairy tale”.
Israel guilty of murdering Palestinian children
Characterizing Hamas as anti-Semitic represents Israeli paranoia. (Bonus: Comical semantic argument that Israeli Jews are the real anti-Semites)
Reader hopes Hamas won’t be negatively influenced by Zionist villainy and stoop to Israeli level of cruelty
Israel is marching towards Armaggedon
Israel is “slowly starving” Palestinians, and is guilty of the worst crimes against humanity in the world
Israelis are immutably and irredeemably racist
Hamas is not a terrorist group, just a “rag-tag” bunch of poorly equipped hooligans
Israel should apologize to their Arab neighbors for their murderous behavior over the last 50 years
Israel shoots anything that moves, including donkeys and “ancient grandmothers”
It seems that Goldstone’s retraction represented merely his collapse under “Zionist pressure”
via cifwatch.com
