Goldstone’s Retreat on his UN report Collapse of International Justice By Latheef Farook

The international justice collapsed and the evil, war mongers, ravaging today’s world triumphed. This is how one could describe the plight of   South African Jewish Judge Robert Goldstone’s effort to retract his own, United Nations, Report on Israeli war crimes in Gaza during its December 2008-January 2009 war.

His U Turn speaks volume for the extreme blackmail to which he was subjected to   and the violent forces which rule today’s world. What is Goldstone report?

In its latest massacre of Palestinians Israel, using United States supplied latest bunker buster missiles, F-16 war planes and apache helicopter gunships unleashed its carnage on Gaza.  Israel killed 1458 Palestinians , wounded around 6000, 34 percent of them children, destroyed properties from houses, apartment buildings, business and industrial complexes, agricultural lands, infra structure, essential services such as water, electricity, drainage to roads and virtually turned Gaza into a killing field and grave yard.   

It was a crime committed by the Israeli government backed by 94 % of its population  some of whom  danced while their forces  rained barrages of white phosphorous over the most populated place on this planet  and  slaughtered and roasted Palestinian men, women , children and the aged.

 The whole world witnessed the Israeli atrocities in Gaza, perhaps Israel’s 60^th massacre of Palestinians since the Jews   migrated to Palestine in the 1930 to kill, drive fear and oust the Palestinians from their lands to use United States to manipulate the United Nations to create the racist state of Israel in the land of Palestinians.

 The United Nations appointed a fact finding mission to probe into the war. The committee was headed by Judge Goldstone regarded as one of the world’s most widely respected jurists, with an impeccable record of wisdom, honesty and integrity. He is a devout Jew and has long been known as a fervent defender of Israel’s right to peace and security.

 

Gaza 4 January 2009: Dozens of Gazan children killed in Israeli ground assault

 The UN Fact-Finding Mission report, released in September 2009, concluded that “   that Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity.  

 Since   then Goldstone has been subjected to extreme pressure and blackmail to retract the report? These pressures culminated when he wrote this month in the Washington Post retracting his report. He wrote that “if I had known then, what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document,’  

One commentator said it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Judge Goldstone wrote his op-ed as a direct result of the pressure put upon him by Israel – pressure that made him a pariah within his own community and which affected also his family. And it also wouldn’t surprise me if the Mossad was involved in this pressure   to break Goldstone and make him retract his findings. Poor Goldstone now wants to make amends with his vile tormentors and is even willing to serve as a propaganda mouthpiece for this criminal regime.  Bottom line, I feel sorry for Goldstone, but I don’t buy his cop-out for a single minute. The facts speak louder than any op-ed: 3 weeks, nearly 1400 dead, of these more than 300 women and children. Case closed.

Summing up his plight Dr Lawrence Davidson professor of Middle East history at West Chester University, United States said  “It will be recalled that after the September, 2009 issuance of the Goldstone Report suggesting that Israel might be guilty of war crimes, Judge Richard Goldstone was barred from attending grandson’s bar mitzvah. That is how much resentment was produced by the critical report that bares his name. Well, Richard Goldstone has just assured himself access to all future family celebrations. He has accomplished this by calling into doubt his offending investigatory work.

 

By trying to retract his report Goldstone not only betrayed himself but also betrayed the Palestinians, the humanity and the international justice which virtually collapsed at the feet of lawless Zionist racist state of Israel whose six decades old history of   invasions, massacres, conspiracies, deception, destruction destabilized the entire Middle East for the benefit of war mongers in United States, Britain and France.

  In this regard it is worth reading what Israeli born Jew Gilad Atzmon  described by John Lewis on the Guardian as the “hardest-gigging man in British jazz”  had this to say;

 In his convoluted Washington Post apology, Goldstone reveals a severe lack of understanding of Israeli militarism, its role, and its operational philosophy. Israeli strategy is based on the power of deterrence. Israel is there to terrify its neighbors, through death, and carnage.  Israel believes that through shock and awe, it can exhaust the Palestinians, and break their spirit. Every so often, the Jewish state exercises a genocidal act — and the numbers of Palestinian fatalities speak for themselves. More than 1400 Palestinians died in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead: they died because Israel believes that Jewish future security is a function of the pain it inflicts upon others. The Goldstone report exposes the criminality that is imbued within Israeli militarism, and Goldstone’s current attempt to dismantle his own report cannot wash away his original findings.

 I tend to agree that Goldstone’s U Turn was surely inevitable: the history of Jewish animosity towards dissidents has long been firmly established, and in the last two years Goldstone and his family were subject to enormous pressure and social exclusion. It is more than likely that Goldstone was torn apart by it all. But the time has surely come to admit that we have reached the point of no return: we have to free our intellectual, spiritual and ethical life from any trace of Zionist ideology, from people who may have Zionist views or may have even been affiliated with Zionist philosophy. I believe that ethical discourse should move beyond any form of Judeo centric ‘ethical zigzagging”. Ends

 

Latheef Farook is a Senior Sri Lankan journalist who, after working for  Ceylon Daily News and Ceylon Observer for almost a decade, led a team to Dubai in February 1979 where he re launched Gulf News. After almost a quarter century in the Gulf he returned home and now based in Colombo.