Insight Into a Perfidious Mind
Richard Goldstone condemned 28 black people to death while serving as a judge in apartheid South Africa, according to Yediot Achronot (as cited by the Jerusalem Post).
We could have expected a denial. He didn’t come up with one.
The next best thing might have been to claim that he arranged the court docket so that he only condemned hardened killers, multiple murderers with airtight cases against them.
He didn’t do that, either.
He responded to the report by saying that he was a part of the system and had to respect the laws of the state, occasionally having to enforce laws he was opposed to.
In other words, he obeyed orders. Where have we heard that before?
Will he try, some day, to acquit himself before the Jewish people by claiming that it pained him to compromise the security of Israel and all its inhabitants, but had to respect the expectations of the UN, the academic left, and the Palestinians, and occasionally had to include arguments he was opposed to?
תמותת רשע רעה (Tehilim 34:22) Loosely, the evil are done in by their own evil.
ולמלשנים אל תהי תקוה
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As of now he was too much of a coward to debate his findings,and is the darling of the J-St,Peace Now ,Haaretz crowd so why should he have to worry about acquitting himself? Hopefully sometime soon he will have to give an accounting in front of the King of Kings!
I get the subtle impression you don’t like Judge Goldstone. I just read a long article in Moment about the head of J Street and it gave me some understanding of how others think. There are Jews who feel they know better than the Israeli government and that it helps Israel to force them to do things they don’t want to do.Sort of tough love. I think that Goldstone was hindered in being even handed by Israel’s refusal to cooperate with his tribunal and the Arabs’ penchant for lieingand cheating. They report atrcdities that never happened and Israel was not in court to dispute it. It is like not showing up for your own trial because you have decided that the court is biased. None of this changes the facts, but I wonder if Goldstone isn’t honest when he says he is a Zionist, like all other South African Jews. He should have recused himself and let someone else be the head of a biased inquisition.He isn’t a Jewish nazi. He is an arrogant fool.
L. Oberstein: It is like not showing up for your own trial because you have decided that the court is biased.
Ori: It’s like a US soldier indited in Spain not showing up that trial. It may be a PR disaster, but the court does not have real authority anyway.
L. Oberstein ;
There are Jews who feel they know better than the Israeli government and that it helps Israel to force them to do things they don’t want to do.Sort of tough love
While you are honestly trying to be melamed zchus on groups like J St and the NIF,how is it that these so called intelligent, well educated people are either wholly unfamiliar or they pointedly ignore the Hamas Mission Statement?
I think that Goldstone was hindered in being even handed by Israel’s refusal to cooperate with his tribunal and the Arabs’ penchant for lieingand cheating. They report atrcdities that never happened and Israel was not in court to dispute it
Since when is the UN a forum where the Israelis have an opportunity to defend themselves? Even if they cooperated they still would have been walking into an ambush
While I don’t know what percentage of the so called Jewish Establishment identify with the views of Tikun Magazine I found it troubling and rather unsettling that they chose to bestow Goldstone with their Man of Year award.Due to his reporting fiction as fact are they blissfully unaware of how many of their Jewish brethren could possibly be in danger R”L by making it harder for Israel to defend itself in the future? In my opinion he is a classic case of a Moser
When I read this article in the JPost, I almost fell out of my chair. Recall that in a prior post I compared Goldstone to Lot (Avraham’s nephew) who had been appointed a judge on the very day Sodom was destroyed. I quoted a vort from R. A. Soloveichik in the name of his father, that Lot was an honest judge enforcing corrupt laws, which is worse than dishonest judges, who at least you can bribe.
Lo and behold, this article comes out confirming myobservation. I am sure that Judge Goldstone followed every technical nicety in running his Court in South Africa. Nevertheless, he was a cog in a brutally oppressive, racist regime who sent human beings to their death to keep it in power. It takes a certain kind of myopia to be able to accomplish that. That was Lot in Sodom and that was Goldstone in South Africa.
A ruling may be technically correct on the law, but can still be a travesty of justice if the Judge does not see (or does not want to see) the bigger picture.
And, let no one say that this is a mere ad hominem attack on Judge Goldstone. This article, if true, calls into quesion his judgment and abilities as a judge. Turns out that the “respected jurist” is one who willingly lent out his technical judicial skills in the service of a terrible injustice. That lack of judgment severely undermines the whole Goldstone report — which many have criticized in its initial conception, its lack of critical evaluation of credibility, its biases, and, most importantly, its lack of appreciation for the need and right of self-defene by Israel. A report authored by someone with such a severe lack of moral judgment deserves no credibility.
i think all of us are guilty of being selective in what we want to believe. I think it was Yossi Beilin who once said that he was for the “peace process’ despite all the evidence that it wasn’t working because he couldn’t accept a world in which there would not be peace, self-delusion. We highly committed Jews care so much about Israel and want so much for it to succeed that we also don’t analyse facts dispassionately or logically at times. Maybe we have no choice because the problems in the future are clear to see and they are many. Can the little State of Israel continue on its present path and not succumb to many challenges internal and external? Maybe honest people have come to the conclusion that the present path is suicidal. I think others have cme to the conclusion that the way of the left is suicidal. I don’t know what will be in 100 years with Israel, but I also don’t know what will be in 100 years with the United States. If we are entering an age when the Chinese and Indians become dominant and the West declines like the Roman Empire, then Israel, a clone of the United States, has to re=think its long term strategy for viability. Does having these nightmares make one a self hating Jew or whatever you want to call it? I don’t think so.
L. Oberstein,
When/if the Chinese and Indians become more dominant, do Israel’s local enemies become any less dangerous and warlike?
Goldstone’s report was massively and fatally flawed. There have been numerous in-depth reports proving this. (Three are linked below.) I really don’t care whether Goldstone’s intent was altruistic or not. The net effect of this dastardly work has been to increase anti-Semitism around the world and further endanger the lives of my family and all of us living here in Israel. As such I believe he has earned a spot amount the worst haters of Israel and I believe his name forever should be followed by “Yemach Shemo”.
[YA -Those who need to arm themselves with the arguments agains Goldstone will find no shortage of useful material. Israel’s official response is on the website of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Alan Dershowitz did an extensive take-down of Goldstone, as did NY attorney Trevor Norvitz]
I thought that it was quite ironic that his grandson’s Bar Mitzvah was on Parshas Tazriah Mtzorah. The Mtzorah was excluded from his family and community because of his resorting to Lashon Hara. How fitting that Judge Goldstone, whose report was filled with the worst type of slander against the IDF, was isolated from his community as a result of his comments and conduct, which clearly placed the IDF in an undeserved bad light.
Reb Menacham, doesn’t the klalah of Yemach Shemo affect the descendents of the “honoree” as well? In Goldstone’s case, Yemach Shemo would cause unwanted collateral damage. In goldstonish lingo, it would be disproportionate.
The problem is not the man but what is going on in the world. The creation of Israel in 1948 was a momentary episode when the nations of the world felt sorry for the poor Jews and allowed an non viable rump territory to become a Jewish State. In the war that followed, Israel belied the scepticsim of not only its enemies but its friends and won. It is ironic that the cease fire lines of 1949 are somehow holy to the nations of the world. In their eyes, they have no more legitimacy than the partition lines of varous prior proposals. It’s all a bluff. Israel will make it because the Israeli people are able to defend themselves and withstand their enemies. If we sat back and waited on the nations of the world, we would all be long dead.
Happy Yom Yerushalayim. May we merit Divine help to remain in control of David’s City until the return of David’s descendent , the righteous Messiah.
Self-hating Jews like Richard Goldstone, George Soros, and Noam Chomsky are modern day kappos, but even worse, since they are not under the same kind of pressure to betray their Jewish people the way Jews were during the nazi era. Doesn’t a man like Richard Goldstone have enough sense to realize that he was deliberately chosen to condemn Israel, precisely because he is Jewish? Vladimir Lenin called such fools “useful idiots,” but Richard Goldstone is much worse than that: he is apparently a man who does could not care about basic moral decency.
L. Oberstein quoted Yossi Beilin as saying that even if evidence indicated the “peace process” wouldn’t work he would go with it to the end because he couldn’t live in a world in which there couldn’t be peace. He is right and he is wrong. There is a potential world in which there can be peace. It is Moshiach’s world. Human nature must be dealt with now as is, without illusions, in order to get to that world. The former liberals who became neocons took that path exactly by examining data. They had background in the social sciences and decided to examine the results of liberal do-gooder policies. For example, giving unwed mothers money for every child they have because it’s “the right thing to do” and “we owe it to them” just causes them to have more and gouge the system. Pour money into public schools and public housing without changing the state of community attitudes in ghetto areas leaves the public with massive vandalism and massive waste of taxpayers’ money without accomplishing any improvement. The problem here in the Middle East is that almost no one in Israel is prepared to defend Israel while scrapping all pretense of a peace plan. That would involve a big “no” to America and all the world powers. Many people who realize there is no chance for peace feel we need to do a con job on the world in order to keep them off our backs. The result is that from year to year they are more and more ON our backs. This will change only when we have a leadership that believes in G-d, tells the truth and says “no, thank you” to American aid. That might be Moshiach or it might be a little before, but something in Israeli politics and society will really have to change for that to happen. Obama reducing America to less than a superpower may be Hashem’s way of helping/forcing us to go that way.
I don’t know what a Jew has to believe regarding Moshiach. Maybe there is more than one shitah. I am not sure that we can “test” Hashem by flounting the one suprpower that supports Israel, the USA, because it doesn’t allow the tail to wag the dog. Israel is a strong country economically, militarily and politically. It is a vibrant modern state far more stable than any neighboring Moslem state.Israel is not in immediate danger of destruction at present, ssuming Iran doesn’t send over weapons of mass destruction. I can assume the nations of the world are not asleep about Iran, even if what they do is not public.
As far as neo-cons who used to be liberals. There are sincere people who care about their fellow man who are social conservatives because they don’t believe the New Deal,Fair Deal, New Society,etc. worked. For every one like that there are many more who just don’t give a darn about their fellow men and use words in place of deeds. As a Jew, I feel for undocumented aliens because my relaives and yours were denied entry by Roosevelt and died , so I empathise with hard working Guatmalans who want a better life for their children and do all the hard work in this country that natives refuse to do. Jews benefited from Roosevelt domestically and Lyndon Johnson would be our greatest President had he not been saddled with Viet Nam. I guess a lot of you would prefer Rand Paul. Good luck.