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Goldstone's retraction and the new anti-Semitism
WaPo ^ | 4/10/11 | Jennifer Rubin

Posted on 04/10/2011 10:36:04 AM PDT by Nachum

Richard Goldstone’s remarkable about-face this month was much talked about but incompletely understood. Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution (who debated Goldstone shortly before the judge’s recantation) remedies that deficiency. Writing in the Weekly Standard, he observes that Goldstone did more than simply withdraw “the gravest charge that he and his colleagues had leveled against Israel and its Gaza operation of December 2008-January 2009, which aimed at stopping Hamas’s firing of thousands of mortar shells, rockets, and missiles at civilian populations in southern Israel.”

Berkowitz reminds us that Goldstone’s original conclusion was more sweeping than his retraction. Goldstone had asserted that Israel staged a “deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.” Israel was not only morally equivalent to Hamas, Goldstone claimed, but worse. Berkowitz explains:

It affirmed that Israel was worse than Hamas, since Israel was a state, since Israel used state-of-the-art weaponry, and since the death and destruction it supposedly deliberately inflicted on civilians in Gaza was much greater than the harm to civilians in southern Israel caused by eight years of Hamas bombardment.

(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: antisemitism; goldstone; goldstones; new; retraction
New? Who knew? Nu?
1 posted on 04/10/2011 10:36:06 AM PDT by Nachum
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To: Nachum

“New? Who knew? Nu?”

Do you mean Nu as in Nuke them?

It could only improve them.


2 posted on 04/10/2011 11:12:54 AM PDT by GladesGuru (In a society predicated upon freedom, it is essential to examine principles,)
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To: All
Reasonable, fair-minded people cannot overlook the disparity in death tolls.

From Sept 29, 2000 to Feb 28, 2011, Israeli security forces have killed 6,338 Palestinians. Palestinians have killed 1,141 Israelis and foreign citizens.

85% of these conflict deaths are by Israel's hand. That's a cold hard fact.

It is not anti-Semitic to question Israel's policies and tactics.

To wield a charge of "anti-Semitism" against conscientious critics is unjust. It is a shameful disgrace to those who suffered and died under real anti-Semitism.

3 posted on 04/10/2011 12:23:30 PM PDT by newzjunkey
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