Goldstone: The Guilt of a Gullible Man

So Judge Richard Goldstone has more or less retracted that shameful, odious Report of his that found Israel guilty of war crimes in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, a report that has fed the frenzy of antisemites and anti-Zionists eveywhere, and even been touted as a death warrant for the embattled Jewish State.

In the Washington Post Goldstone, an apartheid era judge in South Africa, writes that on the basis of evidence that has since become available the Report would be "a different document". 

'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.'

Read his entire article here :http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/reconsidering-the-goldstone-report-on-israel-and-war-crimes/2011/04/01/AFg111JC_story.html

Appropriately enough, that article appeared on April Fool's Day.  But its readers are not the dupes.  Its author was made a fool of long ago.

No wonder Israel's President is demanding an apology to his country from the judge who by accepting blood libels put a noose around Israel's neck in the court of public opinion: http://www.jpost.com/NationalNews/Article.aspx?ID=214907&R=R1

The pity - the woeful, shameful pity - of it all is that Goldstone's original rush to judgment has had its nefarious propagandistic effects.   Binyamin Netanyahu has rightly and not surprisingly said that the Report should be thrown into "the dustbin of history".  But "mud sticks" (and no mud more firmly than when it is hurled at Jews and the Jewish State).

Just as in benighted corners of Europe even into the twentieth century ignorant country folk believed (perhaps their descendents still do) that Jews ritually murdered children at Passover to mix their blood with matzah meal, so the Report has stamped its impress on countless ordinary men and women.  Its negative impact on Israel's image is well-nigh incalculable.

As someone has so pithily described what many see as a retraction by Goldstone born of a guilty conscience: "It's a day late and a shilling short".