There are many legitimate criticisms of the Goldstone report into the Israeli assault on Gaza a little over a year ago. But there is also something deeply familiar about the ad hominem bullying tactics that are routinely hauled out in the latest smear of Richard Goldstone. The latest from Ron Radosh in Pajamas Media:
What led Goldstone, himself a Jew supposedly favorable to Zionism, to chair the commission and to put his name on the blatantly one-sided and propagandist report? To answer that, I want to reproduce a remarkable letter that has been going around the internet, written by a former friend of Goldstone who resides in Israel.
Ah, yes. "Something much darker" must lie there, mustn't it? Go read the piece and make your own mind up. But here are some sections of the email so deeply racist and bigoted PJM should surely apologize for publishing them. The email is addressed to Goldstone:
Are you not ashamed? As an Israeli Jew, and as an Old Edwardian, I am mystified by your behaviour. It is unbelievable that you have seen fit to cause us such great damage and damage extending into the future, but hereunder, I will prove to you why you have done this ... Everybody who has had experience in dealing with our Arab Moslem enemies, as I have, will agree with me that their definition of the truth is the fabrication of a false truth [sic] to conform to what they want to believe...
Your report is based on Arab facts, Arab information and Arab truth.
Now try to imagine any reputable outlet running a piece that used terms like "Jewish facts, Jewish information and Jewish truth."
It would rightly be regarded as anti-Semitic. It would simply never run in a US publication. Goldstone is then smeared as a careerist whose opposition to apartheid was phony and who is now advancing his own career through some kind of tribal betrayal:
It is obvious that you are only using your report for the purpose of Hamas and all the Arab block and their supporters, to nominate you for Secretary General of the United Nations as this is the only worthwhile advancement for a man like you already in such a high position. With all their support, you will have an automatic majority to vote you in as the new Secretary General of the United Nations. I maintain that you are betraying the State of Israel and the Jewish people.
This kind of discourse, this kind of ad hominem, this kind of bald-faced racism - lumping the entire Arab Muslim world as one homogeneous bloc, and seeing the entire region as some Manichean war to the death between "Jews" and "Arabs" by an American who seems to regard himself as a party to that struggle ... really. This is what now passes for constructive analysis? And Ron Radosh seems a perfectly decent man on most subjects with whom I have had many civil interactions. But he seems unhinged on the matter of the Middle East. And this leads to grotesque slanders of the "treasonous" motives of a man like Goldstone.
This kind of McCarthyism needs to end and PJM needs to take down that racist post and apologize.