Friday, April 22, 2011

Falk: What Future for the Goldstone Report? Beyond the Name

by Richard Falk, Foreign Policy Journal, April 22, 2011

Ever since it first struck the raw nerve of Israeli political consciousness, I thought it misleading to associate the Goldstone Report so exclusively with its chair, Judge Richard Goldstone. After all, despite his deserved prominence as an international jurist, he was the least qualified substantively of the four members of the mission. Undoubtedly, part of the intensely hostile Israeli reaction of their highest political leaders had to do with the sense that Goldstone as a devoted Zionist had been guilty of betrayal, even of ‘a blood libel’ against the Jewish people, because he seemed to be elevating his fidelity to the ‘law’ above that of tribal loyalties, and according to Tel Aviv he should never have been mixed up with such a suspect entity as the UN Human Rights Council in the first place.

Continues >>

1 comment:

Nasir Khan said...

In his various articles including the present one, Richard Falk's point of departure in his political analyses continues to be one of adherence to rule of law in international politics, especially in wars and conflict zones. Such a perspective offers everybody including the major actors in world-affairs a saner approach to resolving the conflicts than the one practised by the powerful nations that ignore international humanitarian law and commit various crimes against humanity, such as the United States has done in its genocidal wars in the twentieth century from Vietnam to the twenty-first century's wars of aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. America's closest ally in the Middle East has been the Zionist State of Israel and its destructive war-machine, funded, equipped and oiled by American political establishment. The colonization of Palestine and systematic crushing of Palestinian people has been the hallmark of Israeli politics. Of course, all this with the active support of the United States.

The question of ethnic and religious identity of an individual, keeping in view that Richard Falk himself is a Jew, is used by many Zionists to attack those who object to the Israeli policies and war crimes. For Zionists truth is what Zionism stands for, the rest is a lie! As a result many principled scholars and writers, including some Jews, who show the Israeli policies and crimes against the people of the occupied Palestine are routinely vilified and mocked by Zionists and Israeli propaganda machine. The responses to Falk in the American political establishment and Zionists world-wide show how the network of falsifiers operates to hide the facts such as those of Operation Cast Lead.