The Guardian published a defense of the Goldstone Report today by the three dissenting members, in response to Richard Goldstone’s recent retraction of the most serious allegations, which illustrates just how desperate those who insist upon the report’s veracity have become.
Specifically, the apologia – authored by Hina Jilani, Christine Chinkin and Desmond Travers – laughably tried to characterize themselves as victims, alluding darkly to “the personal attacks and the extraordinary pressure placed on members of the fact-finding mission.”
While I’ll leave to your imagination the question of who precisely they are asserting applied such “extraordinary pressure”, the mind boggles at the audacity of those responsible for such a malicious defamation of Israel – one which did incalculable harm to the Jewish state’s moral standing – to engage in efforts to portray themselves as the saga’s true victims.
One of the more remarkable dynamics in the continuing delegitimization campaign against the Jewish state is how those who routinely engage in the most hideous slanders against Israel reveal themselves to be remarkably thin-skinned – lacking the capacity to withstand anything approaching the same level of critical scrutiny and self-reflection that they’re continually demanding of Israel.
Israel’s critics (whether in the media, international bodies such as the UNHRC, or NGOs) – those who attack the state with something approaching a religious intensity – show an almost comical propensity to charge others with “silencing” them, or even of engaging in “McCarthy-like” attacks, when their arguments are placed under the microscope and refuted.
Like defamations against Jews throughout history has demonstrated, ideas – even the most morally and intellectually bankrupt ones – have a very long life, and have a remarkable capacity to remain embedded in the public imagination long after such views are discredited.
The only thing available to Israelis (and those brave few who are willing to unapologetically defend her), in response to those who continue to hold the Jewish state to standards that no other people in the world are held to, is to rhetorically counter-attack, to name and shame those who peddle in such vilification.
The moral prerogative to utilize these rhetorical weapons represents a right we have no intention of ever forfeiting.
(Also, see NGO Monitor’s response to the Guardian piece, here.)