A former State Department official who is a completely reliable source on the subject tells me that when you were in apartheid South Africa in the 1980s seeking out human rights activists, Helen Suzman was the person you went to see; the name Richard Goldstone was never uttered. So it’s not exactly shocking to discover there’s more to the story of the South African justice who advertises himself as a lifelong opponent of apartheid than he perhaps would like the world to know. Israelis of South African origin-people who knew him when-have begun to comment upon him, and the portrait that emerges isn’t very pretty.
Mark Reichenberg, another recent immigrant from South Africa, concurs absolutely on the subject of Mr. Goldstone’s arrogance, but that is the least of it. Mr. Reichenberg excoriates the justice not only for the Hamasic martyrology of his eponymous report, but also, and more severely, for what might be called a little Goldstonian hanky-panky with the truth about his liberal credentials: “Where was Goldstone,” he asks,
That’s interesting. And in case the victimologists of Hamas murderers see fit to rise to Mr. Goldstone’s defense by pointing out that these are after all Israelis leveling the charge that he’s never been quite the champion of liberty and the down-trodden he has made himself out to be to a too-credulous world, there’s another critic out there with worse to say, and he is not an Israeli. In a searing commentary for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the South African historian and journalist-and former human rights activist-R.W. Johnson takes his compatriot to the cleaners.
There’s plenty more to read there, but I think I can sum it up in brief: The ANC’s favorite judge has now become Hamas’s favorite judge, as well. How not at all surprising.
