"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."
Yes, it's time to Smear, Slander, Twist and Shout for Israel
Israel's army of deflectors and propagandists are working overtime at a fevered pitch, little fat Zionist fingers typing away 24/7 in the run up to the assuredly damning report soon to be released by Richard Goldstone, the Jewish Judge charged with investigating Israel war crimes. I was going to write about this but now I don’t have to Antony Lerman at the Guardian did a fairly good job. Kudos for seeing through the Minutia. Here's his take:
The despicable attacks on human rights organisations investigating Israel's Gaza offensive in January confirm Churchill's observation: "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." The mission led by the South African judge Richard Goldstone to investigate international human rights and international humanitarian law violations during Israel's offensive, established by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), is the latest victim. His findings are about to be made public. The knives have been out for the mission for months. Now they are being plunged into him and his colleagues. Until the report is out Goldstone can't defend it. So the smears and misrepresentation are left free to pollute public discourse.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) has assiduously responded to a deluge of scurrilous attacks on its credibility and staff, yet totally unfounded allegations – for example, about accepting Saudi government funding and failing to give a critical report to the Israel Defence Forces before releasing it to the public – are constantly being recycled. HRW messed up by failing to see that the nerdy and, to most people, disturbing hobby of its weapons expert Marc Garlasco (he collects German and American second world war memorabilia) could be used to discredit his role as author of highly critical reports of Israel's military conduct in Gaza. But when this story broke last week, the equation implied in some allegations – "Nazi" object-collector plus "Israel-basher" equals "antisemite" – was baseless and defamatory. That he also worked on reports critical of Hamas and Hezbollah was ignored. As another excuse to attack HRW, and deflect attention from its reports' findings, the Garlasco affair was a gift.
Goldstone accepted his role only after the council president agreed to the alteration of the mission's mandate to cover all parties to the conflict, not just Israel. But mistrust alone does not explain the extraordinary scale of the attacks on human rights organisations, including all Israeli ones, for their reports on Israel.
In the 1970s, Jewish groups pressing the Soviets to allow Jews the right to leave the USSR worked with the human rights movement and based their arguments on human rights principles. But now the promoters of the concept of the "new antisemitism" – that Israel is the collective Jew persecuted by the international community – hold the international human rights movement largely responsible for it. Unable to face the fact that occupation and increasingly extreme rightwing governments turned Israel into the neighbourhood bully Read more HERE
