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Goldstones Gaza report shows courage

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By Max du Plessis

(source: The Cape Times – S.A)

There has been important and courageous work done by South African lawyers in response to Operation Cast Lead and the violations committed by Israel and Hamas. Three individuals stand out: Navi Pillay, John Dugard and Richard Goldstone.

Pillay was the South African judge on the International Criminal Court (ICC) before taking up her position as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. She was one of the first leading figures to speak out about the violations during the conflict, and was quoted by Reuters at the time as being "concerned with violations of international law", and suggesting that certain reported incidents of the IDF should "be investigated because they display elements of what could constitute war crimes".

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The tropes of jewish antisemitism

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The concept of the ’self-hating Jew’ has been dignified with a pseudo-psychopathology by those keen to suppress dissent

By Antony Lerman

(source: the guardian.uk)

From the moment he took the job heading the UN Human Rights Council`s mission to investigate human rights and international humanitarian law violations during the Gaza conflict, it was inevitable that Judge Richard Goldstone, born into a South African Jewish family, would be labelled a `self-hating Jew` and a Jewish antisemite. Immediately on the release in September of his findings, which concluded that both Israel and Hamas had committed war crimes, Israel`s finance minister, Yuval Steinitz, couldn`t wait to make this accusation.

He certainly wasn`t alone. The charge is so popular these days that people who use it must have felt as though they had won the lottery when they were presented with such a high-profile target like Goldstone. They were probably still savouring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu`s outburst in August when he railed against the two senior and Jewish aides of President Obama, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, calling them `self-hating Jews`

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