Gaza, Goldstone, and the Guardian

 

A memory hole is any mechanism for the alteration or disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts, or other records...

 

The op-ed in the current Bay Guardian blaming Israel for the latest military conflict between Israel and Hamas-controlled Gaza is in line with their past failures on any issue that has anything to do with Arabs and Islam (here and here). Zahir Janmohamed cites Richard Goldstone's UN report after the last round of violence that condemned both Israel and Hamas for killing civilians.

 

Janmohamed doesn't mention that Goldstone retracted his condemnation of Israel after receiving more information and getting competely different reactions to the original report from Hamas and Israel:

 

If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document. The final report by the U.N. committee of independent experts---chaired by former New York judge Mary McGowan Davis---that followed up on the recommendations of the Goldstone Report has found that “Israel has dedicated significant resources to investigate over 400 allegations of operational misconduct in Gaza” while “the de facto authorities (i.e., Hamas) have not conducted any investigations into the launching of rocket and mortar attacks against Israel.”

 

Some have suggested that it was absurd to expect Hamas, an organization that has a policy to destroy the state of Israel, to investigate what we said were serious war crimes. It was my hope, even if unrealistic, that Hamas would do so, especially if Israel conducted its own investigations. At minimum I hoped that in the face of a clear finding that its members were committing serious war crimes, Hamas would curtail its attacks. Sadly, that has not been the case. Hundreds more rockets and mortar rounds have been directed at civilian targets in southern Israel. That comparatively few Israelis have been killed by the unlawful rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza in no way minimizes the criminality.

 

Janmohamed on the latest round of violence: "The same war is happening again. And it is happening again because the US too often looks away when Israel violates international law."

 

Yes, the same war is happening, but, unlike Richard Goldstone, the Bay Guardian and Janmohamed have learned nothing from history because their ideology trumps reality.