Richard Goldstone's kinda sorta mea culpa

This self hating Jew was the author of the infamous "Goldstone Report" a UN sanctioned hit job on Israel's self defense from Gaza terrorism and rocket attacks on civilians.

File this under "better late than never" and the damage he did cannot be repaired.

Goldstone Reconsiders

April 3, 2011 7:22 P.M.

By Giulio Meotti

The U.N.’s Goldstone report — which forbade Israel to defend itself — has been the hardest blow to Israel’s image in a decade. Now, in the Washington Post, Richard Goldstone himself, a South African judge, writes: “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”

Unfortunately, Goldstone’s “reconsideration” won’t have a real effect on the NGOs, global forums, and Western parliaments that used the report to blacken Israel’s name. The media that hyped Goldstone’s allegations of Israeli war crimes won’t allocate the same front-page space to Goldstone’s exoneration of Israel. Despite Goldstone’s penitence, Israel will remain a target for the United Nations.

The worst effect of the Goldstone report was giving to Israel’s enemies the impression that they could attack the Jewish state with global empathy on their side. The report has been a gift to terrorism from the United Nations.

Also important were the wave of hatred on behalf of the European and American ruling classes, the headlines from the “mainstream” international press that repeated condemnations without response, and the satisfied hate of academics and student movements. Goldstone’s report was a match falling into a pile of straw.

But there is a positive aspect of Mr. Goldstone’s reconsideration. The judge is reminding all of us that Israel’s struggle is the same as the Western democracies’. It is an unconventional war: a war where there are not two armies fighting each other, but an army fighting fanatic and terrorist militias that believe they have the right, indeed the duty, to use civilian populations to conduct their holy war.

We are still waiting for the moment when these NGOs and United Nations apparatchik will ride on Israeli buses and shelters to experience the truly unprovoked, homicidal nature of terrorism. Till this moment, the West should reject their approach to Israel — including the racist and anti-Semitic U.N. “Durban III” conference that will be held in New York for the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

— Giulio Meotti is author of The New Shoah.