Only a committed anti-Israel media outlet like the Guardian could take a story about how Israel didn’t offer nuclear weapons to South Africa – if Israelis were approached, they evidently refused – and make it into one about how Israel did offer nuclear weapons to South Africa. Totally surreal:
The first document… is an internal South African memorandum expressing interest in “nuclear warheads manufactured in [the Republic of South Africa] or acquired elsewhere.” The third document is an excerpt from a South African memorandum of conversation between the two Defense Ministers… Really? Friend of Blog Avner Cohen, author of Israel and the Bomb and the forthcoming The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb provides this assessment: The headline, sub-headline, and lede of Chris McGreal’s story are erroneous and misleading. Nothing in the documents suggests there was an actual offer by Israel to sell nuclear weapons to the regime in Pretoria. To the contrary, the conversation amounted to a probe by the South Africans, which ultimately went nowhere.
I do kind of like the balanced elegance of this newest smear though. It has a brazen tit-for-tat quality that’s kind of refreshing, once you get past how mindblowingly mendacious it is. Israel’s defenders produce incontrovertible evidence that anti-Israel human rights investigator Richard Goldstone was an apartheid judge who condemned blacks to be whipped and hung. The left responds with the equivalent of a playground taunt: “our guy didn’t cooperate with apartheid South Africa, your guys cooperated with apartheid South Africa.” Stupid:
The former judge sent (at least 28) black people to the gallows and black people to the whipping posts and black people to other indescribable humiliations. He was an agent of apartheid, someone who supinely enforced its cruel laws… The anti-Israel left is a little blindsided by these revelations. So they minimize while they admit. Sasha Polakow-Suransky, a journalist who has written on Israel’s relationship with the apartheid government, yields timidly that “Goldstone’s apartheid era judicial rulings are undoubtedly a blot on his record.” But, if one is sufficiently hostile to Israel, one is forgiven everything, Polakow-Suransky forgives everything—yes, everything. Even the taking of lives of victims of apartheid rule. After all, legal justice must be done.
When the Organisation of Islamic Conference initiated the Goldstone Report do you think they knew how perfectly their investigator/prosecutor would line up with their own totalitarian apartheid political systems? Or do you think it was just a happy coincidence, and they were really lucky even to find a non-sharia jurist they could get behind?
It’s kind of a loss for anti-Israel partisans that asked Goldstone to be their Jewish figleaf, and that he – being the rank opportunist that he is, agreed. If they had picked someone else he’d still be floating around out there, implicitly tied to Israel. Then they could have used him as a pretext for articles about how “recently unearthed documents are raising troubling questions about the role played by South Africa’s strongly pro-Israel Jewish community during apartheid South Africa.” It wouldn’t have made sense, but it still would have been more credible than the fantasies they’re publishing now. Instead they’re stuck defending his objectivity and decency.
It’s not a huge loss for them of course – where they can’t find actual Israeli/South African ties they just make them up – but it would have been one more drop in their drip drip drip campaign against the legitimacy of the Jewish State.
References:
* Avner Cohen on Israel and South Africa [Arms Control Wonk]
* “We Are Not Done With Goldstone!” And He Is Not Done With Israel. [TNR]
* ‘OIC initiated Goldstone inquiry’ [AJE]
* Who is Goldstone to judge? [Spectator]
Related Mere Rhetoric Categories:
* Media Bias
* Anti-Israel Journalism
* World News
