The South African Zionist Front goes 4th

Richard Goldstone, author of the controversial Goldstone Report, has agreed not to attend his grandson’s bar mitzvah after immense pressure from the South African Zionist Forum (SAZF), who threatened to protest outside. Clearly, they don’t consider him a real Jew after his report which detailed both Palestinian and Israeli war crimes in the 2009 Gaza war. The report was not inherently controversial, but the Israeli PR machine immediately kicked up a storm, invoking anti-semitism and the Holocaust to explain away the report’s contents as malicious fabrication. Israel – and the SAZF, who are just echoing Israel’s time-honoured tactics – would like us all to believe that Israel and Judaism are one and the same thing. But this is just not true. It is possible for a person to be both Jewish and anti-Israel, just as it is possible to be anti-Israel and not anti-semitic. One such man is Richard Goldstone, who did not let his religion interfere with the content of his work. As Goldstone’s grandson comes of age, he should follow his grandfather’s fine example and not the narrow-minded, prejudiced views espoused by the likes of the SAZF.