Dershowitz went too far in slamming Goldstone
To the Editor:
Something is terribly wrong in the Jewish community when a prominent man, who has spent a lifetime shaping legal arguments of the highest caliber, resorts to hateful name-calling against a fellow Jew and a pillar of the international legal community.
That is what Alan Dershowitz did.
In an interview with Israel Army Radio, Dershowitz agreed that Judge Richard Goldstone was a "moser," a term reserved in traditional Jewish law for a Jewish traitor who should be killed. Dershowitz also called Goldstone "an evil, evil man" and "an absolute traitor."
Israel is going through a dark period, marked by McCarthyistic efforts to stifle debate, growing incitement to violence and rising Jew-on-Jew violence. Many have compared this tension to the time that preceded the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
During this time, it is doubly important for leading figures on all sides to engage in civil and rational discussion of the issues at hand. Character assassination is not an appropriate tactic.
Sadly, even Dershowitz's claim that he did not intend to use the term moser does not excuse the resort to low-ball tactics. Dershowitz now claims that he was not familiar with the word moser and instead he thought he was agreeing with the characterization of Goldstone as a "monster."
Similarly, his retraction of the word "traitor" left something to be desired:
"I wrote to the broadcaster, retracting my word 'traitor,' " Dershowitz told the Forward. "But if you're asking me deep in my heart and soul do I believe that the word fairly characterizes him, in light of the way he's used his Jewishness, both as a shield and a sword? You know, if the shoe fits."
Dershowitz could have -- and should have -- aired substantive disagreements about the report that Judge Goldstone authored following the Gaza War. Instead he chose to demean, to insult and to incite. And that is a regrettable state of affairs.
Debra DeLee
President and CEO
Americans for Peace Now
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As opposed to Debra DeLee’s misrepresentation of the Dershowitz case against Goldstone, one can invest some time to decide for oneself with the following: A week and a half ago, (Nov. ‘09)Alan Dershowitz took the stage in a packed auditorium at Fordham Law School in Manhattan. He was supposed to debate Richard Goldstone, the author of the Goldstone Report. But the august international jurist refused, telling the organizers that Dershowitz had “demeaned” him. So Dershowitz stood a copy of the Goldstone Report on the table in the author’s place.
The video listed as 93 minutes long, but a great deal of that is Q&A;at the end. The presentation itself takes only 45 minutes.
http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com/2009/11/dershowitz-for-opposition.html#links
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Yosef Hartuv
02/08/10 09:59 AM
In truth, Prof. Dershowitz has written dozens of factual refutations of the Goldstone slanders, with a consistent refusal by Goldstone to address the actual topic at hand. It’s Goldstone himself who has raised his being Jewish as a defense against his perverse aid to those whose goal is to put Israel’s population in dangers way, without means of response.
“Even before the Goldstone Report was released, Richard Goldstone was arguing for its credibility by invoking his Jewishness, his Zionism, his daughter’s residence in Israel and his connection to Hebrew University. It was the mirror image of the classic fallacy known as the argument ad hominem, which is defined as follows: A substantive argument should not be rejected solely because of who has offered it.”
http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com/2010/02/arguments-ad-hominem-and-by-ethnic.html#links