you dont mention how many whites did he send to gallows during his tenure as SA judge,

IT IS AN INSULTE FOR JEWS WHO DIED IN THE SHOAH

Jane All western countries including Britain, France,Germany, USA etc, also Taiwan... traded with the Apartheid regime and Arab oil kept the Apartheid machinery going. Israel's involvement with the Apartheid regime was in a militarily capacity, small but of course not right but Israel was also afraid of embargos as they were an isolated entity as well due to the power of the non-aligned movement in the UN. In 1987 Israel along with the USA and other Western nations began to reduce their involvement in Apartheid SA. Most of the EU countries at the time had invested in the Apartheid regime and this amounted to at least 52% of all foreign investment. So no righteous slandering of Israel's involvement with Apartheid, have a look at your own back door

.Just like Russia and Czechoslovakia sold Trillions of tonnes of weapons to Israel's enemies for almost nothing ,Israel sold weapons to countries that were willing to buy weapons from her! . With that money Israel developed systems that protected Israel. Dont forget there always has been a vibrant Jewish Community in SA and Israels links were with SA Jews!! Dont use this BS please .

Oh no, dear Debra, Czechoslovakia NEVER had diplomatic, military a or bussiness connections with apartheid regime. So, my back door are cool :o)) And I must laugh, when I read Your self-justifications for defence of israeli megahypcrotocal politics with SA apartheid regime.

91# Ignorant is you, saying to me why? you Know your that war on Gaza Made it clear to most of the peoples of the world the full picture of what the military did on Gaza,This war was a big mistake for Israel it changed all the concepts and sympathy from peoples of world was for your benefit and turned it into a Palestinian people now you known who is ignorant?

He had the option of refusing the apointment as a judge in South Africa during the Apartheid years. Many fine lawyers, barristers turned down this apointment on moral grounds. Goldstone was not one of them.

There is no self justification for anything, other than STOP holding the Jews to another standard that is not also applicable to all other people. That is called double standards,hence the horrendous Goldstone Report and your misguided comments are the result!!! Apartheid SA traded with all countries other than those behind the IRON curtain such as Czechoslovakia because the Apartheid regime did not want to deal with the USSR and communism.However the USSR happily supported the Arabs with weapons in their wars against Israel! ???! Am I to assume you were OK with that?

hands ready to hit kindergartens of Jewish children in Tel-Aviv. It was named by our brothers in Gaza in honor of our brother Muhammad Richard Goldstone.

Don't worry, we have our own called The Dershowitz....The difference is, we only need 1 rocket to wipe every living soul in Gaza and 1 rocket for Nablus. You are always a step behind, keep it up.

In DEMOCRACIES everybody is entitled to a defense. Mr. Dershowitz happens to be one of the foremost lawyers in the world. And yes he was one of more than a dozen lawyers retained to defend O.J. Simpson - so what? Mr. Simpson was entitled to hire anybody that he wanted and did so. Do not blame the lawyers when they do their job. This shows us that you lack all understanding of how non-apartheid countries operate. Apartheid regimes do not allow for the defense of people.

to a lawyer , Even the most evil one . Look only at the Nurnberg or at Eichmann's trials .

It is part of a lawyers job. One for the defence,and the other for the prosecution. So why mix with the subject at hand? i.e Goldstone's unwarranted accusations of CAST LEAD,And the IDF? You are way out of line here man. In a way you are quite right,but it is the nature of the BEAST in every court procedure. Murderers are defended equally in the USA..So what was the point in nentioning Dershowitz ? I think you need to learn about LAW,,Judges, Magistrates,et al.

Your family was so disgusted by the instituted racism practiced by the state towards arabs and ethipopians.... I was recently in your beautiful post-apartheid SA, what I saw were rich white ppl living in big nice houses with multiple severely underpaid and mistreated black slaves they called maids and workers. I also got to see the villages where blacks live in small broken down huts made of scraps of sheetmetal and other materials they can find. Is your family enjoying watching that racism?

Goldstone is a person who turns his coat to the wind - whichever wind is blowing. As an aprtheid judge he sent black South Africans to the gallows in some dubious judgements. When reformist FW de Klerk came to power he changed tack and turned against his erstwhile apartheid colleagues. Now in the era of ANC rule and anti-Israel propaganda being the new world fashion, he turned yet again. Wonder what he would have done in Nazi Germany?

Goldstone was prepared to sit on the judicial bench when no person of colour was allowed to share it with him or indeed any bench. He wanted in. Now he wants out. Nice work if you can get it.

Mandela also appointed former white policemen and others who were guilty of apartheid crimes because in his generosity he realized that in order to help the smooth transition he couldn't throw everybody out. Look in Mandela's autobiography. He mentions those lawyers who helped fight apartheid. Goldstone is not mentioned at all. Guess why?

The real message here is simple: Like many who lived under the Nazi or Soviet regimes, Goldstone is simply a self-aggrandizing opportunist kow-towing to the primary political powers that be. In apartheid-era South Africa, this meant enforcing racist laws. In the world dominated by Media-UN-Arab force against Israel, this means advocating the line against Israel's "agression" in Gaza. Actually his recent statement was rather starkly honest - that he "had to respect the laws of the state, occasionally having to enforce laws he was opposed to." [See Jerusalem Post article from 5/5/2010 "Goldstone sent 28 SA blacks to death"] Obviously, he lacks a genuine, internally guided, sense of right and wrong. If the world media regards such a person as legal or moral authority, this says more about the world media then about him or Israel.

But what about what he said about the IDF? Are you challenging his crdeibility based on what he did in South Africia. What a smear and shows your lack own failure to asses what he said.

Try and show a modicum of intellectual probity.i.e. be a doubting THOMAS. If a judge shows that he is unreliable and hypocritical,and that his present "beliefs" are disproved by his past, of course his "credibility" is challenged.

(I am South African) Of course it is no surprise to say Goldstone was an Apartheid judge. So are many of the white judges still on the bench in South Africa. That’s inevitable and is another debate for another day about the way “transformation” of the judiciary works in South Africa. And the debates around it. (Somehow the idea exists that the law was above Apartheid; it's like saying Jim Crow judges were objective.) As far as I know, Goldstone has never publicly spoken about this aspect of his life nor publicly apologized to the families of the men he sentenced to death based often on flimsy evidence. (BTW, the judiciary refused to appear before the late 90s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.) This is still a mark against his name and, I hope, he will still own up to this role then beyond a lame, I was always against the death penalty and “I was only following orders,” which was his response to the Israeli paper who broke the story. But tarring Goldstone in this way is not a very useful exercise. For one, it assumes no one can change. And as we know Goldstone’s recent career has proved otherwise. In this regard, Sasha Polakow-Suransky writes on the Foreign Policy Blog yesterday, Goldstone’s critics conveniently leave out “… the crucial part he [Goldstone] played in shepherding South Africa through its democratic transition and warding off violent threats to a peaceful transfer of power-a role that led Nelson Mandela to embrace him and appoint him to the country’s highest court.” And, as Sasha wrote--he has an excellent new book out on the relationship between Apartheid South Africa and Israel--the bigger question here is the selective moralism and deliberate amnesia on the part of Israel’s supporters, given that “… Israel’s government did far more to aid the apartheid regime than Goldstone ever did.”

Israel was, to the very end, the apartheid regime's closest ally and arms supplier. Its government should APOLOGIZE to South Africans for having collaborated to that evil regime.

Justice Goldstone's record on apartheid was outstanding enough for Nelson Mandela to put him in charge of investigating crimes of the apartheid regime. Does Liberman know better than Nobel Peace Prize Mandela?

And while Goldstone was enforcing the laws of apartheid South Africa, what was Israel doing for apartheid South Africa? Israel was the major arms supplier to apartheid South Africa andthese arms resulted in condemning infinetely more black South Africans to death than Goldstone's verdicts!

why doesn't the PLO and the Arabs apologize to those locked behind the Bolshevik curtain for collaborating with the USSR and being a tool of communism, which killed over 100 million people.

Whatever the merits of the critique of Judge Goldstone's past, and I'm sure that every human being living today has done something for which he or she is or should be ashamed, the reader of this article should not be fooled by one of the oldest tricks in the book: when the message makes you look bad, and you have no valid response to the facts, attack the messenger's character in the hope that people will conflate the two. This tactic sometimes works, but only for a while. In the end, the facts are the facts, no matter who delivers them, and we should not allow Yedioth Ahronoth's attempt to deflect our attention from those facts to keep us from dealing honestly with them, however painful that might be.

It seems that any amount of effort will be expended to discredit the author of the Goldstone repor rather than facing up to the details of the report by having an open and internationaly acceptable Israeli commission of inquiry. If there were mainly blacks being sentenced to death in S Africa in the 1980's, the same disproportionality could be seen in the US figures on capital punishment up to the present day. And in the 1980's, Israel was cooperating with S Africa's apartheid regime on arms deals, without any apparent distaste for the apartheid policy of the government. So who was doing more for Africa's blacks in those days, Israel or Goldstone?