As readers may know, I have had my differences with the American civil liberties lawyer Alan Dershowitz – specifically, over how American Jews can continue to support Barack Obama given his acute hostility towards Israel and appeasement of the Arab and Islamic world. Nonetheless, all credit to Dershowitz for mounting a devastating onslaught upon Richard Goldstone and his shocking travesty of justice masquerading as judicious analysis for the UN Human Rights Commission on Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. In this piece, Dershowitz accuses Goldstone of conducting a ‘kangaroo court’ in which he "abandoned all principles of objectivity and neutral human rights."

And in this terrific piece he excoriates Goldstone’s ‘wilful and deliberate’ refusal to hear the other side of the story – Israel’s side: the most elementary precondition of justice and fairness. As I wrote here, the mandate Goldstone was given by the UN required him to be thus one-sided and unjust, singling out Israel alone for investigation and thus merely collecting the evidence to uphold the prior verdict of guilt – an utter negation of legal and ethical principles which he sought to conceal by presenting a dubiously revised version of his mandate which bestowed a veneer of even-handedness, while delivering precisely the rigged verdict that the UN had required of him. Dershowitz tears him to shreds by showing how he refused to take evidence from Col Richard Kemp, Britain’s former commander in Afghanistan who had previously stated that during Cast Lead Israel had behaved with globally unprecedented ethical care to avoid killing Palestinian civilians -- evidence which would have holed below the water-line the blood-libel Goldstone was assembling from overwhelmingly partisan sources that Israel had deliberately targeted civilians.

 

Dershowitz has written countless powerful articles and books attacking the Israel-bashers. Yet his onslaught upon Goldstone has a different quality. It is a cry of anguish. He has clearly set out not just to destroy Goldstone’s report but to destroy Goldstone. Thus he states:

His name will forever be linked in infamy with such distorters of history and truth as Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Jimmy Carter.

The reason for this all-out attack is surely that Goldstone personally embodies the two most nightmarish, perplexing and agonising aspects of the witch-hunt against Israel: that a malevolent campaign based on bigotry, falsehoods and injustice marches mind-bendingly under the banner of ‘human rights’; and that so many of its leading proponents are Jews.

Goldstone is one of the most pre-eminent practitioners of ‘human rights’. A former judge of the South African Constitutional Court, he served as the chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. If there is a high priest of the religion of ‘human rights', Goldstone is it. And he is also a prominent Jew – indeed, according to his daughter, he is ‘a Zionist and loves Israel’.

That’s why, as Dershowitz says, his name invests the falsehoods in his report with credibility. But worse, far worse than that for Dershowitz, this report threatens to destroy the moral high ground of the whole ‘human rights’ culture.

That’s why he cries:

Every serious student of human rights should be appalled at this anti-human rights and highly politicized report... [Goldstone] no longer deserves the mantle of a human rights advocate. He has done more to destroy the credibility and objectivity of human rights than any credible human rights personage in modern times.

To save the reputation of ‘human rights’, Goldstone’s reputation has to be eviscerated and buried. But alas for Dershowitz, it’s not that simple. For Goldstone is not an aberration. Not just on Israel but on a host of other issues, ‘human rights’ has become an Orwellian synonym for an attack on human rights. It has become a judicial wrecking ball which is being deployed to shatter the fundamental principles of both western civilisation and national identity.

This is almost wholly obscured by the fact that it was western civilisation which produced the concept of human rights in the first place -- the sacredness of human life, the equality of all people, the seminal importance of freedom, law and justice – and declared these to be universal principles. That’s why ‘human rights’ lawyers protest that their doctrine cannot possibly constitute an attack on western civilisation, because it is rooted in that civilisation’s own foundational principles.

The crucial point, however, is that these were not universal principles but – very different, this – culturally particular principles to be applied universally. They derived from a particular set of religious ethics which gave rise to western civilisation -- principles promoted through Christianity but deriving from the Hebrew Bible. Without that Biblical moral underpinning, there can be no basis for freedom or equality or respect for life.

But modern ‘human rights’ culture effectively set out to sever those principles from their Biblical core. Arising from the contemporary cult of individuality which repudiates all external authority as unjustified constraints on self-actualisation, ‘human rights’ culture claimed that these ‘rights’ were indeed universal – principles that transcended all cultures and therefore laid claim to superseding them. It took the principle of ‘universality’ and radically dislocated it from the unique Biblical tradition from which such ethics had sprung. ‘Human rights’ thus became free-floating axioms, deriving from no higher authority than the vagaries of judicial assumptions, prejudices and whims.

In wrapping itself in the mantle of universality, ‘human rights’ culture became an explicit attack on the very notion of the particular. Religious tradition therefore was directly in its sights – particularly Christianity and the Hebrew Bible upon which it drew, even though these were the foundation of those rights. That’s why, for example, Christians are no longer allowed to uphold their belief that same–sex relationships are sinful; if they protest against same-sex adoptions, for example, on the grounds that a child has the right to a mother and a father figure, they are vilified as bigots and lose their professional position. 

The rights of Christians count for nothing. As the beliefs of a particular, discrete tradition they are trumped by ‘universal rights’. And these are whatever 'human rights' lawyers deem them to be, through institutions such as' human rights' law or supra-national courts – such as the International Criminal Tribunals of which Judge Goldstone was such an ornament. This ‘transnational progressivism’ holds that the nation and the culture that made that nation must yield to the diktats of ‘universal’ principles – which are not universal at all but spring from the minds of western ‘human rights’ lawyers intent on promoting a secular agenda which kicks away all those tiresome Biblical constraints, to be replaced by their own formulae for controlling human behaviour.

Moreover, because ‘human rights’ is the legal engine of self-actualisation, it is also the legal engine of moral and cultural relativism – the doctrine that values are all subjective, that there can therefore be no hierarchy of values and that no culture can have superiority over any other culture. This turned ‘human rights’ into a battering ram against the very idea of a majority culture. So Christians – aka the west -- could do no right while minorities -- aka the Third World -- could do no wrong.

Small wonder that Israel is such a target for so many ‘human rights’ practitioners. Israel is not only a nation (crime number one) but a nation whose existence is rooted in a religion (crime number two), a religion moreover which underpins the oppressive, imperialist, reactionary west (crime number three). Even though the Israeli judiciary is a temple to human rights, Israel is guilty of the original sin of particularity three times over.

That is why those Jewish 'human rights' lawyers who are supporters of Israel – and often passionately so – like to pretend that Israel’s undoubtedly stellar human rights record embodies principles which are ‘universal’ and have nothing to do with the religion of Judaism, upon whose more observant practitioners they tend to look with unalloyed horror and disdain. One wonders whether they would all still be supporters of Israel if it did not have such a record of judicial activism in the cause of liberal nostrums.

But these Jewish human rights lawyers are merely the mirror image of those from whom they recoil: those secular Jewish anti-Israel ‘human rights’ activists who make the false claim that the ‘universal’ principles they propound in order to damn Israel -- doctrines which either bear no relation to or are the direct antithesis of those laid down in the Hebrew Bible and Jewish tradition --  constitute authentic Jewish ethics. The reason why these Jews are so prominent in the witch-hunt against Israel is that they are secular Jews who have signed up to the atheistic, left-wing project to destroy not only the religious foundations of the west but the very notion of cultural specificity – including their own -- and who have detached human rights from those foundations in order to carry out that destruction.

The terrible thing, as Dershowitz says, is that as a prominent and distinguished Jewish human rights lawyer Goldstone is a lethal weapon in the hands of the Israel-bashers and Jew-haters. But the much more terrible and devastating thing – which Dershowitz does not say -- is that in the person of the secular Jewish human rights lawyer, the Jewish people has in fact created its own nemesis.