My latest letter to AP

Since I was so crabby from the flu yesterday, I decided to use my powers for good instead of evil. No nasty email to anyone at work. Just to the biased writers and editors at the AP.

Subject: Richard Goldstone’s faith and its effect on the Goldstone Report

To the editor,

For some weeks now, when the AP reports on the Goldstone Commission’s report, it uses something along these lines:

Israel did not cooperate with the probe, and angry Israeli leaders have condemned its findings. Still, Goldstone’s record as a war crimes prosecutor in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, as well as his Jewish faith and attachment to Israel have made it hard for Israel to refute his report.

Source: http://apnews.myway.com/article/20091020/D9BERP1G0.html

Is it the AP’s policy that because Richard Goldstone is Jewish, his report must be accurate? This is a logical fallacy. The report must be accurate because it is accurate, not because its author is Jewish and has ties to Israel. In point of fact, many people have found many inaccuracies in the Goldstone report, none of which have been reported by the AP.

http://www.goldstonereport.org/

http://www.globallawforum.org/ViewPublication.aspx?ArticleId=104

http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/search/label/Goldstone%20Report

Any of those three links can give you example after example of errors in the Goldstone report. None of them uses Goldstone’s Jewishness as a barometer of the accuracy of his report. All of them refute the report by example, showing that it relied on Hamas terrorists as “eyewitnesses,” or ignored evidence that would invalidate a claim against Israel.

If what you are really trying to say is that Israel’s proponents can’t call Goldstone biased against Israel because he’s Jewish and says he’s a Zionist, then please say so. But that, too, will be wrong. Because there are plenty of Jews who are biased against Israel. Noam Chomsky comes immediately to mind.

Please stop using this logical fallacy in your boilerplate about the Goldstone report. One can absolutely refute the accuracy of the report even though Richard Goldstone is Jewish and has ties to Israel. Those two things have nothing to do with the facts of the report.